Published Monday, March 15, 2004
Arts Education Pioneer to Step Down
Students and Staff Laud Hoffmann Davis
By Jesse Hardman
APPIAN STAFF WRITER

The act of leaving something you love is never easy and never really complete.

HGSE Professor Jessica Hoffmann Davis, the co-creator of the Arts in Education (AIE) program and the only official director the program has ever known, knows this all too well. Davis is stepping away from her position at the end of the semester, a move she intended to make “eight years ago, five years ago, and most recently a few months ago.”

But this time, she says, it’s final.

“I’ve been shaping this opus long enough, and it’s time for me to move on to new work and a new set of hands to take over here,” she says.

While a “new set of hands” are not yet in place, Davis is confident that a successor will be chosen in time to tell students accepted into next year’s program. HGSE officials have assured AIE staff members that the program will continue in Davis’s absence – a relief for those who consider it a one of a kind opportunity. Many of AIE students acknowledge they were not able to find such a unique and dynamic program anywhere else.

Davis explains that many programs simply focus on “arts and education” not “arts in education,” creating an “us vs. them” atmosphere between the arts and mainstream faculty and courses.

Jacquie Old Coyote, a masters student and Ross Scholar in the AIE program, explains what drew her to the program and working with Davis.

“She has uncovered arts from a dusty canvas and made it a vibrant core of understanding and learning,” Old Coyote says. “She has a theme of Spiderwoman, weaving the connectedness of things. That is what really sold me, because it is inherent in the program.”

Davis’s Spiderwoman quality extends to a program rooted in the theory that art has a place in every discipline, from history to psychology to math.

This belief is exhibited in the variety of backgrounds with which AIE students come to HGSE. Off the top of her head, Davis can list students who are “science teachers, arts teachers, classroom teachers, language teachers, community arts leaders, college arts professors, special needs educators, museum educators, researchers, policy advocates, and educational directors in cultural institutions around the world.”

Current AIE student Caleb Neelon points out Davis also did past and future students a huge favor by bringing her vision and talents to Harvard University.

“She has shaped the field of arts in education by integrating it into Harvard, and in so doing, giving it an access to tremendous resources of human and financial capital,” Neelon notes.

Davis and HGSE began their nearly two-decade-long relationship back in 1985 when she arrived as a masters student, looking to chronicle the story of her mother’s school, the Hoffmann School for Individual Attention in the Bronx, New York. She says the school was a place where art, music, drama and dance had status alongside more mainstream subjects.

“Students at Hoffman didn’t know until they left that some folks thought it more important to spell than draw,” she says.

But if Davis never finished the book that brought her to Harvard, she was able to incorporate many of its ideas into her stewardship of the AIE program. She is quick to note, however, that she only formalized an approach that HGSE had fostered informally for years.

“This program existed without title or recognition for decades before we made it an official program…we just gave that work a name and a place and invited students with similar interdisciplinary predilections to come on board with explicit recognition, celebration, and support,” she says.

Scott Ruescher has worked alongside Davis as AIE program coordinator for the past two years. Ruescher says Davis’s charisma and natural teaching abilities will be sorely missed, but notes that his boss does not want anyone to think the show cannot go on without her.

“She created momentum for the program, but the momentum is probably self-sustaining now,” Ruescher says. “Naturally it will have a different tone to it after her departure, and she will agree that it will be exciting to see what tone that is.”

Hobbs Professor of Education and Cognition Howard Gardner, the co-submitter of the original proposal to create AIE, says the program is “unimaginable” without Davis. He says her hard work has made the AIE program admired around the world.

“Now that she is retiring, the rest of us are challenged to maintain this “trust,” and to continue to improve the program in the ways that she has,” Gardner says.

Life outside of Harvard has been on the mind of Jessica Hoffman Davis for a long time. The list of things she says she neglected over the past decade includes museums, her writing, her art studio and, most importantly, her family.

But what finally gave her that added push? Davis says the same thing that pushed her to Harvard twenty years ago.

“It’s in the words of children that we find direction, and my youngest grandson Malcolm, age five, looked at the sixty on the birthday cake, he and his brother had made for me this year and he said to me, “you know, it looks like the word ‘GO,’” she recalls. “I think he was right.”

Jesse Hardman, a student in the Specialized Program, is a staff writer for The Appian.