Unit Overview
In this unit, my students and I will be looking into both small and large ways that we can be activists and advocates for change. Our unit will focus first on how we can use the disciplines of the creative arts (visual art in particular) to make positive impacts on the immediate world around us. We will delve into this through an examination of various artists, our school community, our neighborhood and city. Grounded in a people-first perspective, we will inspect the ways artist-activists around the world use creativity and their work to enact positive and lasting differences. We will be asking ourselves how we can use our creativity to make our communities more welcoming, inclusive, and equitable places. We will consider the different of different localities of impact – from our neighborhood all the way up to the globe. How can we advocate, through art, for the acceptance and dignity of all humans? How can artmaking and creation make us all feel safer physically, emotionally, and spiritually as well as making us feel more connected to our world, nation, communities, and families? Most importantly, how can we use art and artmaking to find joy in an often-hurtful world?
The target group for my unit will be fourth and fifth graders (ages 9 to 11).
The targeted time frame will be within the first two months of the 2026/2027 school year and will include our initial discussions of artists who have used their work to make positive changes. From this we will lead into research, which will then lead to students picking a topic that is important to them that they feel can be impacted by the art we are making. Every student will have a chance to create their own project based on the topic that they would like to bring more attention to and/or impact in some positive way. Most of our students are curious, compassionate, and intellectually curious and I feel that they would really latch on to ways of creating change through small actions. In this case, the culminating project will be a work of art that showcases the topic/topics that they find important and would like to advocate for.
Through examining the past, present, and future of how children and young adults have made a huge impact as activists, we can look at ways that we can make and implement small actions within our school and community that could add up to bigger changes in the world around us. As the title says to be a leader and not a boss, we all possess the ability to make meaningful impact on the world through the small gestures that we can show those around us through our daily actions and the art that we make.
“The opposite of war isn’t peace,
It’s creation”
-Jonathan Larson, “La Vie Bohem”[20]
No matter their age, our students have important things to say. Just like adults, they deserve to be heard. Some might even say that our younger people have a better outlook on the world than the hardened and numb adults. Students receive messaging from every aspect of our society to sit down, conform, and not make waves. In the art room, we have the sometimes-unique freedom to explore self-expression on its own merits. Critical thinking and the questioning of authority are powerful skills for young people, and require intentional cultivation within a standardized
education setting. We have seen that students who do not feel like they are able to speak up and voice their opinions tend to lean more toward ideals that don’t support diversity and inclusion.[21] This unit will emphasize different ways that students can get those thoughts and push their voices out into the world. We will be looking into how the arts have played a role in advocating for positive change. Whether via popular music, visual art, literature, or any other artistic discipline, we find a vast number of examples that range from the subversively sneaking a message “under-the-radar”, to shouting their message loudly, demanding to be heard, not asking the audience to “read-between-the-lines”. As my class is a visual arts class, we will be focusing primarily on the creative world of visual disciplines and asking ourselves about the deeper meaning of pieces and subtle messages along with what the artists might be blatantly showing us. However, as a strong advocate of cross-disciplinary instruction, we will make sure to delve into other art forms as well.
As a baseline, we will start with artists that have already been covered or discussed in our art program or in other disciplines. These might be artists that I have discussed in class or that we have been the inspiration for projects and units that produced physical artwork. Artists such as Romare Bearden and Jacob Lawrence should already be, at the very least, familiar to my students. With these artists, we have talked about their roles as activists but may not have gone into depth about their activism or the methods that they employed to advocate for their causes. Once again, although many were part of artistic groups or movements, they were all individuals, single humans, creating and advocating for change … being leaders but not bosses.
Adding onto the artists that we already know, we can move on to the adding on and discussing of the artists that we may not have been introduced yet or want to go more in depth with. Part of the unit will be dedicated to students being able to research their own artists of inspiration as well as researching the specific artists and specific methods that they will choose for their final project. The unit will culminate with a student directed art project focused on conveying a message of advocacy through their piece. Throughout the introduction discussions and student research, we will be keeping notes in the form of a sketchbook or journal. Students will have the choice of sketchbook or journal, and we will follow the journaling habits that have been introduced and practiced in numerous other activities and projects. Students will be able to use their notes to inform the direction and details of their final project. Students will also have some teacher lead guidance in the form of my predetermined planning questions (another technique that we use regularly for planning and project execution purposes). We will close out the project with a written reflection of the art, the artist of inspiration, the topic or topics that are being advocated for, and the medium/method of delivery.
The goal is to make this as personable and individualized as possible for each student. Educators are always looking for ways to maximize their student potential as well as teaching their content in a meaningful and interesting way and, when possible, I do like to have my students in control but with a framework and some guardrails to make sure that my learning goals are met. I have seemed to have a great deal of success when I am able to find ways for students to connect themselves to their surroundings and give students the power and ability to uniquely tell their own stories. I am sure that this unit/project will take some turns and need some adjustments, but I am super excited to see where my students take these ideas of advocacy and activism.
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