Creating Art, Creating Change

Before you can make a difference in your community, locally or globally, you need to take the time to explore multiple perspectives.

Art is an amazing tool that can be used in all classrooms in multiple ways. For Students Rebuild and the Welcoming Refugees Project, we are encouraging teachers to use it as not just a way to send messages to newly arrived refugees, but as a vehicle for demonstrating their learning.

At World Savvy, we emphasize the importance of informed action; before you can make a difference in your community, locally or globally, you need to take the time to explore multiple perspectives and learn everything you can about the issue. To support teachers and students to do a deep dive into the topic of refugees and creating welcoming communities, we provided resources and an inquiry process that is designed to help young people better understand this complex issue.

Another important part of engaging young people in explorations about global issues is to always provide a solution seeking element. Without that, these topics can feel overwhelming and depressing, and we run the risk of students actually disengaging. However, when you apply a solution seeking lens to tough topics, it allows young people to get inspired by the actions of others and helps them begin to imagine what solutions might be possible.

Once young people think deeply about the refugee experience, they can use art as a means to share information with the larger community and educate everyone on how to create a welcoming community. To do this, we have created resources for educators that they can use to facilitate the creation of both group and individual art pieces.

In addition to these resources, World Savvy has also collected welcome messages from students who participate in our Changemaker Hubs. These are events where we bring young people together to explore topics of their choosing and design solutions to pressing local issues. Recent events have centered around creating healthy communities for all and climate change. Within both of these overarching topics, several student groups made the connection to welcoming refugees — noting the relationships between health and belonging, as well as between climate and migration. More broadly, students at these events have enthusiastically produced beautiful cards to help welcome refugees to their new home.