Placed-based education (PBE)...

• is a form of active, engaged, and experiential learning that promotes critical reflection on social issues.

• provides opportunities for students to connect their learning to their home lives, hometowns, communities, and other meaningful social contexts.

• supports youth to engage in praxis: critical reflection that leads to critical action and activism.

• centers the relational over the individual, understanding that change happens in community and working as a collective.

Youth will...

• study their own communities.

• connect broad social and political trends to students communities and lived realities.

• learn from and partner with community members and community-based organizations.

• engage in action and activism in order to bring about local change in their communities.

• Placed-based education (PBE) gives meaningful purpose to educational endeavors.

• Students learn to cultivate change within their communities rather than obtaining knowledge to pass a test.

• PBE values lived experience, personal narratives, and oral histories as modes of knowledge.

• It takes a location, community, or social context as the “text” to be read and studied.

• PBE honors youth's communities and those who work for change in those communities.

Critical Arts Education...

• Actualizes the transformative potential of the arts as a avenue for envisioning, informing, and enacting change in their communities.

• provides opportunities for youth to creatively and meaningfully engage with their communities.

• supports youth, both through engagement with artistic work and actively engaging in the artistic process, to engage in praxis -- critical reflection that leads to critical action.

Youth will...

• engage with social issues that are important to them and their communities, in and through an engagement with an artistic process, young people.

• move through a process of critical reflection and critical action through creating and sharing an artistic project.

• Deeply context-specific, and borne from a co-created artistic process, Critical Arts Education prioritizes education that is intrinsically meaningful and relevant.

• Maxine Greene (1991), writes about how the arts help us develop a “imaginative capacity." to imagine the world as it could be as the first steps for creating this reality. We see Critical Arts as a means to generate new strategies for existing and transcending.

• Students gain confidence and literacy with the artistic process. This work aims to demystify future creation of artwork.

• Critical Arts Education is grounded in multiple ways of knowing and seeing the world. This pedagogy utilizes artistic creation, artistic expression, relationship building as means of research, scholarship, and action.