Arts Matter Projects: RYME at Various Schools
Arts Matter Projects aim to increase student engagement in the arts, strengthen the arts culture of schools, and create expansive learning opportunities for making meaning and connections between students, teachers, researchers, artists, local communities, and the wider world. Each project is developed through collaboration with students, teachers, and researchers and adapted to meet particular school contexts and cultural ecologies. The projects explore students’ understandings of why the arts matter through student-led participatory action research, advocacy, and real-world learning. Students engage in multimodal ways of expressing and representing why the arts matter. They do this through a participatory process involving community-building activities that deepen understandings about how the arts connect with our own lives and help us connect and communicate with others. The process involves experiential and student-centred learning, inquiry, critical reflection, emergent curricula and transformative pedagogies. They engage students in deep explorations of their own and others’ artistic and musical worlds. Arts Matter Projects promote inclusiveness, ownership, empowerment, innovation, and leadership through expansive learning opportunities that help students feel connected, prepared, and engaged in the arts.
Our work is situated within positive youth development frameworks that shift away from deficit models that focus on preventing, and “fixing” problems toward identifying and fostering strengths, potential, participatory actions and support. Our theoretical and collaborative research methodology involves a braiding of traditional and innovative approaches to explore issues that are relevant and important to 21st century learners with the aim of promoting sustainable positive change in school and community contexts. The projects provide opportunities for students to experience greater voice and a sense of empowerment both in and through the arts. We are interested in learning about the plurality and interconnectivity of arts engagement in students’ everyday lives, from the students’ own perspectives. Students are given opportunities for developing their distinctive voice in relation to the arts, and a narrative capacity for expressing why the arts matter with the aim of promoting a life-long valuing of the arts in their own lives and in the lives of future generations.
To read further on specific Arts Matter projects at selected schools, please follow the links below:
- Arts Matter at Langley Fine Arts School (LFAS)
- Music Matters at Minnekhada Middle School
- Musical Futures at Southridge Junior School
