Chicago Arts Partnerships in Education engages students, inspires teachers, and demonstrates impact by weaving visual, digital, and performing arts into classrooms across Chicago.

What Sets CAPE Apart

Our unique approach to engaging students, inspiring teachers, and demonstrating impact relies on three strategies: Partnerships, Arts Integration, and Research.

Partnerships

To bring traditional subjects to life through the arts, we pair professional teaching artists with Chicago Public Schools teachers for long-term classroom partnerships and training.

Arts Integration

To spark students’ passion for learning, we weave visual and digital art, music, theater, and dance into traditional subjects like science, math, history, and language arts.

CAPE works with external researchers to determine the impact of our programs on students, teachers, and artists. This helps us refine our own work and that of our teaching teams and contribute new knowledge to the field.

CAPE’s Impact

Research has shown that CAPE’s programs improve students’ critical thinking, creative problem solving, and self confidence, and leads to higher achievement in the classroom and on standardized tests.

Learn More About the Importance of Art in Education

CAPE by the Numbers

CAPE teachers and teaching artists spent 13,436 hours learning, teaching, and growing in 2018-19.

Last school year, CAPE’s programs reached more than 4,258 students in Chicagoland schools.

More than 110 classroom teachers are currently receiving training, support, and materials from CAPE.

60 professional teaching artists currently traverse Chicago to bring creative inspiration to CAPE students and teachers.

Stories and Updates

Voices from School Communities: Adriel

Teacher Maria Nava and artist Marceia Scruggs co-teach in the CAPE after-school program at Telpochcalli Elementary School. They recently contacted CAPE program staff to share with us some writing...

Voices from School Communities: George Washington High School

Voices from School Communities began with a query sent by email on June 8, in reference to the murder of George Floyd and national protests. The email read, in part: “I would like...

CAPE to Receive $67,000 Grant from the National Endowment for the Arts

National Endowment for the Arts Chairman Mary Anne Carter has approved more than $84 million in grants as part of the Arts Endowment’s second major funding announcement for fiscal...