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"You need a program that has visibility and becomes part of the school's conversation about children, teaching and learning."

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BC: Your research suggests that you are on a mission to make the education system a better, more equitable place. Do you see the use of the arts in education as fitting in with this?

Catterall: Yes, I do. I am most interested in at-risk communities and making schools more effective for them.

BC: What about your involvement with the Chicago Arts Partnership in Education, CAPE?

Catterall: For CAPE, I headed a systematic program evaluation in 1999. In each of the past two years, we have pursued research opportunities with this program. An example is studying why some partnerships continue beyond their initial funding.

BC: What are the factors that keep art partnerships going?

Catterall: When it comes down to it, it has an awful lot to do with sustained leadership by somebody, either a parent, a teacher, or a principal. Some principals in Chicago were eager and liked the idea from the start. Some were won over by the way the program had captured their teachers. Ultimately you need to have the principal's support for it to last.

You also need a program that has visibility and becomes part of the school's "conversation" about children, teaching and learning.

It boils down to leadership. But also, of course, sustaining a program depends on what that leadership leads. In this program, many teachers felt they were experiencing real personal change and growth, which they liked. There was enough attention given to the program and elevation in status in the communities that parents began to recognize the schools involved as being different and they began demanding that their schools do similar things.

BC: What are some of the other things you're working on now where arts education is concerned?

Catterall: I'm presently involved in the production of a definitive review of research on the arts and learning for the National Endowment for the Arts and the Arts Education Partnership.

BC: One of the biggest recent developments in the study of the brain has been new imaging techniques. Can you talk some about brain-mapping and its potential role in arts education research?

Catterall: I think this sort of work should come first.

I became aware of things going on this area, in part, because UCLA developed one of the first brain mapping centers. I got to know about that as an outsider; a friend of mine knew the head of the Brain Mapping Institute, John Mazziotta, and he and I got together and had conversations about where things might go in this area.

At about this same time, I started conversing with Edith London-who was new at UCLA-and she and I tracked our interests and talked about ways we might work together to look at learning in the arts, both psychometrically and in terms of changes in brain function. We were interested in finding evidence that the arts really did something.

At the moment, we have a put a set of ideas together that make up a presentation of the kinds of things we would anticipate doing in a study, including explanations of some of the processes involved-fMRI and CAT scanning-and designs for a one-year trial. The strongest effects in terms of the arts and learning have thus far been noted in music and spatial reasoning. So we thought, if we can't find significant changes in neuro-function with kids whose spatial reasoning is growing faster than others, then we're probably not ready to seek other changes in thinking.