“We Decided to Change It”: Multimodal Arts Residency Capturing Youth Desire as Agentic

• In Event: Using Arts to Foster Community, Critical Hope, and Civic Engagement in Education

Abstract

This paper draws on data from an ethnographic study of a multimodal arts residency in the partnership between an arts organization and a school and school district to illuminate the importance of youth desires. It focuses on how arts education fosters spaces for youth to deconstruct deficit representations by examining how (1) youth articulate their desires though multimodal arts experiences and (2) everyday acts in schooling spaces can be reconstituted as acts of productive resistance. The study addresses the ways multimodal arts learning engage youth interests and maintain critical hope.

Authors

• Diana Chandara, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities

• Betsy Maloney Leaf, University of Minnesota

• Bic Ngo, University of Minnesota