Cultivating Sustainable School Culture: Tilling the Soil and Nourishing the Seeds Through the Arts

Arts integration is a creative opportunity to respond to the cultural elements of a school; school culture influences how an organization, as a whole, evolves. The evaluation described in this chapter illuminates the early developmental phase of a model that addresses school culture through arts integration. If a proposed theory of change predicts that change in teacher attitudes, beliefs, or behaviors mediate student effects, then those elements should be central to the evaluation. Our results indicate that the development of a locally grounded unifying framework for learning may be critical early in the process of implementation. Moreover, each school adapted arts integration to focus on specific elements of creative engagement. Evaluators should consider different dimensions of learning at both the organization and individual levels.