Art Matters
Abhishek Panchal works to elevate the arts in India’s school curricula
Photo of Panchal by Nirav Karelia
Art Matters
Abhishek Panchal works to elevate the arts in India’s school curricula
From Boston to Bangalore, school art teachers share many of the same frustrations: class times are too short, budgets are too low, their work is seen as extracurricular rather than core. What these art educators need, says Abhishek Panchal, are school leaders who understand their challenges—and value the arts enough to address them.
Panchal (’21) is on his way to becoming such a leader.
He joined the Gateway School of Mumbai as a visual arts teacher in 2016. Three years later, after enrolling in CFA’s Online Master of Arts in Art Education Program, he was promoted to arts program coordinator, overseeing Gateway’s programs in visual art, music, and drama. Earlier this year, Panchal became Gateway’s vice principal.
“I see myself leading a school in the near future,” he says. “I think that’s next in my trajectory.”
Founded in 2012, Gateway is a nonprofit school for children with disabilities. It offers lower, middle, and high school programs and serves about 120 students with a range of disabilities, from attention deficit disorder and dyslexia to cerebral palsy and autism. When Panchal became Gateway’s arts program coordinator, he aimed to elevate the arts at the school.
“One of my goals was to bring the arts from extracurricular to cocurricular,” he says. “Now, if you see the vocabulary we use in our communication—maybe on the website, maybe while talking to our external stakeholders—the arts and physical education are ‘cocurricular.’ They support the main curriculum.”
As vice principal, Panchal has a higher platform from which to advocate for the arts at Gateway.
“If you come in with research, if you come in with the right amount of data,” he says, “you’re able to convince stakeholders—may it be donors, may it be parents—of the reasons why a child should participate in an art education program.”
Panchal has power beyond the walls of his own school. Gateway is an education leader in India and considers itself a “lab school”—it develops best practices and then shares them with other educators through publishing and professional development programs. When he speaks at conferences and forums, Panchal can promote Gateway’s view that art is critical to the holistic development of a child.
One of my goals was to bring the arts from extracurricular to cocurricular.
Panchal gave up some teaching responsibilities when he became vice principal, but he continues to teach art and design to Gateway’s high schoolers. He also maintains a personal artistic practice in a small home studio.
“I hold a very strong opinion that art teachers should continue making their own art,” he says. “Whenever I’m introducing my students to a new form or new media, I often experiment with that in my own practice. It helps me understand the potential breakdowns my students might have in access, and it helps me to think about scaffolds or modifications that they might require to access that particular media.”
Panchal wrote his CFA master’s thesis on integrating Indigenous Indian art forms into middle school curricula. He and his students have explored art traditions such as Warli painting, an ancient form of mural painting using white pigment made from rice flour and basic geometric shapes to symbolize elements of nature.
Panchal hopes to earn a doctoral degree one day and pursue a role in education policy and administration. Would that mean leaving his art behind?
“There’s a common misconception that being an artist is about what you do in the studio,” says Panchal. But artists aren’t defined by what they create, he says, so much as by how they see the world.
“I always tell my students, you’re not artists because you come here and sit in the art studio and make art. You’re artists because you’re thinking, you’re observing, you’re making connections.”