An Ambitious Arts Education Initiative in Chatham County

Mike Wiley, a professional actor, playwright, and director, has be en visiting students in Chatham County Public Schools for 13 years.

A few years ago, he was working with a student who was struggling to deliver some lines from a creative writing exercise.

“Hold on,” Wiley says he told the student. “Just imagine you’re out on the playground, shouting to your friend, reciting this piece of poetry,”

That normally shy student ended up delivering a performance that was so loud, and so powerful, that Wiley says the teacher was brought to tears.

Now, the county’s arts council is spearheading an ambitious drive to get an artist into every K-8 school in the county. This academic year, the Chatham Art Council’s Artists-in-Schools Initiative , which is funded by the council, has grown from just two artists in two schools to nearly twenty artists in fourteen schools.

Other artists involved in the program include afrofuturist hip-hop/rap, jazz, soul, and poetry program Blackspace (with GRAMMY-nominated Pierce Freelon), flamenco with dance company Flamenco Vivo Carlota Santana, and poetry with poet Phillip Shabazz.

The residency program seeks to use art to enhance student engagement with traditional subjects like history, science, and math. Wiley’s play, “A Game Apart,” about Jackie Robinson, for instance, teaches history alongside themes of resilience by looking at the baseball player’s childhood years.

“They all are able to see themselves in Jackie and the experiences that made him the person that he was, and they see the triumphs as well as the failures,” says Wiley. “When you see that someone had fallen off a horse a number of times and gotten back onto that horse an equal amount of times, you too can see yourself walking in those shoes.”

Students also learned about tough subjects like segregation through Wiley’s Robinson play.

“I’ve had students ask, ‘Does this mean that my mother and father would not have been able to get married?’” says Wiley. “I’m able to answer those questions, and then their teachers are able to fill in even more afterward. So it’s a lovely relationship that arts educators are able to build with students.”

While the length of each artist’s residency varies, Wiley usually spends a week in a given class, first performing one of his own plays, and then working with the students to create a performance of their own. After Wiley’s residency at Bennett School last season, principal Dr. Carla Neal wrote a thank you letter to the Chatham Arts Council.

“Our community faces the geographic challenge of not being in an area where there are opportunities for students to engage in positive arts or enrichment activities,” Dr. Neal wrote in a note shared in the art council’s press release. “Doing this workshop during the school day was an experience that allowed ALL students to positively interact with professional artists that they might otherwise never experience.”

Wiley agrees that it’s the ambition of the Arts Council, a relatively small organization with an emphasis on connecting children to the arts, that makes the residency a success.

“To be able to accomplish what they accomplish every year is, in a sense, unheard of,” says Wiley.

Reach Reporter Chase Pellegrini de Paur at chase@indyweek.com . Comment on this story at backtalk@indyweek.com .

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