2018 AAAE Conference

Teaching Millennials: The New Rules of Engagement:
Alan Salzenstein
Ximena Varela
As AAAE matures and moves into its 40th year, many of the organization’s members are facing the challenges of adapting pedagogy to a new audience – a new generation of students.  The classroom experience today will ultimately set the stage for the direction of arts organizations in years to come as this generation enters the field.  Our session draws attention to the educational needs of millennials, and how arts management faculty can best engage with, respond to, and challenge students to be effective arts managers for the future.

Millennials, a term used to refer to people reaching young adulthood in the twenty-first century, are navigating in an environment far different from that of their arts management instructors and employers. Due partly to dizzying changes in technology, societal shifts, and a changed economic reality, millennials differ from preceding generations in how they encounter and engage with the world.

This session will explore what research tells us about millennial education, the concept of “self” in the millennial world and the foundation-altering impact it has on how we think about their education, and present tools to build rapport, focus on relevance, and make topics relatable. The session will include tools used for both undergraduate and graduate teaching, as well as a discussion of the adaptive administrative scaffolding that serves them.

Better Together: Teaching Collaboration as a Tenet of Arts Administration
Erica Bondarev Rapach
We live in a world driven by collaboration - social media, crowdsourcing and file sharing are examples of critical and unavoidable tools in an arts manager’s toolbox. Although we can teach the tactics of using these tools, at the heart of collaboration is relationship-building, a skill that takes ongoing commitment and development and that goes beyond textbook tactics. Social media platforms, crowdsourcing campaigns and file sharing resources are merely a reflection of the people behind them, who have to be willing to collaborate in order to garner results.

As an arts management professional working in the field for more than a decade, my positions have included detailed descriptions of the tactical work I am excepted to accomplish but I have found that much of my time and energy is spent building the relationships that help make those tactics possible. As an educator in American University’s arts management graduate program, teaching Marketing for the Arts, I have learned the importance of training my students to develop their own personal brands so that they can pursue successful partnerships which, in turn, will lead to their own professional success.  It means teaching open-mindedness, humility, and the ability to give up control.

Partnerships and collaboration are ultimately about compromise, a life skill that serves us well beyond the classroom.In this session I will share my personal experience with what it takes to make a good partner as well as examples of partnerships that come from my professional experience in the areas of marketing, programming and community engagement