EDUC 507 – Art, Education, and Social Change

This semester in EDUC 507 our class explored the ways that art influences our life, our thinking, and the opportunities we see for change. The COVID-19 pandemic has significantly shifted our lives and our class discussion. As a classroom community, we are processing this global event as it unfolds, and will continue to process for the rest of our lives. For the course final, we had planned on a gallery displaying artifacts designed to influence and inspire social change.

COVID-19 has shifted the possibilities for art, but it has not taken away our opportunity to create, speculate, and seek inspiration. On this website, we present letters to the future reflecting on our experience of pandemic, isolation, lock-down, and loss.

We acknowledge that our classroom community was just beginning to form when we transitioned to remote learning. We also acknowledge that all members of our community were not able to engage equally in this process. Our responsibilities, our living situations, our concerns, and headspace have all been impacted differentially. As one of our class members stated: “creation is collaborative and rooted in community.”  You will not view the work of all of our crew here, but we hold everyone close as part of our artistic and dialogic community. For those whose work isn’t represented here, we feel their presence in all of our work, in the community we’ve built, and in this project being a creation for/by all of us.

Love,

Alison & Lucía