ESPrit de Corps

This past week Phil and I attended an Americans for the Arts webinar called The Qualities of Quality:  Excellence in Arts Education and How to Achieve it, presented by Steve Seidel.  (You can download the Executive Summary here.)  An interesting part of the research findings that Seidel described was that among the people surveyed, quality was very often defined by personal experiences.

Following the webinar, Phil asked me to define quality for myself and I’ve shared my answer below.

How do YOU define quality?
Your answer should apply to all of the following: an artistic experience, an educational experience, a work environment,  a holiday party during a season for which you feel some degree of ambivalence [I don’t know what Phil is referring to here].

I think quality is essentially dependent on personal satisfaction or the ability to guide others to find satisfaction.  For me, a process or experience to be of the highest quality has to include the following characteristics:

-  Relates to the world outside of where the experience is occurring (bigger picture)
-  Allows for self-directed thinking, room for interpretation
-  Utilizes a personal body of knowledge/personal expertise/honors previous experiences
-  Privileges process over outcome
-  Process is evident in the outcome
-  Process welcomes multiple outcomes
-  The outcome shows growth/learning/care but is not stuffy/elitist/exclusionary
-  Promotes interaction and perhaps a sense of community
-  Is authentic in terms of language, materials, hors d’oeuvres
-  Is engaging/interesting/exciting to people with lots of experience in a particular area and also to people who have no previous knowledge of a particular area
-  You can dance to it

So now it’s your turn!  How do you define quality for yourself and/or in your work?