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“This is precisely the time when artists go to work. There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal.” 

-Toni Morrison

 

 

Our Vision for Arts in Action

                                                                        

 

The Racial Unity Team helps build awareness and educate New Hampshire students about diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice. N.H. legislators are questioning the value of  academic studies of our history of discrimination. Legislation has been written stating that “diversity education is divisive.” In contrast, the common goals of our teachers, RŪT, and the curricula are to help students to do heart work while building their knowledge of ways that the status quo hurts all of us and especially people of diverse races and ethnicities.

 

 The Racial Unity Team’s goals for the project include:

 

• To broaden student access to multicultural artistic and cultural experiences .

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• To include teachers as part of the leadership in order to institutionalize and advance the influence of the Arts in Action project. To help students become upstanders when they see injustice. 

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• To help students learn to govern their voices - to encourage people to listen to them through conversation, not argument. 

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• To help students find commonalities with others to find solutions to problems, speak out against bullying, write  letter to an editor or to a company concerning an injustice, and to stand up to a friend who is practicing bias or discrimination. 

 

2023 Governor’s Arts Education Award Recipient

 

The Racial Unity Team was selected as the 2023 N.H. Governor’s Arts Education Award recipient. This award recognizes an individual, nonprofit organization, school district, or community that has made an outstanding contribution to arts education within the past three years through sustained contributions to arts education in the classroom, leadership in a school, and the implementation of a comprehensive arts curriculum. 

 

Piloted in Exeter High School, Arts in Action has been tested in Bow, Oyster River, Dover, Portsmouth high schools as well as Stratham Memorial School at the elementary grade level. At Exeter High School, Arts in Action is taught as a “unit” on justice, equity, and social change in the ninth-grade curriculum The direct connection between students and their surrounding community has a twofold effect; students begin to realize through their classroom learning experience that members of their community are not only interested in what they have to say, but also that they are willing to help.

 

The Racial Unity Team’s Arts in Action project provides students with sustained opportunities to hear a multiplicity of voices that round out a classroom’s curriculum and to share the  experience and expertise of informed people in the community and across the nation. It offers a platform for students to voice their lived experience and hopes for the future.

 

 

 

Students have expressed how the Arts in Action project have affected them:

 

“We all have to work together to make this a better place for all.” 

 

“Everyone should get an equal portion of life, uninhibited by systemic racism, oppression, and systemic inequality that America is built on.”

 

“People shouldn’t have to live in fear. I want to make this world a better and safer place.”

 

“I was inspired throughout all the drafts of my art by the saying, ‘Hate has no home here’”.

 

“Everything that I have learned in this unit has made me really reflect back on my own history and provoked me to be more aware of how racism is happening so often that it is going unnoticed, and after watching these mentor videos I feel inspired to do something about it.”

 

“This whole unit has changed my thinking, since it has broadened my horizons and helped me understand different perspectives and opinions that I hadn’t thought about before.”

 

“This unit has made me think more about the world around me and how I can make it better. “

 

“With few Asian students in my school I knew how important this topic is to share with my fellow classmates so I wanted to present my research in an easy form for teens to take in, a cooking show. With help from my friend, I filmed the show and included an educational section explaining how misconceptions around MSG are untrue and also harmful to Asian American communities. After editing the video and seeing all my other classmates’ projects come together we began sharing them with each other. 

 

I remember seeing all sorts of different topics from homelessness to teen mental health. Additionally, Mr. M picked my video to go on the Creative Mornings showcase of excellent student work during the Arts in Action unit. I took the opportunity knowing this showcase would reach outside the school and into the community, just as I had hoped it could. The process was fun and relaxing while also being quite serious (considering the depth of some topics) and academic because much of my research included going through medical and scientific studies. I couldn’t thank Mr. M and Ms. P enough for creating a project that gave myself and my classmates space to show who we are and change the world as we did it.”

 

 

 

 

 

For More Infortmation please contact Kelly Touhey-Childress at Kellyc@rutnh.org.