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Everyday Advocacy for Your Choral Program

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By Karen Bruno

What is advocacy? Advocacy is an opportunity to share with other people, many of whom are decisionmakers in some way, why choral music matters—to us, to our singers, and to the world. Advocacy should not be a term that frightens us. It should be a term that inspires us to explain to others why choral music makes a difference for the better. There are many people who never had the opportunity to experience or understand the art form that is so important to us as choral conductors and music educators.

There are lots of ways to share the impact of music education, and many organizations have spent a good deal of time and energy compiling statistics, sharing research, and distributing creative tools for large- and small-scale advocacy. The National Association for Music Education (NAfME), Chorus America, Americans for the Arts, and National Association of Music Merchants (NAMM) are some of the organizations who do this sort of work regularly, and we should all familiarize ourselves with the advocacy tools they provide. But statistics and studies tell only part of a story. They tell the larger story of why music or the choral art form is important and discuss the impact choral programs have in general, but these are probably not the primary reasons your principal, community foundation, or singers and their families support your choir. They are likely to be more interested in what you have to say than statistics provided by a national organization. Why are you a choral musician? Why do your singers show up to participate? When we tell our own story in conjunction with research about the impact of choral music writ large, we provide complete and compelling reasons to prioritize, staff, and fund choral music in our schools and our communities.

Part of the problem is that we know we should advocate for choral music, but we aren’t sure how to do it. What do we say? To whom do we say it? We have our hands full selecting repertoire, writing lesson plans, studying scores, teaching and conducting, and meeting the individual needs of our singers. We are busy! Isn’t a beautiful concert advocacy enough?

Simon Sinek’s 2009 TED talk and subsequent book, Start With Why, took the business and leadership worlds by storm. His thesis was that people are not as interested in a product as they are interested in why a business exists in the first place. The core belief, cause, or reason a business exists can be a compelling story. If a company sells its story, consumers are more likely to purchase its product, he claimed. He encourages CEOs to build a culture within their companies that is mission driven and to hire people aligned with the company’s core beliefs rather than those who are just excellent sales people. Identifying and prioritizing why a company exists, he argued, is foundational for success.

Although Sinek was speaking to business leaders, it is easy to see how his ideas are relevant to teaching and to advocacy. When we identify our core beliefs and values, we become better teachers, leaders, and storytellers. We can explain why it’s important for a student to schedule choir amid Advanced Placement (AP) classes, a foundation to award our program a grant, or an adult to attend a weekly Tuesday night rehearsal across town. While we may have spent time creating our own mission statements as undergraduates, for most of us it has been a very long time since we checked in with our own “why.” Consider:

  • Why do you teach and conduct choirs?
  • Why do your singers choose (and continue) to participate?
  • Why did you enter the profession?
  • Why do you stay in the profession?
  • Why does singing matter to you?
  • Why does singing matter to your choristers?

These are not easy questions, but the answers will help you shape your everyday advocacy stories.

If we want to tell our stories clearly and compellingly, we must identify our core values and guiding principles; these are the heart of everyday advocacy. Our stories become the message of everyday tools to engage and educate our communities. Go beyond the general research, beyond the beauty of the choir’s performance, and articulate the most profound reasons you and your singers are involved in your choral program.

Former U.S. Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill is remembered for saying, “All politics is local.” Whether or not this statement is true, we do well to remember that local issues are important to communities, and that sharing the value of choral music is an important part of our job. If we don’t advocate for the choral art, who will?

Excerpted from Karen L. Bruno’s “Everyday Advocacy For Your Choral Program” from Volume 60, Number 2 of Choral Journal (September 2019).

Stories of Newness: Healing and Reimagining with Jazzmone Sutton (Advocacy)

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Jazzmone Sutton, now the State Advocacy Engagement Manager for National Association for Music Education, was teaching elementary music when her school shifted to virtual teaching. Due to concerns about screen time, there weren’t formal music classes, so she provided music resources for students. Pre-COVID, she implemented “Technology Fridays,” which proved to be helpful for online learning. In August 2020, classes were virtual and lasted 20 or 30 minutes. They weren’t able to have an elementary chorus, although many students asked her about singing. At least, Jazzmone thought, parents were able to see the excitement and energy music had, and this was a big advocacy tool.

 

Like all teachers, there were struggles. She wasn’t able to teach the lessons she wanted to teach. Her classes were often only 20 minutes, and that was too short. While she became incredibly precise and got right to music making, she also struggled with playing and singing in her class due to COVID regulations. She refined her teaching, but shortened class time and cleaning instruments left her with even less time to address music creation.

 

If you have ever met Jazzmone, however, you would know that she doesn’t dwell in the frustrations. Virtual teaching allowed her to connect with students in a different way. She gave voice and piano lessons, and taught whatever students were interested in. A number of students purchased their own instruments, and she provided learning resources. To see students so engaged during this time was inspiring. In fact, there was so much interest in these endeavors, she had a vision of having a second music teacher in her school. There simply wasn’t enough of her to spread around. In addition, parents and caretakers participated in music. For example, a student had his mom learn Latin dancing with the class. Afterwards, the mom would jump into a lesson simply to say hello. In another instance, a grandmother reached out to ask for help to sing and play in church. Jazzmone was able to connect her to self-guided resources. Virtual learning removed barriers of participation that we, as instructors, don’t always realize are there. What could this mean for the future?

 

Jazzmone values giving her students the skills to be independent music makers, and COVID forced her to do this to another level. She asked herself: “Will they make music after I’m gone? If I get out of the way, can they make music?” She couldn’t see much music making, but that was the point. Students were creating music with classes, family, and friends. The students were making music without her there. During COVID, “it wasn’t that people stopped singing. It’s that people stopped singing in a group that someone was in control of.” But people sang. She points out that people fought to keep singing, though it may have been a different type of music, and this demonstrates that music is a vital part of the human experience.

 

In the last year, Jazzmone accepted a job with the National Association for Music Education. Similar to teaching, her new job in music education advocacy requires relationship building. “What we do is community,” Jazzmone said, “We should strive to build relationships within our space.”  She did that in her teaching, and it’s how she approaches advocacy.  

 

As an advocate for choral educators, Jazzmone would share some words of wisdom: Allow yourself grace, allow students grace, and do not expect normal. What does grace look like?  Grace is acknowledging the growth and possibilities in the current situation, even though it may be different than pre-COVID. For example, you may want to do certain music, but your students may not be ready for it. With grace, a choral teacher can release the expectations and see the possibilities for what the situation could be. One way Jazzmone reframed this for her students was to ask them what they hoped for out of their time together, and they had great ideas. And if you run into barriers, look at it with patience and kindness. She believes we have to leave room for surprises, because surprises are opportunities for change. In a year when those surprises were consistent, choral educators were innovative and impactful. Allow your singers, your community, yourself to surprise you. 

 

I asked Jazzmone specifically about equity. We agreed that advocacy involves understanding equity. Here it also needs relationship building. Conversations are a two-way street between teachers and students (or communities), and teachers will know the needs of the community because they’ve spent time with the community. In essence, relationships help teachers meet the needs of their students because they will know what they need to advocate for. Who are your students beyond musicians? How do you advocate for the whole student? And this, Jazzmone says, is how she can help in her new position. 

 

If you are looking to increase advocacy, Jazzmone Sutton is the State Advocacy Engagement Manager for the National Association for Music Education, and would be a great resource. Additionally, ACDA has an Advocacy and Collaboration Committee that is very active. You can view the website here. 

From “Raising the Voices of a Generation: The Role of Choral Directors in Increasingly Complex Times”

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By Jeff M. Poulin

In February 2019, I published a new framework for the field, through Americans for the Arts, which articulated the aptitudes, practices, skills and commitments, making up the “12 Core Competencies of an Arts Education Leader.” This framework is intended to guide all of us working in the field of arts education toward a new way of leadership and evolved approach towards the work of arts learning in our communities.

From 2016 to 2019, we embarked on a four-year journey to engage the arts education field in a series of research initiatives to determine how to ensure an expanded, well-resourced, and less- barriered pipeline to leadership in the field of arts education. We began by exploring the literature to determine what knowledge was published. Unsurprisingly, there is little in the nexus of leadership development and arts education. What we did find provided us with the undergirding concepts that 1) anyone can be a leader in this field and 2) leadership traits can be learned over time.

Through numerous research inputs from existing and new datasets, we found four themes—aptitudes, skills, practices, and commitments—that served as the guide- posts for the long arc of our work. We also found that a self-predication of mastery usually underpinned leadership competency: one must feel that they already have mastered their individual role within the arts education field (like being a master choral director) on their path to leadership.

As we dove deeper, we identified the individual competencies of leadership, which allow for individuals to reflect, correct, or explore to reach their potential.

Aptitudes—the inherent ways in which we approach our work

  • Collaboration – Working together within and without the arts field, we recognize that we are stronger together.
  • Criticality – Seeing beyond how the work currently is and envisioning how it can be.
  • Creativity – Thinking outside the box to solve problems and imagine the future

Practices—the ongoing processes that sustain our work

  • Mentoring – Engaging in multi-generational cyclical learning experiences to foster the next (and renew the current) generation of leaders.
  • Networking – Recognizing our own and fostering community among diverse individuals with different strengths to contribute.
  • Learning – Continuously engaging in opportunities to attain new knowledge and maintain up-to-date with current trends. 

Skills—the developed approaches to interconnect our work

  • Policy literacy – Understanding the impact of the implicit and explicit policies which impact our work.
  • Evidence use – Utilizing quantitative and qualitative data to illustrate the impact of our work.
  • Storytelling – Illuminating the impact of our work through the real-life experiences of individuals and groups.
  • Advocacy strategy – Formulating the strategies that unify advocacy efforts to effect sustained change.

Commitments—the obligations that run through our work

  • A love for and joy of working with learners and in the arts
  • A commitment to social action, cultural equity, and racial justice

Within this framework, I would underscore the importance of utilizing data, understanding policy, partnering with young people, etc. These are all essential components about how we rethink how we talk about music education and how we inform our leadership in the field.

The field must also focus on the four identified skills: policy literacy, evidence use, storytelling, and advocacy strategy. It is these four skills where we fall down and remain stuck in the status quo. As leaders, we must understand the policy landscape which impacts our work – both in the arts and education sectors as well as in adjacent sectors of policymaking. We must use new and innovative evidence to demonstrate the impact of our programs. Alongside this evidence, we must be effective and moving storytellers to illuminate the data. Together, it is essential to craft and adhere to an advocacy strategy; one that moves beyond the age-old tactics and emboldens our reconsidered “why” for music education.

Lastly, I encourage all readers to go back and revisit the two commitments. The words “love” and “joy,” though immeasurable, ground our work in the intrinsic. Similarly, the affirmation of social action, cultural equity, and racial justice, serves as a charge within every action that we take as educators.

I would even go so far as to say that we, as arts education leaders, have a responsibility (beyond just our students or the young people that we serve) to our broader community. Our work is essential in developing young people but also in improving our city, state, or nation. Modeling the type of interaction we hope to see from students as servant leaders must be within our scope of work also. Our professional expectations as choral directors goes beyond music training and performance, instead to community leadership and advocacy.

This post was drawn from an article by Jeff M. Poulin published in Volume 60, Number 2 of the Choral Journal (September 2019), a focus issue on advocacy and collaboration. For the full article, ACDA members may sign-in to the ACDA website and read the entire article at https://acda.org/archives/1169. Thank you to ACDA Advocacy and Communications Committee member Joe Cerutti for preparing the excerpt.

Advocacy: Responsibility, Calling, Amplification, and Joy

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By Amanda Sprague Hanzlik

2020 marks the year where the definition and practice of arts advocacy began to transition and evolve for me – in my heart, mind, and real life. Until recently, the majority of my experiences with advocacy for the arts, and specifically choral music, have been personal, local, and limited to my places of employment and the houses of worship I have attended/worked in over the years. Those efforts have been forged through conversations, relationships, community events, and creating public/community presence for the choirs I direct and engage with. Even with those elements present in my professional life (and although creating community has always been a very natural part of my life’s work), I will admit that the word advocacy has often felt somewhat foreign and mysterious to me. I always felt as if I were somehow not experienced, educated, or important enough to have a voice and speak articulately about advocacy in any real or official way. Honestly, I even avoided those special advocacy sessions at the big conferences in my early years as an educator. In my naïveté, I sincerely thought that people in far away offices at ACDA and NAfME were the ones who held the advocacy cards – I was a worker bee in the trenches, who looked to them for guidance.

What I didn’t yet understand was that advocacy of the arts is a multidimensional process; a multi-layered web of relationships, issues, policy, collaboration, and ultimately, action.

Sometimes, advocate is a verb – sometimes, a noun. Individuals and institutions often need an advocate in a variety of situations; they self-advocate or seek advocacy efforts to be made on their behalf. One of my favorite definitions comes from AgeUk, a charity organization in Leeds, United Kingdom:

The role of an advocate is to offer independent support to those who feel they are not being heard and to ensure they are taken seriously and that their rights are respected.

An advocate does not represent their own views but amplifies that of the person they are supporting. An advocate should also empower the person to advocate for themselves wherever possible. – AgeUK -Leeds

These definitions became extraordinarily relevant in my developing relationship with advocacy – particularly the sentiment of amplification. According to Merriam-Webster, these are the definitions of amplify:

1 : to expand (something, such as a statement) by the use of detail or illustration or by closer analysis

2a: to make larger or greater (as in amount, importance, or intensity) : INCREASE

b: to increase the strength or amount of

especially : to make louder

My favorite? To make louder.

Amplification of our voices, issues, concerns, ideas, and solutions is necessary – and as I discovered, it is a defining element and tool in the development of advocacy efforts.

I currently serve as president for the Connecticut chapter of American Choral Directors Association (ACDA), and in the spring of 2020, I was practicing advocacy by actively searching for and seeking out assistance, resources, and connections for Connecticut choral directors, so that they might be able to feel supported and advocate for themselves and their programs/choirs during the first wave of COVID-19 and remote learning. Then, something happened: a new and urgent need for arts advocacy on a much larger stage presented itself. The State of Connecticut began to explore and create an official Reopen Connecticut Advisory Group – and quite surprisingly, not a single arts organization was offered a seat at the table. I knew that I, and we as an ACDA executive committee, had to step into the arena – and we did (as did many other CT arts organizations). This letter is our public statement and was shared widely via email and social media, and was delivered to the desk of our governor.

The process of this very public statement/engagement with governmental agencies and the amplification of the voices and concerns of my fellow educators was clearly new for me. Although I felt and recognized the weight of that specific responsibility, it was the action that felt like the fulfillment of a calling. This action gave voice to my choral colleagues, and created a way for all of us to be seen, for our needs to be amplified in an arena where impactful state-level policies were being considered and developed. Ultimately, this action also produced closer relationships and an evolution of trust with my local government, state representatives, the members of the CT-ACDA and other arts organizations in the state. It even opened the door for me to engage in a very practical way, by serving on a task force, where I, along with a diverse group of other arts educators, created “K-12 COVID-19 Considerations for Music Education Programs in the State of Connecticut.” This action also opened my eyes to disconnect and need for more purposeful engagement, connection, and intention on the part of the ACDA and other arts organizations in our state – we cannot remain reactive or reserve our presence for times of crisis. Arts organizations, and specifically ACDA chapters, must establish patterns of engagement with our governmental bodies, as a normal and cherished part of our mission and community involvement.

This entire process, the action, the relationships, the negotiating, the collaboration, the WORK – it was and is a calling. All of these elements also produced depths of joy and gratitude, for which I was not prepared and had no way of anticipating. For the first time, I felt that I was stepping beyond the role of traditional advocate into the role of citizen-artist, in a new and unexpected way.

The role and definition of a citizen-artist can be defined as the following:

Individuals who reimagine the traditional notions of art-making, and who contribute to society either through the transformative power of their artistic abilities, or through proactive social engagement with the arts in realms including education, community building, diplomacy and healthcare.  – The Aspen Institute Arts Program

I am seeking what it might mean to more fully explore and embrace the roles of advocate and citizen-artist, both in my life as a choral musician and educator, but also – looking ahead – for the transition of my role into past-president of our ACDA chapter.  I see this new role as an opportunity to follow this calling and joy of advocacy – to more intentionally seek better ways to forge authentic relationships with other arts organizations and governmental bodies: to evolve and to challenge myself, our chapter and our state to pursue connection, justice, equity, dialogue, meaning, and the creation of policy through the amplification of the voices of individuals, arts communities, and choirs in Connecticut and beyond.

Amanda Sprague Hanzlik is president of the Connecticut chapter of American Choral Directors Association.

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