EDITORIAL
Teaching Artistry: West Meets East in Potential

 
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EDITORIAL
Teaching Artistry: West Meets East in Potential

Eric Booth, Co-founder, The Ensemble; Co-founder, ITAC; Senior Faculty, Academy for Impact through Music

04-02-2025

Teaching artistry is the sleeping giant of social change. 

And that giant is waking up. At least that’s what I claim, in my relentless advocacy for the global field. 

We know that this field has perennial challenges. It’s largely invisible to the wider public; it’s universally underpaid; it doesn’t have established pathways in or reliable pathways upward. No major funder anywhere has ever committed to a significant investment in building this field beyond supporting individual programs that rely on teaching artists. The infrastructure of the profession is fragile, modest in scope, and, in most places, non-existent. Add to all that the brutal impact of the pandemic, during which many teaching artist jobs, and even programs, were lost. 

Still, I see evidence that the giant is stirring. The promising signs I see appear mostly outside of schools and arts institutions, in fields—like health, wellness, youth development, and creative aging—that are starting to recognize how effectively teaching artists can help them achieve their goals. In particular, I saw these signs last month on a three-week tour advocating for teaching artistry in China, South Korea, and Taiwan.

Even dedicated readers of The Ensemble may not know that the world’s most developed infrastructure for teaching artists thrives in South Korea. My visit to Seoul, its capital city, included a keynote address at a conference celebrating the twentieth anniversary of the national government’s Arts and Culture policy that launched the Korea Arts & Culture Education Service (KACES). There was plenty to celebrate: KACES has certified over 5,000 teaching artists who lead arts classes in 8,000 schools—that’s more than 70 percent of all the elementary, middle, and high schools in the country. Among the more than 30,000 university graduates in arts-related fields each year, over 3,000 get T.A. certifications. And in 2024, there were 745 teaching artists active in about 1,100 community facilities, providing arts education programs to 20,000 people.

One of KACES’s many robust programs is the Dream Orchestra, which for 15 years has supported over 50 El Sistema–inspired youth orchestras for young people in underprivileged neighborhoods. KACES has recently launched 29 Dream Dance troupes and 20 Dream Theater troupes, with visual arts coming soon. This Dream Arts initiative is the world’s only multi-disciplinary El Sistema–inspired national network of youth development through the arts.

My tour also included the discovery that advanced teaching artist practice in Taiwan is as good as it is anywhere in the world. In two daylong workshops and an international forum there, the differences in approach between Western understandings and those that have arisen in Chinese culture were small, compared to the profound commonalities in purpose and practice. 

In mainland China, the term “teaching artist” was new to most people I met, but the practice was active in every city I visited. Program leaders were eager to connect with teaching artists and to have them bring creative energy into their arts organizations, and especially into their schools; address youth mental health issues; and collaborate across the sector in establishing a professional identity. 

Here’s something especially interesting: in every one of the 21 events of my advocacy tour, the issue of youth mental health arose spontaneously. This has become a front-burner issue for people in the arts, education, social welfare, and even government. In many discussions I was part of, there was wide agreement that teaching artists can make a powerful contribution to addressing this global challenge. 

More generally, the fastest growing employment area for teaching artists around the world is in arts-and-health work of all kinds—especially in youth mental health, but also in creative aging and in addressing specific medical issues: dance for Parkinson’s disease, music for dementia, drama for addiction recovery, expressive writing for anxiety and depression. “Social prescribing” is a “giant” new horizon. In the United Kingdom, medical professionals can prescribe teaching artist programs to address medical issues, and this practice is spreading to other countries around the world. Our Asian colleagues are eager to join this movement.  

There are things you can do—things all of us must do—to help this giant become strong and visible enough to achieve its full potential to address the most pressing challenges of our troubled earth. For starters, here are three of those things:

  1. Make sure everyone in your program reads The Ensemble. As a widespread field, this is the way we learn together. (And it’s free!) Make sure you and your colleagues talk about the articles that interest, surprise, and inspire you.
  2. Join the International Teaching Artists Collaborative (ITAC), the global network for the field. This is free, too, and it’s a lively network with resources, opportunities, and connections you never dreamed possible. ITAC is developing a number of national hubs; explore the website to find out more about those.
  3. Get copies of Making Change: Teaching Artists and Their Role in Shaping a Better World. This short book is the first one written to introduce the field to those who don’t know about it or those who should know more about it. You can get free or at-cost copies through its website. Advocating for our field is not someone else’s responsibility; we are all responsible. 

Teaching artistry has arisen organically from the cultural soil of every country on earth, and now the local roots are connecting and broadening. On each day of my Asian tour, I saw colleagues realize for the first time that they are part of a network of professional practice that really can make a difference in the way the world works and the ways humans can flourish. Please join this network actively! We all must participate, to awaken its power.

Advocacy, April 2025, Arts and Health, Arts Education, Arts Institutions, Arts Organizations, Community Programs, Creative Aging, Cultural Policy, Dance Therapy, Drama Therapy, Education Reform, El Sistema, Eric Booth, Expressive Arts, Global Field, government support, International Collaboration, ITAC, KACES, Mental Health, Music Therapy, Network Building, Professional Identity, Public Awareness, Social Change, Social Prescribing, Teaching Artistry, Teaching Artists, Writing Therapy, youth development

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