How would you try to convince a naysayer of the value of arts education? Maybe you would plead for the value of these subjects in their own right, citing the mind-expanding powers of self-expression, technical exploration, and human understanding. Or, depending on how stubborn your opponent is, you might try a different tack, pointing to the evidence that immersing children in the arts leads to better outcomes in all academic areas, even the ones they privilege.

In either case, you would be right, but you wouldn’t be thinking big enough, say Kylie Peppler, Maggie Dahn, and Mizuko Ito, authors of the Wallace-Foundation-sponsored report The Connected Arts Learning Framework: An Expanded View of the Purposes and Possibilities for Arts Learning. While they agree with both of these arguments (which they dub “art for art’s sake” and “art for academics’ sake”), they believe neither one gives enough credit to the full impact an arts education can have. Such exposure can not only enhance students’ artistic and academic development, they say, but impact other areas of their lives, like personal relationships, emotional well-being, and career development. For that matter, the impact doesn’t stop at the individual student, but can spill over into communities and society more broadly, as networks and relationships build, civic engagement increases, and areas for social progress come to the fore. In that light, artistic and academic growth are only small parts of a bigger holistic system of learning that the arts feed into.

This bigger system has a name in educational research circles: the connected learning framework. However, as the report’s authors explain, the term is not yet widely known in out-of-school or arts education, despite its alignment with many of the goals and outcomes its practitioners pursue. To bring the framework into wider use in our sectors, they have adapted it into a new subgenre they call “connected arts learning,” in the hopes of giving educators useful new language for describing and extending their impact. Here’s a brief summary of the framework and how museums can use it (and already are).

What is Connected Learning?

“Connected learning describes how educators and researchers can create meaningful learning opportunities by building relationships, basing learning on youth interests, and providing opportunities linked to real-world issues and communities,” the authors write. It takes a big-picture view of the role of learning in our lives, looking beyond acquiring information and skills for their own sake to the way these activities build our interests and develop our identities as we grow. In this way, connected learning emphasizes the “why” of education and asks whether the structures and practices in place are optimal to nourish those outcomes.

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Connected arts learning, in turn, “describes meaningful art education that connects young people’s interests in the arts to present and future opportunities by building relationships and networks, both within the arts organization and extended to the broader community.” While it is a universal framework encompassing the needs of all young people, its emphasis on the role of culture, community, and identity is especially helpful for determining how to support those from marginalized backgrounds. For that reason, the authors center education scholar Tara J. Yosso’s concept of “community cultural wealth,” which “focuses on the ways young people from historically minoritized groups can derive power from within their communities, rather than being pushed to assimilate into dominant cultural norms.”

In other words, if connected learning negates the idea of learning in an educational vacuum, connected arts learning negates the idea of learning the arts in a cultural vacuum. Instead of leaving their communities behind to learn skills and knowledge developed in other cultures, students learn to look deeper into their communities and unlock the beauty, opportunities, and resources that exist around them.

How does this translate into concrete programs? The authors identify five general approaches they came across in their research, which are not mutually exclusive but often overlap within one program:

1. Culturally Sustaining Arts: Basing arts learning on the cultures and identities of the learners and community.
2. Future Forward Arts: Preparing or involving youth in the workforce or civic life by helping them build relationships with working artists and activists.
3. Networked Arts: Embedding arts learning in social networks that include youth, family, and educators.
4. Doing Well By Doing Art: Supporting mental health and overall well-being by explicitly responding to students’ social and emotional needs.
5. Youth Voice Arts: Giving students a platform to develop their perspectives, leadership abilities, and voices in public by combining activism and art.

Already, there are countless examples of museum programs that take these approaches, whether or not the educators in charge are aware of the connected learning framework. For example, the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library has helped Iowa youth develop employable skills and practice activism through a monthslong project to build a replica of the Berlin Wall (Future Forward Arts, Youth Voice Arts). The Museum of Children’s Art has enrolled Oakland teenagers in a yearlong Community Futures School, where they lead discussions of oppression and its solutions, analyze futurist texts, and work with professional mentors to create artworks that combine technology and Afrofuturism (Culturally Sustaining Arts, Future Forward Arts, Youth Voice Arts). The Hammer Museum has hosted fourth-through-sixth-grade classes from underfunded Los Angeles schools for weeklong Classroom-in-Residence programs, opening a supportive space for students to reflect on heavy topics like grief, and supported their teachers with months of professional development to incorporate art into lessons (Networked Arts, Doing Well By Doing Art).

How Can Museum Programs Incorporate Connected Learning?

While you’re likely already working with elements of connected learning in your programs, studying the framework and the body of research behind it can help you enhance your impact. In particular, you might uncover aspects of your program design that are undermining your goals by minimizing the role of student interests, relationships, and opportunities. Peppler, Dahn, and Ito provide a rubric for assessing how well your program aligns with connected learning in these areas, as well as a series of questions you can ask to bolster each one. Here is a summary:

Stoke Interests

Even when educators aim for broad impact on students’ lives, they “still sometimes try to get kids interested in arts learning without first discovering what interests those kids already have,” the authors write. Instead of trying to “get young people interested in art,” connected arts learning uses art to explore what they’re already interested in. This means finding ways to collect input from students and develop the curriculum to follow their passions, rather than developing it in isolation based on outside sources. To accomplish this, one organization the authors interviewed relies on a youth council, an external evaluator, and informal conversations with students. An example insight: Whereas staff thought youth would be interested in experimenting with cutting-edge technology like virtual reality, they learned they were really more eager to experiment with the humbler medium of podcasting.

To center learners’ interests in your program, the authors recommend asking these questions:

• How do you incorporate youth interest and voice into programming?
• How do young people drive decision-making?
• How do you include learners’ identities and cultural backgrounds?
• How are the arts leveraged to engage learners?
• How are new interests supported in collaboration with professional artists?

Build Relationships

The traditional arts education paradigm tends to minimize relationship-building, consisting mainly of short-term engagements where educators lead students in individual projects during a confined class time and encourage them to practice on their own. Connected arts learning, in contrast, endeavors to build long-term relationships with youth and their families that extend beyond the classroom and allow for collaboration. This includes welcoming families and communities into both shaping and participating in the learning experience—not only in special events or projects, but day to day.

The authors suggest asking:

• How do you cultivate affinity-based networks of support?
• How do you support learners in working collaboratively with others?
• In what ways are relationships among young people, artists, and families accounted for in your programming?
• How are channels of communication kept open to support and sustain arts learning?
• In what ways are inter-generational relationships incorporated and leveraged to connect youth to arts opportunities?

Provide Opportunities

Traditional arts programs don’t think far beyond the classroom walls, measuring success by learner’s achievements within the program itself, and rarely introducing them to opportunities that extend beyond it. Connected arts learning flips this on its head, intentionally cultivating opportunities for learners outside of the classroom, whether connecting them with mentors, providing them with career training, or giving them chances to perform, exhibit, or engage in civic life.

Ideally, these opportunities are not just arts-related, but allow participants to explore any interests they may have. They are also not just career opportunities, with the goal of getting students on a stable financial path, but have the broader goal of helping them develop a meaningful life. (As one staff member interviewed tells the authors, “A lot of college and career readiness is based on the presumption that low-income students have to get set on a path much earlier…. I’d also like to strive for something where they can have the time to explore, just like a student of any income level.”) Finally, when these opportunities include professional work, like internships, apprenticeships, or leadership positions, students are ideally paid.

Questions to ask:

• What types of arts opportunities are communicated and offered to young people?
• How do the goals of the arts program connect young people to opportunities beyond the program itself?
• What are the values of the class or program and how are those values embedded in the arts experience?
• In what ways are young people matched with inspiring opportunities that align with their arts interests?
• How do you support networking that can connect youth to opportunities in and outside of the arts?