This collaborative project involved 15 students in grades 8-12 with majors in different arts disciplines (visual arts, dance, language arts, music, photography), RYME researchers, and LFAS teachers Jim Sparks (Music teacher, SFU doctoral student and Coordinator of the Arts Matter Curriculum Project) and Donna Usher (Photography teacher and Coordinator of the Arts Matter Lecture Series). The researchers and students met for eight sessions over the course of several months to explore knowledge and develop shared understandings about why the arts matter. Activities focused on dialogue, reflection, student-led participatory action research, and multimodal representations of the “messages” that the students’ thought were important for increasing awareness and understanding about the value of arts engagement, particularly within their own school culture. The students worked on a variety of projects that enabled them to identify and express key messages about the arts that were important to them. Their key messages emerged through the students’ growing recognition of the valuable role they play in mentoring younger arts students (the school has students from Grade 1 through to Grade 12), and the expansive artistic and positive growth they experienced when engaged in integrated or multidisciplinary arts activities. In relation to these ideas, they explored opportunities, constraints and key processes as well as the different ways of getting their messages “out there” so that they would connect with the particular audiences that they wanted to reach the most. They were also involved in planning a session with arts students in teacher education at SFU, where the LFAS students visited the SFU campus and shared their insights and experiences and gave a presentation/performance of their diverse artistic representations of why the arts matter.