A new vision for learning has animated a new vision for NOCCA’s learning environment and facilities.

The current construction of the classroom addition for Media Arts, Musical Theatre, and Theatre Design – scheduled to open  this October – completes the build-out of NOCCA’s present campus.  With the charge to help NOCCA become one of the top five high school arts conservatories in the world, Eskew+Dumez+Ripple began a Campus Master Plan in April with planning horizons for both the near and long term.

Expansion at NOCCA flows from our passion for highly engaged learning and an economic and culturally thriving society. NOCCA’s existing footprint totals 131,000 square feet of space.  The draft master plan calls for an eventual expansion to over 500,000 square feet to accommodate:

• NOCCA Conservatory – performance spaces, professional training studios and classrooms for current arts disciplines; kitchens and classrooms for Culinary Arts; studios for new arts disciplines yet unknown; and academic labs;
• NOCCA Forum – student dining, health facilities, retail cafe and gallery;
• Residential Hall – serving statewide, national and international students;
• Visiting Artists Quarters – for visiting arts and academic master artists;
• Green space and Culinary Arts gardens;
• Plessy Memorial Park;
• and on-site parking.

Through hours of thought and execution in paint, ink and thread, the young artists on the cover have displayed their exuberance and capability resulting from NOCCA’s Creative DNA.  It is now part of their DNA and how they will approach goals throughout their lives.  Expanding such learning and NOCCA’s environment will enrich students’ life work, and, we believe,  our city and state.

Both discovery phases have led us to the development of the Academic Studio:  a learning environment that will capitalize on NOCCA’s distinctive initiation model of education and strengthen all of student learning by connecting science, math and the humanities to intensive arts-training.

At NOCCA, students are required not only to study the arts, but also to be professional artists.   The same will hold true within the Academic Studio where students will approach science as if they were young scientists.  Admission will continue to be by arts audition, but those students choosing to participate in the full day program will be mentored by physicists and mathematicians just as they are mentored by recording engineers and jazz musicians.  Their learning will be cross-disciplinary (across arts and academics as well as within).  It will be project-based and multi-modal to accommodate different learning styles.  It will meet students where they are in terms of their prior academic knowledge and preparation, and map academic sequencing with skills required for artistic training. (For instance, Level I Media Arts students must master properties of light and sound waves currently not taught until the 12th grade per Louisiana grade level standards.)  And it will lead to TOPS eligibility as a minimum standard.

This spring, we formed an Advisory Council of international leaders in science, math, design and education.  The council includes a member of NASA’s Mars Exploration Rover mission, the former director of Apple’s multi-media lab, and the director of Educational Innovation and Technology at MIT.

They have posited critical questions:  What happens when science and math are taught as an art, as a constant process of curiosity and discovery? What happens when students have a visual arts and a science mentor? What happens when students bring the passion they have for one subject – their art – to their comprehension of how to approach other subjects?  And most importantly, what happens at the edges when math and science cross paths with arts and passion?  The possible answers have excited everyone on NOCCA’s campus.

Given all that we have learned during the exploratory process, NOCCA has determined to implement core academic courses via an iterative and incremental process.  What we learn in one phase will be passed on to the next phases and courses. The first course, science, is being developed in collaboration with   the Exploratorium, San Francisco’s renowned museum of science, art and discovery.  Human Perception has been chosen as the first module to be piloted as it provides students a way into science that is strongly connected to their inquiry in the arts.

We also look to work with best-in-class partner institutions and share learning with schools, universities and innovative institutions across the region and country. Central to this will be the development of the Open Classroom in which learning will be globally connected, technologically enabled and highly differentiated to meet the needs of NOCCA’s diverse range of learners.

Since 1973, NOCCA has provided the highest quality professional training to young artists.  Yet the world in which today’s young people will be living and working is changing dramatically, making our job of preparing them more complex.  Following Katrina we sought a definitive answer to the question “What do we need to do now to prepare our students to thrive in the 21st century?”

We began by conducting an Internal Discovery Phase to wholly understand, utilize and protect the principles and dynamics that operate within NOCCA.  With the assistance of strategic planning firm Collective Invention, education experts illuminated the elements of learning consistent across all six arts disciplines – NOCCA’s Creative DNA.  They are:

• Technical grounding
• Respect for the artist, work and material
• Critique
• Development of professional attitudes
• Development of individual artistic voice
• Life skills and development of self
• Collaboration and ensemble work
• Development of attention/awareness

These dynamics are highly interconnected at NOCCA.  For instance, faculty stress that technical skills are essential – but not sufficient – they must be balanced with life skills and the development of a student’s individual artistic voice.  Some disciplines require more time spent on technical grounding before cultivating individual aesthetics, but the pathway is the same.

A seriousness of attitude and purpose also permeates NOCCA’s environment, stemming in large degree to a profound sense of respect for the arts.  This includes a respect for all components of the arts:  the canon, the instrument, the voice, the body, materials, craft, faculty/mentors, peers and visiting master artists.

Yet, the most essential and defining practice at NOCCA is critique.  Faculty and peers regularly critique student work to refine craft, teach constructive communication, strengthen meta-cognition and prepare students for the professional world.  Critique directs attention more deeply into technical grounding and individual aesthetic.

As a result of NOCCA’s Creative DNA, the NOCCA experience is less about solely imparting a specific body of rote information and more about imparting an interconnected set of skills, knowledge, attitudes, capacity and expanded perception.  Faculty at NOCCA are introducing students to a particular discipline with the serious assumption that students will participate in that discipline in the future.   NOCCA does not follow a traditional education model as such, but rather an initiation model.  An initiation model is a powerful one – it forms the foundation for the seriousness and respect present in faculty/student and peer relationships, which in turn provides a sense of safety for all, extending the degree to which students can be pushed to both understand and produce their best work.

Seeking best practices not only internally but externally, we visited 35 centers of learning and innovation across the country.  These included MIT, Stanford University, San Francisco’s Exploratorium, San Diego’s High Tech High, Art Center College of Design, The Juilliard School, MoMA, Google and YouTube.