Culturally Responsive Arts Education (CRAE) uses the best practices of arts instruction and arts integration to work toward creation of a responsive and healthy school environment. This project engages the arts of the African Diaspora and incorporates the culture of the students to stimulate student interest, develop ownership of learning, and inspire achievement. CRAE enlists teaching artists and arts specialists in bringing to life its central principles-- principles that focus on the unique power of the arts in education, viewing race and culture as an asset, educating about the impacts of racism and models to overcome it, and the role that artists can play in building relationships between children, schools, and communities.

Artists facilitate a process in which children, by the work of their own hands, can develop an internal narrative to counter a pervasive notion that their academic potential is somehow predetermined. Whether the drum, spirituals, capoeira, quilting, painting, jazz, spoken word, rapping or b-boying, the arts of the Diaspora exhibit the richness of Black culture and demonstrate the resilience of its people . Through both stand-alone arts instruction and arts integration, CRAE asks learners and teachers to see one another and academic subjects anew. In this setting, it is hoped that children and teachers might co-create a world in which they experience, discuss and gain insight on issues pertaining to art, racism, ethnicity, and citizenry.

CRAE incorporates the following themes as core elements:

• Employ the arts of the African Diaspora
• Partner with artists in order to develop an instructional climate that promotes a positive racial identity
• Develop leadership qualities within children
• Forge collaboration among arts specialists, teaching artists and teachers of other core subjects
• Employ artists in connecting to and developing relationships with of the a child’s family
• Engage artists in the building of a relationship between a child and her school.
• Encourage relationships with community institutions

This emerging definition of Culturally Responsive Arts Education is drawn directly from “Culture, Racial Identity and Success: A Report to The Heinz Endowments” by Mary Stone Hanley, Ph.D. George Mason University and George W. Noblit, Ph.D. University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill