Interview with Kim Cairy - President of the Michigan Art Education Association
Announcer: Welcome to Inside Michigan Education, a weekly show featuring interviews with community leaders, school administrators, school business officials, and individuals, who are passionate about the future of Michigan education. And now, here is your host for Inside Michigan Education, Rob Huisingh.
Rob Huisingh: Welcome to Inside Michigan Education. This week we are joined in the Foxbright Podcast Studio by Kim Cairy. Kim is the President of the Michigan Art Education Association, also known as the MAEA. Welcome Kim, it's great to have you on the show.
Kim Cairy: Thank you Rob. I am really excited to be here today to discuss the arts.
Rob Huisingh: Kim, tell us a little bit about yourself. How did you come to be in the position you are in and what do you do?
Kim Cairy: I have always been passionate about creating art myself personally and working with children. I am currently an art teacher in Saginaw Township Community Schools, at White Pine Middle School. I have the distinct pleasure of working with our sixth, seventh, and eight grade students on a daily basis, so I am very fortunate in what I am able to do.
I became involved in the Michigan Art Education Association when I was beginning my schooling, because it was such a key, important part that completed what I wanted to do in life. It's my professional organization and I have been involved in some aspect every year I have been a member and I have been fortunate enough to eventually be able to be on our Executive Board and be a President and work with such a great group of art educators around the state.
Rob Huisingh: Kim, tell us a little bit about the MAEA, and what role does it play in Michigan Education?
Kim Cairy: MAEA serves as a professional organization for students, pre-service teachers, art educators, and higher ed educators around Michigan. We are unified with the National Art Education Association. We are currently one of the largest associations. We roughly have around 1,300 members that are part of Michigan, and we serve as a professional development source, a networking source, and an informational source, and a resource for our teachers in Michigan.
Rob Huisingh: How do you define arts in education?
Kim Cairy: Well, there is the first aspect of the creative process for our students. I feel that the arts help develop the whole child. If you are looking at it technically, we have performance arts. Within music there is choral, there is orchestra and band, and there is theater performance, dance performance, and visual arts.
Rob Huisingh: Some people have said that we need to be churning out our engineers, we have to have math, and science, and I am not saying they are wrong, but what about the arts, why are they here, why do we need them?
Kim Cairy: Well, in response to the engineer comment you are correct that those are also important professions, but we have be creative in looking at our future, and that our future now deserves a very different kind of person. A person that has a different kind of mind, and to quote Daniel Pink; his book, 'A Whole New Mind', we are looking at creators, empathizers, pattern recognizers, meaning makers. These people are going to be our artists, our inventors, our designers, storytellers, caregivers, these are the individuals that are going to be our big picture thinkers. They are going to change our society and how we live today and how we function creatively.
Rob Huisingh: Your 59th Annual Conference is coming up, and its going to be here in Grand Rapids from what I understand.
Kim Cairy: It is. This is our 59th Annual Conference. Our conference theme is 'Art Brings Hope, Healing, and Change. A big part is community service learning that our amazing conference planning team, which is at a local level here in Grand Rapids, they have just put together an amazing four days for art educators to come socialize, network, just rejuvenate and create what they need to, to take back to their local schools in their community to make it a better learning environment. We become a part of the community. We are going to be very active in local galleries and the local universities here in Grand Rapids, with Calvin and Kendall College and the Grand Rapids Art Museum.
One thing that's somewhat of a highlight. We have a wonderful Miami-based Cuban artist that's going to be here with us, Xavier Cortada. He will be working on a collaborative large scale mural that we will unveil, and it will be donated back to Saint Mary's Health, and installed for patients, staff, and family to enjoy. I think that's really important that where we are at each year that we give something back to the community and show the support of the arts there.
Rob Huisingh: When we talk about education today, its pretty hard to get past the fact that schools are focused on the MEAP. Are there any reforms that you can think of that we need to be looking at with regard to how we are going about our education process today that are going to have dramatic impacts in the future?
Kim Cairy: Well, I think you are definitely correct in the fact that that our schools are facing two major factors; funding, and the pressure to improve student learning and reading, writing, math, science, and social studies. I think it falls upon us, definitely within the arts community, to further that initiative, to keep the arts within our schools and to not make it that program that has to be eliminated.
One way to do that is to look creatively at the MEAP and how we can subjectively assess what we are doing at an individual level within our school and community to support the arts and measure what we are providing for our students in the performance and the visual arts.
Rob Huisingh: Just somehow sort of quantitatively assess, if a school has 29 students which are involved in band, that somehow that quantitatively affects the school's evaluation.
Kim Cairy: True. They would be able to have a mark off or a check area where they could evaluate what that school is doing to provide a quality arts program for their students.
Rob Huisingh: I understand that approximately half the people that are involved in arts and education are members of your organization. Well, what do you say to those who aren't a member, why should they be a member?
Kim Cairy: It's really hard I think right now in the State of Michigan. I am living proof that I think it's so important to invest back into your professional occupation what you do everyday that you make so important to you.
I don't see how they could afford not to be a member, it's so important, and I think it really helps their overall teaching career; what they are doing for the students in the schools, promoting the arts. I think that they can get that from being a member of the Michigan Art Education Association. I know I have.
Rob Huisingh: Well Kim, I want to thank you for taking the time to be on our show. It has been a pleasure. We are looking forward to the Annual Conference coming up. The dates of that, it's October?
Kim Cairy: Yes, it's October 9 through the 12; its a Thursday, and it runs through Sunday. Obviously, art teachers and any interested attendees are still able to register. They can register online at our website, which is www.miarted.org, and that's currently happening now and its going to be an amazing, amazing weekend.
Rob Huisingh: Alright. Well Kim, thanks for being on our show. I hope you will join us again, and I look forward to having you back.
Kim Cairy: Thank you.
Rob Huisingh: If you would like to learn more about Michigan Art Education Association or have a question you would like to ask Kim, you can contact her by email at kimcairy at hotmail dot com. Information on the MAEA is also available online, as you heard before, at www.miarted.org, again that URL is www.miarted.org.
So do you have a question or a story or something interesting that concerns Michigan education, well, if you do, we invite you to send us your thoughts. You can find us online at www.insidemieducation.com. Until next week, this is Rob Huisingh with Inside Michigan Education.
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