Arts and Activism for All: Across the Curriculum and Beyond School Walls

There is a rich set of theories on critical education regarding the essential place of the arts. From John Dewey’s experiential pragmatism to Paulo Freire’s problem posing to Maxine Greene’s spheres of freedom and beyond, the arts breathe life into education to make it more humanizing and liberating. Critical education can break the boundaries between academic disciplines and create spaces where the arts can amplify and aestheticize messages of struggle and hope. While standing on the shoulders of theorists like those just mentioned, contemporary educators are moving into new territories with social justice and the arts across the curriculum. This trend needs more work with new connections between theory, research, and practice.

Dewey (1934) argued that one cannot separate any work of art from the experience that enabled it. He posited that theory must answer these two questions:

He explained that answering these questions requires a point of view that ordinary experiences not regarded as aesthetic can become so. As such, the creator of original art is a pioneer who sees beauty and awe in what others see as commonplace. The artist is a visionary who can move others toward a new perspective, making art powerfully transformative.

As Dewey (1934) wrote with this focus on art, the terrorism of lynching African Americans had been a reality for decades. He had been an ally to African Americans, having participated in the 1909 founding of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP; Rockefeller, 1991). Local law enforcement looked away from lynching incidents and sometimes even participated, and those who protested lynching also could become murder victims; therefore, it became the work of extraordinarily courageous artists to express rage against the horrific acts (Lampert, 2013). W. E. B. DuBois, founding editor of the NAACP’s periodical The Crisis, juxtaposed his photos of accomplished African Americans next to dreadful images of African Americans being lynched. His photos and writings moved Congress in 1919 and 1921 to debate the Dyer Bill, which would have allowed federal prosecutors to investigate any lynching ignored by local and state governments, but a filibuster by Southern senators defeated the bill. The Crisis continued to publish photos, political cartoons, and writings that depicted the horrors of lynching and mass murders of African Americans, and it continues today as the magazine of the NAACP.

Dewey’s contributions to democratic and experiential education are immense, and Paulo Freire brought a deeper focus on how educators can work in solidarity with people in oppressive situations to resist and combat oppression. Freire’s seminal work, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, published in his native Brazil in 1968 and first translated to English in 1970, is a cornerstone to the contemporary movement of critical pedagogy. Freire (2018) posited that an oppressive system of banking education, whereby a teacher deposits knowledge into passive students, can be replaced by a liberating system of problem posing, whereby educators join with students in developing critical consciousness through work toward creating a more just reality. He upheld the work of critical dialog in which survivors of oppression raise their own generative themes and become cocreators of knowledge along with educators who identify themselves as colearners.

Although Freire did not often address the arts directly in his writings, he inspired fellow Brazilian Augosto Boal (1979/1985) to create a theory and practice of “theatre of the oppressed” (TO). Boal first brought his theory of participatory drama to practice in Peru in 1973, when a leftist government embarked on a national literacy campaign guided by Freire’s former literacy work in Brazil. Boal was able to lend cameras to Peruvian adults who were studying to become literate. These learners took photos of images that had certain meanings to them. This became a preliminary step toward learning how to use the body and language toward creating a work of dramatic art, which enhanced the lessons of gaining literacy.

Boal continued his work around the world until his death in 2009, and countless schools and organizations have continued to find value in TO exercises. One example is in Bhukhanwala’s (2014) study of an after-school theater program in a middle school in the Southeastern United States. The students, with guidance from a graduate-student facilitator, employed TO to confront bullying. One of the TO activities that the group utilized was “forum theatre” (Boal, 2002). The students enacted a play of their creation to a group of sixth graders, who became, in Boal’s term, “spect-actors” with the ability to participate in problem solving during the performers’ repeat enactment. Boal’s “joker” was the student who worked as facilitator and narrator during the event. Bhukhanwala found that “students in this study were actively engaged in making sense of their experiences with bullying, understanding the roots of conflicts with peers by engaging in perspective-taking, becoming sensitized to feelings, and generating possibilities for addressing conflict situations” (p. 10). This was an authentic learning experience made more relevant and powerful with students participating together in creative expression.

The arts in so many ways open what Maxine Greene (1988) called “spheres of freedom” to build genuine community. Greene (2000) later expanded on this concept while pointing to the importance of identifying purpose and opening imagination. The traditional purpose of schooling for assimilation, as she stated, must give way to education for understanding and affirming diverse cultures. Greene explained that part of this shift involves exploring a variety of creative expressions from diverse sources including popular and folkloric music, street theater, graffiti, and murals. She added that when any of these has elements of racism, sexism, violence, or hatred, the solution is critical reflection rather than censorship. Regarding imagination, Greene’s own words are worth quoting at length:

This is the education for hope and joy that all students need and deserve. Twenty years have passed since Greene wrote these words, and they still ring of an urgent need to construct an education for diversity, equity, and inclusion with the arts as an essential component.

The arts have much to offer the learning process in any of the academic disciplines, but they can have their greatest impact as part of a transdisciplinary curriculum. Klein (2000) identified a curriculum as transdisciplinary when the boundaries between disciplines dissolve and give way to a whole new area of study. Examples of transdisciplinary themes could be ethnic studies, women’s studies, sustainability, or, especially in this time of the COVID-19 crisis, global public health. These are themes that call on deep searches for truth in efforts to face problems, explore solutions, and create new knowledge. Marshall (2014) posited that the arts enhance such study by infusing aesthetic elements and more into the multilayered opportunities for inquiry and metacognition. She described an approach of arts research integration that upholds works of art for their capacity to bring imagination into inquiry, to generate creative thought and critical discussion, and to be unique sources of knowledge beyond their aesthetic value. Marshall further explained that arts research integration can place the arts at the center of a transdisciplinary study rather than on the periphery. Whether the arts take center stage or a supporting role, they have an important place in shaping transdisciplinary inquiry.

Integrating the arts into a transdisciplinary study can create a truly meaningful and unforgettable learning experience. Duggan (2018) supported this idea and went further to advocate for engaging students in community activism. He named four organizations in Chicago that work with schools to make this happen. Students who learn from inquiry and action in these programs have completed performances and presentations in public venues, including social media. One example highlighted by Duggan was a group of high school students who investigated how a nearby paint manufacturer had brought contamination to the area surrounding their school building. They found that the corporation had violated state and national standards for acceptable levels of pollution. They reported their findings to a local environmental justice organization and presented their work at an annual forum held at the school. They also extended their work to websites, reporting on disparities between their community and surrounding areas that are affluent. This project involved science, written composition, and civics, and, although Duggan did not report on involvement with the arts in this example, it certainly created a learning environment that could generate creative expressions involving righteous anger and collective hope. The students who participated learned a deep lesson on democracy and change agency, one that helps prepare them for life-long work of active citizenship. Any high school that upholds democracy in its mission statement would do well to emulate this kind of active learning.

Activism and the arts can work together across the curriculum and between schools and surrounding communities. I will start with a discussion of teaching 20th century movements with music before addressing the teaching of contemporary movements with the arts. Seeing past and present manifestations of arts in activism is important toward imagining what can work in the future.

One cannot fully understand and appreciate the civil rights and labor movements of the 20th century in the United States without considering how music played a role in each. Teaching these movements in the isolation of only a social studies course is limiting. Teaching them across multiple disciplines—especially including music—can open students’ minds and hearts to the complexity and power of people creating knowledge and art together toward transforming themselves and their society. While addressing each of these movements, I will focus on music because it is the medium that I know the best from experience. I also will raise ideas about the school and its surrounding community commemorating each movement collaboratively toward connecting past and present struggles in cross-generational unity.

Struggles for racial justice in the United States have origins in the colonial era in resistance to white supremacy as manifested in genocides against Native Americans and enslaved Africans. Given limited space for this article, I will focus on African Americans in the civil rights movement from 1954 to 1965, the classic years of the movement. The struggles of those years brought hard-fought gains, and the current uprising in the Black Lives Matter movement is the new giant step in the long fight to end anti-Black racism. The arts, especially the music of “freedom songs,” were ubiquitous in the civil rights movement, and they have much to teach all educators and students today.

The songs that African American slaves sang to express their struggles and their hopes for freedom became known as spirituals, and the songs continued to be an important part of Black culture after the abolition of slavery. They became the cornerstone for evolving genres of gospel, blues, and jazz. Even as these newer musical forms were growing, the spirituals—old and some new—made a strong return as the “freedom songs” in the earlier years of the civil rights movement from the professional group known as the Freedom Singers, affiliated with the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, to the many protesters at marches and rallies (Darden, 2014; Johnson Reagon, 2001). Singing accompanied the 1954 breakthrough for school segregation and the 1955 funeral following the horrid murder of Emmett Till. The nightly organizational gatherings for the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955 to 1956, held in Black church buildings, involved sometimes hours of everyone singing and praying together before the start of the meeting (Public Broadcast Service, 1994). After the boycott of nearly 13 months succeeded in desegregating the city buses, the movement to end Jim Crow continued throughout the South. Singing songs such as “Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Around” was one of the protesters’ nonviolent responses of resistance against the often-violent acts of repression from police and vigilantes (Miller, 2018). The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. had emerged as the lead spokesperson, but women like Fanny Lou Hamer, Septima Clark, and Ruby Doris Smith Robinson were among the organizing leaders (Collier-Thomas & Franklin, 2001). Women also led song. Bernice Johnson of the Freedom Singers emerged out of Albany, Georgia as an important song-leader to the movement (Mingo, 2019). Also, an iconic moment of the 1963 March on Washington was when the gospel star Mahalia Jackson sang “How I Got Over” and “I’ve Been ‘Buked and I’ve Been Scorned.”

Written words cannot do justice to the power and beauty of the protesters singing the freedom songs. Documentary films have captured large and small groups of singing protesters in the civil rights movement. “Eyes on the Prize” (Public Broadcast Service, 1994) and “King: A Filmed Record: Montgomery to Memphis” (Landau, 1970) have many stirring scenes of singing during marches, sit-in protests, and other demonstrations. Many of the songs recorded in the South during the early 1960s are available on a CD titled “Sing for Freedom: The Story of the Civil Rights Movement through its Songs” (Smithsonian/Folkways Records, 1992). Viewing and hearing the sights and sounds of the singing are essential for any comprehensive study of the movement, and these sources belong in all school libraries.

Singing in the civil rights movement often happened spontaneously, but there was also plenty of intentional organizing behind the push to bring songs to protesters’ lips. The Highlander Folk School in Monteagle, Tennessee was one of the main headquarters of organizing in the South, and Guy Carawan, a White folk musician, began volunteering there in 1959 as a music organizer (Glen, 1988). Candie Anderson, a White student at Fisk University, married Carawan in 1960 and joined in his work. Union activists had sung the African American traditional song “We Will Overcome” before 1947, when Pete Seeger learned it from Zilphia Horton, Highlander’s music director at that time, and then added verses and changed it to “We Shall Overcome.” Carawan worked on a new arrangement and introduced it to organizers across the South. It quickly became the anthem of the civil rights movement in the early 1960s.

At the same time, jails were becoming centers of organized singing for the movement. Colley (2013) reported on how the jails of Albany, Georgia filled up with Black protesters who began singing freedom songs to lift their spirits while incarcerated. The protesters continued singing together after they were released from jail, adding new verses and songs about the jail experience. Albany was not the only place where this happened; John Lewis recalled singing with others in 1960 in the jail of Nashville after being arrested for taking part in a sit-in. On May 12, 1963, children and youth left school to march in Birmingham. Nearly a thousand faced arrest and jail, but the youth of all ages continued singing to maintain courage (Landau, 1970; Loder-Jackson, 2015). When the jails were filled beyond capacity, demonstrators of all ages then were targets of police dogs and highpressure fire hoses. This became a turning point of the movement when photographs and video clips of the police brutality were available to the world. Then, just 18 days after the March on Washington, came the terror of the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham on September 15 that killed four girls. Film footage of a street scene after one of the funeral shows a crowd singing “We Shall Overcome” (Public Broadcast Service, 1994).

De jure racial segregation came to an end with the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, but de facto segregation and systemic White-supremacist racism continue decades later. When teaching the civil rights movement, educators can promote arts and activism across the curriculum by involving social studies, English, art, and music departments together. Students can sing some of the freedom songs that African American youth of 1963 in Birmingham sang when marching and when facing jail. They can also perform contemporary and original works of hip-hop, spoken word, poetry, and song that are relevant to the BLM movement today. The study of the two social movements of different times could involve the school and its surrounding community in a cross-generational learning opportunity. Elements of this type of project are in the Freedom School of South Los Angeles, where students of color are a majority. Students there have learned from the civil rights movement while creating works of poetry and song as expressions of their experiences in the era of BLM (Shimshon-Santo et al., 2018). Examples like this offer bridges to connect historic and current struggles with inspiration and imagination bolstered by the arts, and they can work for other social movements as well.

Much like the civil rights movement, the labor movement in the United States has a strong history of involving music. In this section I will focus on the importance of singing among members of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) from 1905 to the early 1920s. There were other eras, though, of plentiful singing in the movement. The sit-down strikes during the Great Depression, especially by United Auto Workers in Flint, Michigan in 1936 to 1937, involved long hours of occupying a work site without working, and singing labor songs became a way to break the monotony. Also, in the years before and after World War II, labor songs found their way into recordings by renowned artists such as the Almanac Singers, the Weavers, and Paul Robeson. Then, when McCarthyism took hold in the early 1950s, artists who sympathized with workers’ struggles became blacklisted while labeled as communist. The labor movement in the United States has suffered additional setbacks since then, but music and the arts have kept a place in it.

The IWW, founded in Chicago in 1905, was a sharp contrast to the American Federation of Labor. The American Federation of Labor was founded in 1886, when multiple craft unions left the Knights of Labor, the first national union of the United States, which was founded in 1878 (Hild, 2007). The IWW, unlike the American Federation of Labor, welcomed in its “one big union” all workers of all skill levels, including so-called “unskilled” workers, women, people of color, the unemployed, socialists, and anarchists. The Red Scare of the late 1910s to early 1920s was successful in almost completely dismantling the organization, but it continued in much smaller numbers and continues to exist in multiple nations today.

The IWW members, known as “Wobblies,” created various songbooks with the title “Little Red Songbook” in the early 20th century (Eyerman & Jamison, 1998). Singing was a part of nearly every Wobbly organizing meeting, however small or large. Many of their songs consisted of new words placed in old, familiar tunes. Ralph Chaplain’s “Solidarity Forever,” penned in 1915 and sung to the tune of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” is an enduring classic labor song. The most famous among Wobbly songwriters, though, was Joe Hill, a Swedish immigrant who composed labor standards like “Preacher and the Slave,” “Casey Jones,” and “There Is Power in a Union.” Hill was found guilty of murder on a case with dubious circumstantial evidence, and the State of Utah executed him in 1915 after a worldwide protest demanded his release (Kornbluh et al., 2011). Many Wobbly songs live on in collections of labor songs, including “The Big Red Songbook” (Green et al., 2007), which contains lyrics to more than 250 IWW songs. A few albums exist that feature Wobbly songs, and many YouTube videos from various artists—professional and amateur—have kept some of the songs alive.

Any study of labor history in the United States is incomplete without including the IWW, and every study of the IWW must include the music that inspired members in class struggle as they sang together. An interdisciplinary team of social studies, English, and music teachers could work together in teaching this essential part of workers’ history. Six cities of the United States—New York City, Washington DC, Baltimore, Minneapolis/St. Paul, San Francisco, and Seattle—have a labor chorus, each with culturally diverse, intergenerational members from multiple unions. Each of these groups seeks opportunities to share their singing with people of all ages, including school youth (Abendroth, 2020). The New York City Labor Chorus was the first of these, formed in 1991 when Pete Seeger recommended to the three founding mothers the Jamaican-immigrant musician, Geoffrey Fairweather, who became the group’s first director/conductor. Teachers in the cities where these choruses exist can invite the group to perform in the school, and elsewhere educators can find videos of the choruses in YouTube. The lesson is that singing in the labor movement is not only limited to the past, and the larger lesson is that the arts can help to fuel a social movement in the present and future as they have in the past.

As of this writing, the new normal under the COVID-19 crisis in the United States is in its sixth month. The nation’s death rates from the virus by race or ethnicity per 100,000 people are for African American or Black at 84, American Indian or Alaskan Native at 52, Hispanic or Latino at 50, Asian at 35, and White at 34 (The COVID Tracking Project, 2020). While more than 40 million in the United States have become unemployed during the pandemic, billionaires’ net wealth by early August has increased by $637 billion (Woods, 2020). These numbers are sobering, but there are other numbers that reveal hope. Pew Research Center reported in mid-June that 67% of United States adults either “strongly supported” or “somewhat supported” the BLM movement; among white peopled polled, the figure was 60% (Parker et al., 2020). A Reuters/lpsos poll in January of 2020 found that 64% agreed strongly or somewhat that “the very rich should contribute an extra share of their total wealth each year to support public programs” (Schneider & Kahn, 2020, para. 3). As these figures illustrate, understanding issues requires at least a basic grasp of numeracy; therefore, it is important to include math in efforts to integrate the curriculum around real-life current issues. Science will have a place in many issues as well, especially regarding sustainability and the climate crisis. Of course, social studies and English language arts share a central role in studies of social issues. The arts, though, as I have argued above, are also essential to a fully integrated curriculum with a goal of preparing students for active citizenship and change agency. There are some important examples in recent research that affirm this special role of the arts.

As youth increasingly become active in contemporary social movements such as BLM, Me Too, Fight for Fifteen, the Sunshine Movement, and more, there is a need to produce research on how or whether they have learned to be effective as concerned activists. How are they learning in school to take their sets of knowledge and skills from physical sciences, social sciences, and the arts toward challenging questionable social policies and practices? I will comment on two studies.

The Puerto Rican community has a large presence in many locations across the continental United States. Tucker-Raymond et al. (2011) conducted a case study in a Midwestern city on how students utilized art to grow in cultural identity. The students, most of whom were Puerto Rican and most from low-income families, lived in a neighborhood where the working-class residents were experiencing economic hardships from neoliberal policies enabling gentrification. The study followed seventh graders in a K-8 school and students in an alternative high school. Teachers of art, English, and social studies collaborated in teaching the history and culture of Puerto Ricans in Puerto Rico and across the continental diaspora. Themes of struggles for social justice by ordinary people ran across the studies in what the authors called a “history in person.” Students produced murals and poems to express themselves in their learning. Upon completing the study, the seventh graders presented their works to the community in a “culture show.” Murals created by students from both schools appeared in public spaces in the neighborhood. The authors developed concepts of cultural persistence, political resistance, and hope in their findings. They concluded that the students had experienced learning in Freire’s problem-posing process by naming problems as they knew them and by creating new knowledge from their investigations, actions, and reflections. The works of art were important products of that learning.

Another example is from action research by Sosin et al. (2010). Sosin, an art educator in a high school in New York city, collaborated with Adelphi University teacher educators to examine how creating visual art could enrich students’ learning of labor studies. Their research questions were as follows:

The students were English-language learners, many of whom could see their parents struggle as immigrants to integrate into the mainstream economic culture of the United States. They studied artistic works of social realism from the U.S. labor movement and read texts from labor history before creating their own paintings based on their observations of work in their neighborhood, on their own work experiences, or on their parents’ stories. The authors concluded that the students, upon completing the project, gained a deeper perspective on how to recognize exploitation and how to resist through organizing for collective bargaining. They also found that students grew in appreciation for the value of the arts in expressing resistance to oppression.

These are only two examples of research examining the arts in integrated curricula that foster activism. More contributions to this body of literature will be important for critical educators as social movements bring new or different struggles. Finding resources for support in these efforts is imperative. I now turn to an organization whose purpose is to uplift the arts for the education and activism in support of contemporary social movements.

Social movements are born when enough people say, “Enough is enough,” find each other, and do the hard work to organize. While doing that hard work, they benefit from the community-building strength that can come from the arts. They sing and rap together, read each other’s poems and short stories out loud together, paint a mural together, write and perform a play for street theater together. These activities help to release righteous anger in the face of oppression, they help to express the hope for overcoming oppression through thoughtful and bold actions of resistance, and they help to exclaim the joy of each victory— large or small. Fortunately, the social movements of the 21st century have an organization that promotes the arts across the movements. That organization is AgitArte.

The organization’s website features a 5-minute video in which codirectors Jorge Díaz Ortiz and Sugeily Rodriguez Lebron show and describe mutual-aid projects in Puerto Rico following disasters of Hurricane Maria, an earthquake, and COVID-19 amidst an unresponsive and corrupt colonial government (AgitArte, n.d.). AgitArte’s purpose statement reads as follows:

Also listed on the organization’s main web page are the names of four board members. Below that are brief descriptions of three guiding themes: cultural solidarity, popular education and agitation, and artists/cultural worker development. As of my viewing on August 22, 2020, the three current news items on the web page are “Agitarte featured in ‘The Life Instinct’ online exhibit,” “Jorge [Díaz] receives Oscar Romero Award,” and “#Black-LivesMatter.”

AgitArte also coauthored with Greg Jobin-Leeds (2016) the book When We Fight We Win! Twenty-First-Century Social Movements and the Activists That Are Transforming Our World. Credited as AgitArte-member contributors on the back cover infold are José Jorge Díaz and José “Primo” Hernández of Santurce, Puerto Rico, and Deymirie Hernández, based in Boston. Focusing on the years 2000 to 2015, the book has a chapter for each of these six topics: the LGBTQ movement, struggles for public education, ending mass incarceration, immigrant rights, struggles for economic power, and environmental justice. With help from fellow organizers, Jobin-Leeds focused on the following three questions: “How do we create real and enduring change? What have successful organizers done that works, and what doesn’t work? How can anyone get involved and make a difference?” (p. xvi). Upon completing work for the book, he concluded that transformative organizers do the following:

• build organizations that are grounded in the most impacted communities;

• create transformative visions;

• tell powerful stories;

• go to the root cause of problems;

• reclaim the intersection of our struggles and identities;

• disrupt power, changing who has it and what to do with it once reclaimed; and

• build solidarity and stand together (p. xviii)

Each chapter gives detailed examples of these types of actions while displaying magnificent artwork, including images of posters, murals, drawings, cartoons, and photographs. The artwork complements the text in telling powerful stories. The focus is on ordinary people who have worked together in resisting oppression and creating change. It is both a joyful celebration of gains and a fervent call for further struggle.

AgitArte in its designers’ note in the book’s final pages draws attention to Gramsci’s theory of cultural hegemony while citing Stephen Duncombe (Jobin-Leeds & AgitArte, 2016). The organization’s stark warning is that a cultural “common sense” from capitalist hegemony is a threat to humanity. They follow, though, with words of encouragement and hope that come from the movements highlighted throughout the book. Their final sentences address the contribution of the arts toward victory:

If more grassroots activists in progressive movements will engage in the arts while looking to an example like AgitArte, they will have truly powerful weapons to advance their struggles. Critical educators can help by integrating the curriculum with activism and the arts in the center of their collaborative work. They can help further by connecting with activists and artists in the surrounding community, bringing students and community together in the struggles with mutual works of art as part of the infrastructure for building bridges toward broader, stronger movements.

Frederick Douglass famously proclaimed in a speech in 1857 in Rochester, New York, “Power concedes nothing without a demand” (BlackPast, 2007). The demand to end slavery was a struggle that led to the Civil War and the ratification of the 13th Amendment. The demand to end legal racialized segregation led to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The demand to end systemic racism continues in the BLM movement. Demands and struggles also resist and persist against patriarchy, heteronormativity, and neoliberal capitalism. Expressing these demands involves a trail of numerous writings and speeches in prose, but employing the arts can add creative power, a sense of urgency, and enduring works of beauty to the cause.

A democratic process is necessary for effectively connecting schools and their surrounding communities in the arts and activism. Young people can rise as leaders to join with community activists in struggles for justice. Examples are found in the March for Our Lives against gun violence and in internationally organized school walkouts demanding urgent actions in response to the climate crisis. By encouraging students and community members to share in leadership, progressive educators can work as facilitators and coinvestigators in the learning process. Involving the arts is not an additional feature but rather a vital element in an integrated curriculum for social justice. Elderly activists know how singing helped to fuel the social movements for civil rights in racial justice and for ending the U.S. war in Vietnam. Youthful activists today know that hip-hop and spoken-word poetry can channel powerful expressions of resistance and vision in BLM, the Fight for Fifteen, and additional movements. The visual, literary, and dramatic arts, too, can ignite imagination, passion, and inspiration among concerned citizens. Youth can learn that participation in activism and in the arts is for everyone.

In sum, youth need to learn that they need not be mere observers in activism and in the arts, and that the two can work together. Democracy depends on citizens who can function as change agents. The arts benefit when more people participate as amateurs instead of stopping at being just admirers of the professionals, and grassroots movements benefit when activists create works of art together. All can find a role in participatory democracy, and all can find empowerment through direct involvement in creative expressions in the arts. Critical educators are aware of these truths. How will we work further to connect the goal of enabling activists/artists with real strategies and effective practices?