The debate over the value of arts education may be as old as art itself. But when you talk to young people, they have no trouble articulating that value. A student from Detroit gets to the core, pinning it on a sense of achievement gained from producing art.
"Everything else is evolving around that," the student says. "Like the feeling good, and the learning the skill, and the building relationships. But at the end of the day, it’s just you and your dance, and you and your art, and your painting that you made. And you did it."
That student was quoted in a recent, Wallace-commissioned report, one of two that point to the benefits young people could derive from youth arts programs. Both reports suggest that high-quality arts programs could help young people build the confidence and the relationships they may need to thrive as adults. Employers are increasingly seeking "soft" skills, such as creative thinking, self-awareness, and social influence, to guide them as technology, demography, and geopolitical upheaval transform the country's society and economy. The two reports suggest that youth arts programs could help young people develop such skills.
"Art is of course important in its own right, as a medium for young people expressing themselves, understanding who they are and how they interact with the world," says Bronwyn Bevan, Wallace's vice president of research. "But these reports suggest that community-based art programs may provide a unique environment for developing relationships that can ultimately help young people navigate an unpredictable road ahead. Is it because creative pursuits make young people more comfortable with vulnerability, more accepting of new connections, and more open to new possibilities? We want to understand more."
The Art of Connection
The promise of youth art programs may lie in the concept of "social capital." Researchers use this term to describe supportive relationships that can help young people acquire new skills, create personal networks, seize opportunities, and gain new perspectives. Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam puts social capital in two categories in his 2000 book, Bowling Alone.
The first category is relationships among young people and their immediate circles, including friends, families, teachers, and classmates. Putnam suggests that these relationships can help build what he calls "bonding capital," a means of developing identity and finding emotional support and protection. The other is relationships between young people and those beyond their immediate circles, such as mentors, advisers, potential employers, or even an uncle's girlfriend or a retired neighbor. Putnam argues that such relationships can build what he calls "bridging capital," a means of navigating the world, marshaling resources, and finding productive and fulfilling occupations as adults.
Since the publication of Putnam's book, researchers have linked bridging capital to economic mobility and proposed it as a way to ease isolation and improve public health during the Covid-19 pandemic. Some suggest that there is significant opportunity to help young people use social capital, be it within their communities or beyond, to develop the skills they need to pursue productive and fulfilling futures.
Strengthening Community Through Creativity
One of the two Wallace-commissioned reports describes arts programs that appear particularly adept at helping students build bonding capital within their communities. Well-Being and Well-Becoming: A Picture of Mattering for Youth of Color, led by researchers at the University of Pittsburgh, describes what its authors call "culture-centered, community-based youth arts programs." These programs are independent, out-of-school operations that practice creative youth development, an umbrella term for efforts that use artistic practices to support young people's social, emotional, and cognitive growth. But they differ from many other creative youth development programs in at least two ways.
First, they do not see the arts just as a means to an end. "They're not just using the arts to teach kids about something else that's important, like environmentalism," says Esohe Osai, one of the report's lead authors. "It's more about learning how to become the violin player, learning how to become the vocalist, learning how to become the dancer, and allowing that investment in excellence in the arts to coincide and intersect with their identities."
Second, they are based in and grow from the neighborhoods and communities where young people live and learn, and focus on the cultures of the young people they seek to engage. “The arts the students are interested in are usually tied to something around their identities,” says Osai. She uses the example of a program for Latino youth in Detroit that teaches artforms such as hip hop that are popular in their communities. “It can be valuable for young people to engage with,” she says, “because they're already engaging with it on their own.”
Much of a program’s value comes, Osai suggests, from the relationships young people develop with adults. She points, for example, to the role of teaching artists. "You have individuals who are often professional artists, who are teaching young people the craft that they care about and are passionate about," she says. "That intersection of the interests of the teaching artists, the interests of the youth, and the space to create and to learn together just creates a very beautiful picture."
These relationships, combined with programs' focus on cultural self-expression, can help young people better understand who they are and how they relate to the world. "It's about youth feeling affirmed and celebrating their identities as they're learning," she says. "To have a space where you can engage in learning, engage in the arts as a cultural aspect of your existence, be affirmed and celebrated, and be seen in your identity is important."
She points to a student who, after a program-sponsored trip to the state capitol to learn about arts policy, became interested in a government career. That student, Osai argues, is an example of how creating safe, engaging spaces–the types that build bonding capital–can help broaden young people's horizons and open the door to the bridging capital they need to realize their potential.
"Before we can take you out to bridge you to something that's different from your experience," she says, "we have to build this internal bond within the community." That bond, Osai argues, helps build young people's confidence to expand into more unfamiliar areas.
"Bonding capital is where it starts," she says. "That can then facilitate the bridging capital, especially among young people who are more hesitant and might not have the confidence it takes to go somewhere different."
Bonding capital is where it starts. That can then facilitate the bridging capital, especially among young people who are more hesitant and might not have the confidence it takes to go somewhere different.
— Esohe Osai
Beyond the Studio and Into the World
A second report suggests that youth arts programs may also help young people develop the bridging capital that would allow them to go somewhere different. Stitching Together the Threads: A Cross-Disciplinary Literature Review on Youth Arts and Well-Being, published by the RAND Corporation, is a wide-ranging literature review that synthesizes ideas and evidence from several disciplines, including psychology, medicine, education, and youth development. It considers nine broad categories of youth well-being, such as academic and practical competency, productivity and employability, and economic stability. It then identifies five "mechanisms" or pathways through which arts programs could contribute to one or more of those nine categories. "We looked at the full spectrum of arts engagement activities across all the different dimensions of well-being," says Joie Acosta, the review's lead author. "We were trying to not just map out a single hypothesized pathway, but the collective pathways that these kinds of arts engagement activities work through."
The one pathway that contributes to all categories of well-being: "creating social connections and community," what Putnam might call social capital.
The report points to several studies that document ways in which this pathway could contribute to well-being, both of individual students and of their communities. One study, for example, explored a program in which students created exhibits about the experiences of suicide survivors. Its authors suggest that the exhibits sparked conversations about depression and motivated people to check in on community members struggling with mental health. Another looked at a theater program for young people with autism spectrum disorder. That program, the study found, helped build compassion and understanding among young people who were not on the spectrum. Acosta and her co-authors suggest that such programs could contribute to civic engagement and community safety, connectedness to others and one’s environment, feelings of inclusion and justice, and a positive state of mind–four of the report's nine categories of well-being.
The report makes compelling connections between youth arts programs, social capital, and well-being. But important questions remain. For one, it is unclear what types of relationships contribute most to young people’s well-being. "We didn't look specifically at what kinds of interpersonal relationships were built," Acosta says. "We don't know whether they were built with people that were similar to the students in the programs or people that were different."
For another, researchers cannot tell whether certain types of programs are better or worse at supporting youth well-being than others. The breadth of the report required researchers to pull evidence from different disciplines with different research standards, different avenues of inquiry, and different terms to describe those avenues. Studies exploring arts programs from a psychological perspective, for example, may look at different outcomes and use different methods to study those outcomes than a study exploring such programs from a medical or educational perspective. "The level of specificity and the predictive power of the research is still very much in its infancy," Acosta says. "There's a lot to learn about the strongest pathways to getting specific outcomes."
"There needs to be more coalescence across the groups that are working in these areas," she adds. "We need investment in more feasible and relevant measures to quantify the impact of the arts, and to look at the ideal level of rigor to study such things."
A forthcoming report, this one by researchers at the University of California, Irvine, may help work towards such coalescence. It aims to learn more about the skills participants learn from youth arts programs and the relationships and resources these programs help them develop. It will include a comprehensive catalog of such skills and relationships and lay the groundwork for future Wallace initiatives that could systematically explore how arts programs can help ease young people's paths into adulthood.
"Research has shown that the arts can be a powerful context for young people's learning and personal development," says Bevan of The Wallace Foundation. "We're now looking at how youth arts programs, by building relationships, encouraging creative risk-taking, and fostering a sense of belonging, can also be explicit about helping young people find their futures. What do these programs do well and what could they improve to better prepare students for the changing world? These are the sorts of questions we hope to explore in years and months ahead."
Top photo: Students perform at the Pittsburgh-based Alumni Theater Company. Photo by Mark Simpson
