Where the arts become evidence:
NMSA × ASCEND
across 40 New Mexico communities
New Mexico School for the Arts and ASCEND have each been awarded HB2 Out-of-School Time funding. NMSA is the only public school in New Mexico drawing residential students from 40 of the state's most geographically dispersed communities. ASCEND is building out-of-school time programs for students and families statewide, grounded in Durable Life Skills. This page describes a collaboration we would like to explore together: connecting students on campus in Santa Fe with their siblings and families at home — through a shared skill language, witnessed evidence, and a living portfolio that belongs to the learner, not the grant.
"In an ensemble, every player develops individual mastery while contributing to a collective sound no one controls alone. This is not a metaphor for Durable Life Skills. It is Durable Life Skills, performed in real time."
Two funded programs.
One shared question.
NMSA already solves the hardest problem in rural out-of-school time: bringing students from 40 remote communities together in one high-quality learning environment. Both funded programs now face the mirror question — what happens for siblings and families at home while students are in Santa Fe, and what evidence of learning can travel with every learner beyond any single grant? We think the answer is stronger built together.
A residential public arts high school drawing students from across the state — rural, tribal, geographically isolated. Students living more than 65 miles away live on campus during the school year, creating a unique community whose home connections span all 40 communities.
Six specialized departments — Creative Writing & Literature, Dance, Film & Cinematic Storytelling, Music, Theatre, and Visual Arts — provide a ready-made cross-discipline ensemble. NMSA's HB2 OST award brings its own program, staff, and goals to the table.
A New Mexico nonprofit focused on family-centered learning, workforce readiness, and educational technology serving rural and tribal communities statewide. ASCEND's HB2 OST program is organized around three pathways: Artful Intelligence, Music & Math; Family, Friends and Neighbors; and Remedios.
Facilitators trained through the Fifty Fridays Learning by Doing Immersion Course, and the NextREADY GPS evidence system — Durable Life Skills, witnessed iCAN and iSEE statements, and learner-owned StoryMaps — are already in place.
Playing The Changes offers a shared language: improvisation and ensemble as the way Durable Life Skills are practiced, named, and documented. NMSA's disciplines supply the artistry; ASCEND's facilitators and CBO partners can extend it into home communities; NextREADY GPS connects the two through the same skill framework and the same three questions: what did you make, what did it take, and what would you tell your grandmother or abuela about it?
NextREADY GPS creates the conditions for durable skill evidence.
Together, we could connect campus and community.
Playing The Changes
Playing The Changes · Lesson 1 Introduction
In Playing the Changes, we learn how to use improvisation to transform fear of change into freedom to use change for empowerment through joyful perseverance — the power to persist through the ups and downs of life and practice.
Playing the Changes weaves together jazz improvisation, indigenous wisdom and AI as a Remedios — a Spanish word for healing, help, or solutions — to help us navigate three intersecting worlds: the natural world of ancestral wisdom, the modern "Western" world, and the quantum world of digital and AI.
One framework. Two sites.
An online bridge that connects them.
A collaboration between NMSA and ASCEND could let the residential and home community programs share the same assessment infrastructure, the same witnessed-evidence practice, and the same skill language. The bridge we are exploring is not metaphorical — it is a scheduled online session where NMSA students and their at-home siblings work on the same skill sheet at the same time.
The image alongside shows something most people know from geography: a map is made of layers — customers, streets, parcels, elevation, land use, all the way down to the real world. NextREADY GPS works the same way. Each skill domain (Work, Learning, Life) is a layer. Each student's evidence is a pin. Each NMSA discipline — Music, Film, Dance, Theatre, Creative Writing, Visual Arts — contributes a different kind of data to the same living map.
When a family in Zuni or Shiprock opens their child's StoryMap, they don't see a score or a report. They see a map of their student's growth, anchored to the places and people that matter — a living document that travels with the learner beyond NMSA, beyond the grant, beyond any single program.
ArcGIS StoryMap layers · geolocated evidence · each layer a skill, each pin a learner
Durable Life Skills and CTE
McCune Durable Life Skills Project · Tree of Life, Work & Learning · 2 min overview
The video shows the Tree of Life, Work & Learning — three root systems (Life, Work, Learning) feeding into a single trunk, with every career cluster growing in the canopy above. The roots are not abstract. They are the same skills NMSA students develop in every discipline: Creative Thinking in Film and Visual Arts, Teamwork in Music ensemble and Theatre, Communication in Creative Writing and Dance, Critical & Analytical Thinking across all six departments.
The career icons floating in the canopy — arts, education, health, government, STEM, agriculture, business, law, transportation — are not distant aspirations. They are the destinations the roots support. When an NMSA student completes an FFN interview and the interviewee's job title links to a SOC code in the SkillsBank, the tree becomes their tree: their roots, their canopy, their career map.
Why Playing The Changes
generates uniquely strong evidence
Most OST programs add an assessment layer on top of an existing activity. Playing The Changes is different: the ensemble structure is the Durable Life Skills development. Every rehearsal session is a documented skill event. The evidence is not retrospective — it is generated in real time. That is what makes it a natural meeting point for two funded programs with different sites and the same commitment to learners.
A Music student, a Dance student, a Film student, and a Creative Writing student can all work the same Durable Life Skills assessment. What looks completely different on the surface — a jazz improvisation, a contemporary dance phrase, a documentary shot list, a poem — is built on the same underlying Durable Life Skills structure. The NextREADY GPS skill map makes this visible across all six NMSA departments and across the bridge to home community siblings.
Maintaining connection to place is the heart of New Mexico. Students at NMSA are already making art about who they are and what it means to leave home for training. The StoryMap capstone is the public evidence that the distance was generative, not just painful.
Online bridge sessions could be structured so residential students and their home siblings work on the same skill sheet at the same time. An iCAN statement about coordinating complex responsibilities under time pressure is valid whether it came from a string quartet rehearsal or from managing a household while a parent works two jobs. The system recognizes both.
When the NMSA student publishes their capstone StoryMap, it is geographically anchored to both Santa Fe and their home community. Families can see themselves in the map. The story is not "I left and became someone different" — it is "I carried where I came from with me, and here is the evidence."
One test every family
already knows how to give.
ASCEND's Fifty Fridays program ends every activity the way a kitchen-table conversation always has — with three questions. They are not a bubble sheet; they are a conversation a young person can have with the people whose opinion matters most to them. They could serve as the shared assessment for any NMSA × ASCEND work.
What did you make? The product — a performance, a film, a poem, a StoryMap, a build. Real, not simulated. NMSA's six departments already make real work every week.
What did it take? The process — the skills, the setbacks, the iteration. This is where Durable Life Skills live, in every rehearsal, critique, and revision.
What would you tell your grandmother or abuela about it? The meaning — why it matters, to them and to their community. If it can't survive that translation, it hasn't happened yet.
Witnessed evidence. A student's growth is written as a claim — "I can [verb] ___" (an iCAN statement). A peer, a coach, or an Elder responds — "I see ___" (an iSEE statement). That response turns a claim into evidence. Nothing publishes to the Community Digital Library until a real person has witnessed it, starting with at least one Elder. For NMSA, that could mean families and community members at home witnessing work made on campus in Santa Fe.
Three levels, one fire triangle. Growth moves from what things are, to how they relate, to how they combine. Each level is a foundation the next cannot exist without — the way fire needs fuel, heat, and oxygen together.
Rooted in the 4Rs. Reciprocity, Relationships, Responsibility, and Redistribution — drawn from Dr. Gregory Cajete's Indigenous Knowledge Roadmap and operationalized through Keeping Track (Notah Begay III Foundation, 2021) — shape how results are shared back with the communities that generated them.
Exploring collaboration
No commitments yet — just a sensible sequence for finding out whether, and how, our two funded programs fit together. Each step is shaped by what NMSA wants and needs.
NMSA and ASCEND leaders compare notes on their funded OST programs: goals, staffing, schedules, and the communities each is reaching.
Which of the 40 communities, CBOs, siblings, and families touch both programs? Where would shared effort help, and where should each program stay independent?
Options include a common Durable Life Skills language, shared SkillsBank evidence and StoryMaps, the online bridge sessions, joint professional learning, and coordinated family events.
Start small: one cross-discipline Playing The Changes project linking NMSA students with siblings or a home-community partner, run as a single Fifty Fridays-style quarterly cycle — gather, cultivate, harvest and celebrate with families, then share results back to the community. Learn from it together.
Five connections,
one evidence pathway each
The table below follows the ecosystem diagram above. Unlike a generic assessment add-on, Playing The Changes generates the evidence as part of normal program delivery — the documentation is not additional work, it is the work.
| Connection type | What it could look like | NextREADY GPS evidence pathway | What both programs gain |
|---|---|---|---|
| Campus → student (residential OST) |
Cross-discipline Playing The Changes sessions as structured DOK progression. A Music student, a Theatre student, and a Visual Arts student collaborate on a shared project. Each session: listen → contribute → reflect. DOK level advances from describing one's role (DOK 1) to designing a cross-discipline capstone that addresses a home community need (DOK 4). | GPS_Assessment table: timestamped penny placement per session. iCAN statement version chain in SKB_iCAN_Statement. MasteryIndex delta between entry and exit provides a pre/post pair. StoryMap layer created at capstone. | NMSA's ensemble work becomes documented skill evidence; ASCEND's framework is tested in a rich arts setting. |
| Student ↔ sibling (online bridge) |
Scheduled weekly session: NMSA student and at-home sibling open the same Durable Life Skills sheet simultaneously. Each documents their current position and aspiration. A facilitator, peer, or Elder witness helps frame the shared reflection across the distance. Evidence: sibling relationship as mutual skill development, not just family support. | Two GPS_Assessment records — one per learner — linked by SessionID and TeamID. SKB_Evidence records from each sibling's reflection. Shared StoryMap layer shows both geolocations. Bilateral MasteryIndex records enable sibling cohort analysis. | Siblings and families become active participants; travel is no longer a barrier for rural and tribal households. |
| Student → home community (StoryMap capstone) |
NMSA student publishes an ArcGIS StoryMap anchored to both the Santa Fe campus and the home community. Community members, families, and potential employers can see the student's skill growth, the ensemble's collective work, and the connections between their NMSA discipline and the needs and strengths of home. The home community is visible in the student's evidence — not erased by the residential model. | StoryMap layer in ArcGIS with geolocated GPS_Assessment records from both sites. SKB_CareerConnection records from FFN interviews link community voices (informal job titles) to SOC codes. The StoryMap serves as auditor-visible evidence and an employer-credible credential artifact. | Families see growth they can recognize; both programs have a public, shareable story of impact. |
| Home CBO → family (community engagement) |
Home-community partners host family engagement events: student showcases, cultural celebrations, YPAR presentations. Families participate in Family, Friends & Neighbors (FFN) career interviews — their informal job titles are preserved in the SkillsBank alongside official SOC data. Community voices are not lost in the database. | POL_Event records for each family engagement touch. SKB_CareerConnection records preserve interviewee relationship and informal language alongside SOC code. Family participation documented as MSG-supporting evidence per WIOA TEGL 10-16. Timestamped, geolocated, auditor-visible. | Deeper community roots and shared CBO relationships, without duplicating each other's outreach. |
| Learner → SkillsBank (portable evidence) |
Every tap, penny placement, iCAN statement revision, and FFN interview accumulates in the learner's SkillsBank — a portable, learner-owned evidence portfolio that travels beyond NMSA, beyond the grant cycle, and beyond any single workforce program. The evidence survives. The skills don't expire. | SKB_Evidence, SKB_iCAN_Statement, and SKB_CareerConnection tables provide the complete learner record. Version-chained iCAN statements show the cognitive growth arc from DOK 1 to DOK 4. WIOA export: one-click PDF for case file. Shareable summary link for employers or college advisors — controlled by the learner. | Learning evidence that outlasts either grant and belongs to the learner. |
Two awards. One conversation
worth having.
If you are part of the NMSA community, an ASCEND facilitator, or a partner organization in one of the 40 communities, we would love to hear what you think could work — and what shouldn't. Every part of this page is a starting point, not a plan.
ferdi@ascend-advance.org
Introduction welcome