(proposal for a book to be used by educators, activists and students)

Editors: Beverly Naidus, Bob Spivey (and possibly others)

At this point we are really interested in hearing about how people teach or facilitate the study of art for social change. Among other things, we would like the reader to learn how students (and communities) learn to use art as a tool for consciousness raising, to create dialog and reconciliation between polarized groups, to develop awareness and compassion about the suffering of others, to explore a positive identity in relation to a society that diminishes and oppresses "the other," to provoke a response from those who are numb or deeply entrenched in the culture of denial, and to celebrate aspects of life that are not promoted by consumer culture.

If you are comfortable writing from a very personal place that would be great. In other words, how did your values and life experiences direct you to this path? What have been the challenges of teaching this way? What have been the rewards? How do we help students in the process of brainstorming concepts, developing intentions and contextualizing their work? How do we discuss audience? Are there strategies that can be shared about working collaboratively and working in community? How can we inspire more art faculty and educators to encourage students to make socially engaged art? These are some of the questions that occur to me right now. We hope to send out a longer list once we know who the publisher is. We don't want our questions to be seen as limiting the content of what you write or the style in which you write. We hope to do some brainstorming with the short list of folks we have invited to write and see where that takes us. We may end up having a healthy debate about what we do that might be useful to publish. Who knows?

Our goal is to edit a book that we would have loved to have discovered when we were younger. We would also like to make the book accessible to activists who are doing community cultural work. We want to have a wide variety of approaches represented in the book. In other words, there will be contributions from artists who work with young kids, teens, elders, university and college students and people in different community settings.

We will be gathering submissions in the winter of 2003.