Art Education for Social Justice

Tom Anderson from Florida State University in Tallahassee, Florida, USA took the initiative to organise for January 2010 a symposium about "Art Education for Social Justice".

Following papers from Kids' Guernica members were given:

International Art&Design for Social Justice Symposium

The Departments Art Education and Interior Design at Florida State University hosted the 4th Annual Art&Design for Social Justice Symposium on January 18th, 2010, in conjunction with workshops and an exhibition commemorating the 15th anniversary of the Kids' Guernica Peace Mural Project. This international symposium focused on how tools, abilities, and strategies can be developed to address social justice issues through art and design education. The event was designed to generate synergy, spawn collaborative projects among participants, create new scholarly initiatives, and allow examination of the role that art and design plays in the creation and telling of a broader social narrative. The Kid's Guernica Peace Mural Project with workshop activities began on January 16th and the symposium took place on the 18th. Speakers from a number of European countries and several countries in Asia and the Middle East participated in these events as well as participants from North America.

The term 'social justice'

social justice:
"Each person possesses an inviolability founded on justice that even the welfare of society as a whole cannot override. For this reason justice denies that the loss of freedom for some is made right by a greater good shared by others."

John Rawls, A Theory of Justice

Contact:

Tom Anderson

Jessie Lovano-Kerr Professor of Art Education

323C Eppes Hall, Florida State University,

Tallahassee, FL. 32306-1232

(850) 644-5473,

tanderson@fsu.edu

For the papers see:

http://socialjusticesymposium.fsu.edu/

For ordering the book contact:

Lynn Ezell | Publications ManagerNational Art Education AssociationP:
>> 703-889-1296 direct | F: 703-860-2960 | E: lezell@arteducators.org

More background information:

"Art Education for Social Justice, an anthology featuring art initiatives and research committed to social justice, was published by the National Art Education Association this Spring and featured at a super session at the 2010 National Art Education Conference in Baltimore. We invite you to join our online forum and provide feedback regarding the content and ideas in the upcoming book as well as exchange current information concerning community projects, schools, art organizations, and research that strives to address social justice through the arts.

The fifteenth anniversary of Kids' Guernica held at Florida State University celebrated over 200 peace murals by children from more than 40 countries. Artists, educators, and community activists and organizers gathered from around the world to share their stories of mural making as peace building. The original murals between students in Florida and Japan fifteen years ago were created to honor the 50th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima. The Florida State University Museum of Fine Arts will host an exhibition of the murals through January 31st. http://www.mofa.fsu.edu/

The goal is to build a bridge of peace and understanding, ultimately to save the world from further devastating warefare. Is it too grand to claim that the world can be saved through community action in art? Probably so. But let me reverse the question and and ask if not through art, then what? Certainly biology and physics and agriculture and chemistry give us wonderful practical tools, but it is the arts that provide the holistic quality of understanding necessary for social wholeness and cultural health, through the arts that we develop the sensibility, the unifying sense, the direction, in short the ability to use our tools. Let me repeat then, if the world cannot be saved through art, then through what? Through the Kid's Guernica Peace Mural Project and initiatives like it, we want nothing less than to save the world through intercultural tolerance and understanding. One bridge at a time."

-Tom Anderson, Ph.D, Florida State University, Co-founder of the Guernica Peace Mural Project

Source:http://www.arteducationforsocialjustice.org/2010/01/kids-guernica-international-childrens.html

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