Erica Halverson
In collaboration with an episode of Tink’s podcast recommendation podcast Feed The Queue, we’re sharing an interview with Erica Halverson. Erica is a professor, an author, an actor, and the host of Arts Educators Save the World. Outside of the podcast, she studies arts education and teaches the next generation of teaching artists and classroom teachers who learn to share their artistic superpowers with the next generation of geniuses.
On Arts Educators Save the World, Erica is joined by successful artists and the mentors who helped make them who they are. These artists include people like Lin Manuel Miranda, Cecily Strong, and Josh Radnor. Together they reveal the lasting impact that arts educators had on them and why enabling, inspiring, and celebrating the creativity of children is essential.
To learn more about the show, Tink’s own Aakshi Sinha interviewed Erica about what’s behind the making of the show, the bigger goal of highlighting mentors in arts education, and the core values of the team that guide the development of the podcast and its community. If this interview isn’t inspiring enough, you can follow it up by tuning into Feed The Queue to hear Lin Manuel Miranda’s heartfelt episode.
This interview has been edited for clarity.
Aakshi Sinha (AS): I am so excited to talk to you, Erica. I absolutely love your podcast, Arts Educators Save the World. I think it's the best title because it really conveys the feeling you get when you listen to your show. So I firstly just want to give you the opportunity to introduce yourself and your show.
Erica Halverson (EH): Thanks for having me! So my name is Erica Halverson and I am a professor, artist, educator, actor, media producer. I am a professor at the University of Wisconsin Madison in the School of Education. My academic expertise is in how people learn through the arts, with a focus on how artmaking influences people's identities, and their literacy and learning lives. I've been doing that job a long time. This is my 18th year as a professor. I was originally trained as a theatre artist, so when I was a very young person, I thought I wanted to be a professional actor. It turns out that what I love about the theatre and about performance is the craft, and not particularly the career. What inspires me and has always inspired me is how collectively we use the tools of art making to make people's lives better.
So I've done that in a range of different art making spaces. I've had grants from the National Science Foundation to study makerspaces and the maker movement and how that functions as a way to transform kids lives. I've had grants from the Wallace Foundation and the MacArthur Foundation looking at digital media art making like filmmaking and radio making. In 2021, I wrote a book called How the Arts Can Save Education. When the book came out in 2021, I was talking to Alec, who is my producer and co host, and he said, “Oh, we got to get these ideas out there. How do we get them out there?”. So we birthed this idea of Arts Educators Save the World, which takes the focus explicitly off of the arts practices, and more on to the relationships between how artists have experienced art making in their learning lives, and the mentors who have helped facilitate their pathways. We connect successful artists with their mentors to talk about the impact of arts education on their lives.
AS: I love that and it ties so well into what I wanted to ask next, because in every episode of the show that I have listened to, the first 15 minutes have always made me cry, like without a fail. It's specifically the parts when these celebrities, who are successful artists from all creative fields, begin to introduce their mentor to you and what they have meant to them. That section always tears me up, because it just reminds me of the lack of appreciation for teachers and being unable to express the intangible ways in which they impacted us. I wanted to ask you how you came to decide on this specific format of expressing this idea?
EH: I think we wanted to figure out a way to center the contributions of mentors, knowing that most mentors will not talk about their own impact. They won't say, “let me tell you about all the amazing ways that I have changed people's lives”. And so to ask of the artist, who is not always a “celebrity”, but often is one or is somebody whose life is focused around celebrating what they create, they are so moved to be able to position their mentor as the center of the conversation. We wanted to figure out a way first of all to center what the mentor brings, and also with the acknowledgement that Alec and I, as representatives of the audience, we are probably familiar with the artists but we are probably not familiar with the mentor. And so it's an opportunity to introduce a person who is new to us collectively, to introduce somebody who is not familiar to us collectively, and what better person to do it than the artist who has been on our television or in our airpods, or on our on our walls.
AS: I love that. This week is also Teacher Appreciation Week and we wanted to do this episode specifically surrounding that moment. What is something that listeners or anybody could kind of take away from this format and apply especially as we're thinking about mentors and educators in the next few weeks?
EH: I think there's a very tangible thing that people can take away, which is, make sure you reach out to somebody, an educator or a mentor who's changed your life and let them know. Like you said, we often don't take the time to do that, especially aspirational people who are interested in pushing their own lives along, pushing their own careers along. We don't often take the time to stop and say, “you know what, let me send that email. Let me send that text. Let me tell this person to their face, not only how much their support has meant to me, but specifically some nugget of what they've taken away”. Because I think, yes, of course, at the grand scale, it is great to hear that you that you've done a good job, right? But it's even more impactful to hear, maybe specifically, what one choice, one practice, one idea, one exchange that particularly stood out. So that's a super tangible thing, right? It's like not to be too cheesy, but like, think a teacher, think a mentor.
Then I think, on a slightly grander scale and sort of like political with a lowercase p, a thing that people can do is to really speak publicly and proudly about how art space learning experiences have mattered in your life. Because I think one of the sad things about my career is that at the bigger scale, the needle of how much and how important arts education is in the daily discourse, hasn't really moved in the last 20 years. Despite lots of evidence about the ways in which the arts make people's lives better, the ways in which the arts serve as engines of equity, and radical inclusion, the ways in which kids who struggle in mainstream institutions and schools flourish when they participate in the arts. Despite all of that evidence, we are still in this very, like math and science and reading matters most and the arts are things you do when you have extra time. And I just fundamentally think we are better as a society, when we center arts experiences in young people's lives. I encourage people to talk about their experiences, especially when they're in spaces where they can talk with school boards, or legislators or nonprofits.
AS: That's amazing. So many things we can do beyond just this week of appreciating mentors and teachers. I feel like that really gives an overview of things you could be thinking about, always at the back of your head. And I love that it starts by kind of reflecting on your experience in educational settings. Why did that matter to you? How did that change you? How did that impact you and affect you? I love that the show also kind of reveals all the many ways in which that could happen.
EH: I'll just add that - so far in our 22 episodes, we have shared stories of a vast range of types of mentor/mentee relationships, from what you might imagine, like the high school art teacher and their students, to mentors from informal spaces. We had an adult mentor/mentee relationship between Craig Thomas and Rob Greenberg, who are both television show runners. Greg spent time interviewing Rob about how he learned to be a mentor on the job. Emily Ashford, who has since gone on to star on Sweeney Todd at in Sweeney Todd on Broadway, brought her high school social studies teacher. They talked about how her teacher's instruction in social studies impacted Anneliese’s decision to go into the arts.
A recent episode with Chef Ballantine Howell Jr, who was a chef tested on Top Chef, brought his mom. We had this really beautiful conversation about how growing up in a close relationship with his mom – who is herself a super accomplished cook and cultural steward of the Italian and Haitian cultural values that she and Valentine's dad brought to their relationship – influenced his choice to become a chef and how that's made him a chef than he is. So by mentorship, we mean a lot of things. And I think that's really important too, because I think people get very locked in to the idea that “oh, by arts educators, you mean, elementary school music teacher, high school art teacher?” And yes, we mean that. But we also mean so many other ways in which mentors and mentees interact with one another around learning and through arts practices.
AS: That is beautiful. I feel like that's such a perfect segue into the episode that we will play on Feed The Queue. I wanted to end with a personal question that I want to ask your advice about. I feel like as I've been listening to the show, I have so many teachers that come to mind, so many mentors in so many different ways that I would love to kind of reconnect with and express gratitude towards, but sometimes specifically, when it's art or arts educators, they get to see you in such intimate ways. I don't think you always get to do that in a lot of different classes. And for me specifically, it was tied so much to coming out and being confused as a kid exploring those things in India, and having space through theatre or music to be able to explore those things. But sometimes because of how things like capitalism and the way we make money or the way we succeed, I feel like if I reached back out to these teachers, I would be disappointing them in some way because I didn't do the things that we dreamed together about.
EH: I can speak to that in a couple of ways. First, I can't imagine there's any educator who worked with you Aakshi, who would be disappointed in the human being that you've become. But I also think, and I think this is true for educators of all kinds, they have their passion, the thing that has driven them to become an educator, but I don't think their goal is for everyone to become them. My kid is very close with her physics teacher and she doesn't particularly have an intention to become a physicist or become a research scientist. But the way he's worked with her, both around the content of physics, but speaking to what you were saying, in her confidence as a female identifying person in STEM, and how much that's influenced who she is, as an intellectual, even if it's not around physics, is extremely powerful. I think to be able to reflect on how the work you did together has influenced the choices that you've made – I can't imagine there is an educator who wouldn't be thrilled to hear about that. So that's my kind of my genuine answer.
Then my cheesy answer is, as I move forward with this show, I have a lot of interests in working with folks who become successful in non art arenas. I’d like to get them to make those connections and to bring those arts educators back into conversation with them. My dream, I'll just put it out into the universe, is Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, who is a documented and known High School Theatre kid. She's spoken about the impact that her theatre education had on her life. My dream would be to get an opportunity to talk to Justice Brown Jackson, with or without a mentor that she had, about her reflection on those experiences, because arts practices aren’t just about becoming an artist. We make art because it teaches us about who we are, it teaches us about how we fit into communities, it teaches communities about ideas that they never thought to consider before. That's why we why we make art. And so I think any arts educator that had you in their life would be thrilled to know how you've transformed those ideas into the person that you’ve become.
AS: I love that because I do think we're not used to thinking how arts education translates to all walks of life, whatever you end up doing. It's just not something we're used to connecting the dots on. So I love that idea. I'm so excited for everything that's gonna come on the show. Thank you so much for talking to me about it.
EH: Thank you for having me! You all do great work. And we are really lucky and grateful to be able to enter into this version of communication with partners who know how to do that well and with care.