Snow City Arts Foundation

Our programming is built to “meet students where they are” as our Teaching Artists adjust programming to each student’s unique interests, abilities, and needs while providing the rare opportunity to work toward school credit while hospitalized. All programming adheres to a set of Best Practices that puts the student first and informs our methods for the development, execution, and evaluation that our Teaching Artists develop curriculum against Student Decision Making, Customized, Differentiated Learning, and Artistic Process Valued Over Art Product. Across our five disciplines, our workshops include: Daily Discipline-Specific Projects in one of five disciplines which allows the student to explore interests uninhibited, resulting in a deepening of understanding and skill in arts concepts and where Teaching Artists craft curriculum designed to guide a student through the exploration of discipline-specific arts concepts and techniques; Peer-to-Peer Level Projects that provide creative ways for students to collaborate with other hospitalized children without being in the same room due to health conditions that limit students working side-by-side; and Personal Projects for children who are hospitalized for long periods of time who create a piece in a single genre or intersecting genres that to be completed over several days and visits of instruction, which allow a student to take pride in a sense of completion and ownership over their work. SCA utilizes an assessment rubric with six-outcomes Creative Decision Making, Applying Techniques and Technologies, Sense of Self as Artist, Making Connections, Reflection, and Experimentation. These areas are measured over a four-point mastery scale: Exploring, Developing, Proficient, and Accomplished. This rubric is applied in every workshop that the Teaching Artists consider to be the student working at their ‘normal’ ability. The rubric is not employed when a student is clearly not feeling well, but wants to engage in making art. All Snow City Arts curriculum is aligned to state and national learning standards in the artistic and academic standards to ensure rigor. In January 2015, we adopted the New Illinois Learning Standards Incorporating the Common Core in Literacy and Math, the Next Generation Science Standards, the National Curriculum for Social Studies, and the recently released National Core Arts Standards. Our Teaching Artists and Program Director collaboratively select from over 1,000 learning standards to ensure rigor and comprehensive learning in every project.

Database Snow City Arts is committed to making its data collection and assessment tools as robust and efficient as possible. Now in its fifth year of use, we hope to upgrade our custom-built Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA)-compliant database to make reporting and deep data analysis more efficient. This software tool permits our artists and administrative staff to precisely track each student’s demographic information, mastery of learning standards, assessment outcomes, and artistic portfolio. The report function needs to be more robust. The goal of these improvements is to make it a more efficient tool for program staff, and to report deeper analytical trends that are not currently readily available. School Reports SCA’s software allows us to track individual student data, mastery of learning standards, and learning development. Twice each year, we produce comprehensive reports and artistic portfolios for each student who signs a release to be sent back to their home schools. By sending these achievement reports to students’ schools, SCA helps provide a continuous academic track for arts learning. Through an agreement with clinical staff and the Department of Child and Family Services, students in the inpatient psychiatric unit at Children’s Hospital University of Illinois are now eligible for such reporting and potential credit.

Our Teaching Artists assess as many outcomes as applicable to the workshop at hand however, due to the first interaction providing the baseline data, we can only measure change in a student when we see them for a second time. This means that we have little impact data on one-time encounters, which is about 50% of the time. As a result, SCA ran two pilots for how we might better collect data on the impact of one-time engagements. We are coding data and, if another pilot is not needed, we hope to institute an additional data-gathering method, including adjusting our database to accommodate this data. Theory of Change Over the last two years, SCA has undertaken the process of developing and testing its Theory of Change. Since the number of times a student engages with SCA varies from just once to potentially 100 times over the course of many years, it is difficult to define how learning occurs through these variations. Our draft theory therefore defines goals for learning dependent upon the number of engagements a student has with SCA over a specific time period. SCA has utilized the work of Arts and Business Council consultants to do a thorough data analysis of learning and assessment trends within the first three full years of student data in its new database. That analysis indicated that our rubric is strong, more training could be done it with our users, and that the Theory of Change is generally on track. There are also a series of next steps based on the analysis. In addition to additional training on the rubric, SCA will tweak our Theory of Change just a bit to better reflect impact based on the number of engagements, we are considering building an Advance Placement rubric for those students who come to us with a depth of experience in the arts; and we need to solve for the impact of just one workshop.

In 2018, SCA engaged with 1,295 students in 2,930 workshops resulting in 2,727 instructional hours. While the majority of our participants hail from the Chicagoland area, SCA also works with students from the Midwest region and across the country. Now that SCA is fully operational at Central DuPage Hospital, our first suburban partner, we have expanded our geographic reach to a wider array of students than at any time in the organization’s history. Our students range in age from early childhood to early 20s. In 2018, 85% of our students fell between the ages of 6 and 18. Our student population is comprised of 30% African-American, 24% Latinx, 43% Caucasian and 3% Asian-American students. 54% of our students are female, 46% are male. Across all hospitals, approximately 65% of our students come from low-income households, and receive either free or reduced-fee medical care. In 2018, SCA celebrated its 20th Anniversary with a series of six events throughout the year, showcasing the work of students in five Chicagoland hospitals. Each event focused on one of the genres in which SCA provides programming, and were presented in partnership with some of Chicago’s most esteemed cultural institutions. These events included a Creative Writing exhibition in partnership with Open Books, a Visual Arts Exhibition in partnership with The Arts Incubator at The University of Chicago, an exhibition on Teaching Artistry in partnership with Weinberg/Newton Gallery, an original work of theatre in partnership with Steppenwolf Education, a Media Arts Festival at Gene Siskel Film Center, and a Night of Music at Schuba’s. All of these events served as a retrospective of 20 years of students’ work in hospitals, and were free and open to the public. All of these events provided opportunities for current and former SCA students to re-engage with teaching artists, to not only see their work in a professionally-presented manner, but reflect on how their time with SCA influenced their artistic growth as individuals.