A Vision of Civically Engaged Art Education: Teens as Arts-Based Researchers

Abstract

Civic engagement is not just concerned with identifying societal and political structures. It is also concerned with how young people understand themselves as civic agents capable of starting and sustaining change. Seeing students as change makers is a civically engaged goal supported by literature surrounding the aims of art education in K–12 schools. Working in collaboration with local teens, we engaged in a weeklong art camp that facilitated teens’ inquiry into the legacy of foot soldiers in the civil rights movement in Tallahassee, Florida. Teens explored the people, places, and events that mobilized the community as they made connections with current events and created a collective portrait of change makers. In this article we explore the question: How might positioning teens as arts-based researchers create an opening for young people to be civically minded critical thinkers and makers?

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The authors thank the teens that volunteered their time and energy to spend a week learning about the civil rights movement in Tallahassee, Florida.

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

FUNDING

This project was funded through Florida State University’s Arts and Humanities Program Enhancement Grant.

Notes

¹ The Tallahassee Foot Soldiers is a group of activists recognized for supporting the local civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s.

² These three students were chosen because of their in-depth engagement in the process of research documentation. As such, these students exemplified the role of arts-based researchers and gave us a wealth of physical data to engage with after the conclusion of the weeklong intensive.

³ In the discussion, the civic skills the data were coded with are identified through the use of italicized text.

⁴ All student names are pseudonyms.

⁵ To listen to Zoe’s song, follow this link: https://bit.ly/2YW0knl.