Full description
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Theory underpinning this outcome
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Evidence that this outcome occurs
Young adults who had intensive arts experiences in high school are more likely to show civic-minded behavior than young adults who did not. They take an interest in current affairs, as evidenced by comparatively high levels of volunteering, voting, and engagement with local or school politics. In many cases, this difference appears in both low and high-SES groups (Catterill, 2012).
Respondents who reported both creative and attendance based arts activity were six times as likely to do volunteer or charity work in their community, although this analysis does not explain causality (National Endowment for the Arts, 2008).
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Activities
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Processes
Animating Democracy offer the following common factors that characterise successful arts and civic engagement activities:
- understanding of context —understanding the context for the social or civic concern, current other engagement efforts, who has taken leadership, etc. to ensure the integrity of goals, relationships, and the credibility of the project.
- tapping the power of creativity—fully tap the unique qualities of the art, artistic process, and creativity for ways to encourage meaningful engagement. The quality of engagement often goes deeper faster when people are involved in making art together.
- facilitating with skill—In dialogue experiences, those that are most substantive and transformative have deft guides who are able to create a sense of trust, respect, safety, and make perceptive connections between the art and the issue.
- providing a range of opportunities— look for multiple and varied opportunities for engagement in the trajectory of planning and implementing a whole project as well as what might happen after its conclusion. Frequent and varied sustained opportunities for engagement allow different stakeholders and publics to more readily participate, involve people in various ways to accommodate differences, and can provide important sustained attention to a social concern for greater impact (Animating Democracy, n.d, 22).
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Animating Democracy (n.d). Planning & Designing of Arts-Based Civic Engagement Projects. Washington: Americans for the Arts.
(This item is currently in development. Updates will be posted here as they are completed)
