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Announcing our Strategic Pause for ArtsEdSearch

Date: 15 October 2024

If you are a long-time user of ArtsEdSearch, you may have noticed the platform has been quiet for the last year. In the spirit of transparency and shared learning, our team wanted to invite you into what has been done internally to grow the resource and formally announce the strategic pause that is currently underway.

But first, some background. ArtsEdSearch is one of AEP’s longest standing resources. Initially published in 1995 as a printed resource and launched online in 2012, it has grown over last two decades to be an online hub that houses over 300 studies related to arts education. Our Annual Survey revealed that it is one of AEP’s most used resources. At the same time, we also recognize that persistent gaps have emerged in the resource without intentional and deep interrogation of the internal processes that keep the database running.

Over the last four years, our team has conducted a needs assessment, hosted focus groups, thinkers’ meetings, informal interviews, a policy briefing, and even launched an internal task force to examine what was perpetuating these gaps. These engagements ultimately revealed several learnings:

  1. The criteria we used to review research was contributing to gaps related to student populations, settings, age levels and topics in the overall body of research.
  2. The audience and the intended purpose of ArtsEdSearch was not clear.
  3. The types of information valued in ArtsEdSearch was not inclusive of multiple ways of learning, knowing and sharing that are so vital to communicating about the value of arts education.

These aren’t small issues! Our team made a choice that we needed new expertise and additional capacity to help us address this. Through a call for proposals, AEP hired Asif Majid to help us embark on this work. I truly would need to write a separate blog post to share all the value his expertise, analytical ability, facilitation, humor and critical feedback has offered this project.

With Asif’s support, AEP has been able to articulate a new purpose statement and focus for the tool with feedback from our staff, federal partners and three separate focus groups of partners and users:

The purpose of ArtsEdSearch is to connect diverse arts education research to practitioners through ease of access, understanding and use.

We envision the primary users of ArtsEdSearch to be educators, artists and arts education advocates, funders and program designers.  These groups use ArtsEdSearch to inform advocacy and policy agendas, identify programmatic priorities and goals, and support case-making in grant and funding decisions.   

Our purpose statement invites research that includes the many ways people gather, share and disseminate knowledge. We are especially interested in research that bridges community, classroom and scholarly contexts; artistic, written, embodied and oral expressions; and projects that specifically engage a wide range of practitioners.  

By engaging with this resource, we hope that users will have access to a wider range of information to support their programs, advocacy and decision making.

This renewed purpose statement is guiding the next phase of our work, which includes re-designing our review process and criteria for inclusion in the database. It is also guiding the formation of a multi-year plan to expand the types of resources included in the database.

While work is still underway to formulate and implement new processes, it’s necessary for AEP to take a strategic pause in updating resources. We have learned from many of our partners—like the National Guild for Community Arts Education—that it takes time to re-imagine what can be. Continuing to operate with existing processes wouldn’t allow space for intentionality and learning. So, while you may not see us uploading new research regularly until mid to late 2025, we want to leave you with three reassurances:

  1. ArtsEdSearch is not going anywhere! You can continue to access the research in the database, and use the tool as is for the foreseeable future.
  2. Deep, important work is underway internally to build an even better resource for you. We hope you will trust us that the wait will be worth it!
  3. If there is information that you are looking for and can’t find, please reach out to our team directly. Our priority is to make sure you are connected to the best available information to inform your work, and while this may not be at your fingertips in the digital tool, we are here to leverage our human capacity to help you find what you need.

To stay up to date on the latest news related to ArtsEdSearch, be sure to subscribe to the ArtsEd Digest. We don’t take for granted our ability to take this space and time to transform the database, and we are grateful to all of the countless contributors to each evolution of this resource.

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