Our collaborative role supports teachers in delivering high-quality arts-integrated residencies and in-school workshops that provide equitable educational opportunities to increase student engagement, support social and emotional learning and activate critical thinking and problem-solving skills. We work with teachers to establish clear instructional goals and outcomes tailored to each school’s needs and align with Standards. Our program supplements and enriches classroom lessons allowing students to make meaningful connections between subject areas that connect to prior knowledge and make their learning relevant to their lives.

Our popular program, “Voice Your Soul,” teaches youth to recognize the power of music as a voice for social justice in our world by integrating music and lyrics with social studies through themes looking at liberation struggles and socio-political movements from the past to the present. Students learn from music with messages about social and political ills—race and struggle for equality; political, cultural, and economic social systems; and moral values. Students are heard; they listen to others and co-create with their peers. The program includes a dynamic culminating event—a showcase of student-created social justice projects presented at the school for classmates, teachers, parents, caregivers, and family members.

Our program includes customizable lessons with student-centered activities and the following resources: Music, videos, rubrics, graphic organizers, and additional primary/secondary sources such as reliable, current event news and social media, historical speeches, charts, and graphs. All we need is a classroom! Our teaching method is project-based learning with rigorous integration of—ELA, Social Studies, Civics, SEL, Technology, Art, and Music. The unit ends with student-created social justice-themed projects featuring multimedia, art, and creative writing—songs, rap, poetry, skits—and live performances.

In the first part of the unit, students increase their knowledge of how people have protested injustice in the past and present by analyzing texts from song lyrics, videos, and other mentor texts, to determine the intended message and meanings and what makes the content uniquely powerful. Legendary songs of the ’60s-’70s will be a mentor text for how music can be more than entertainment but a platform for social commentary and change. Other forms of protest—marches, walkouts, and sit-ins—will offer students a broader understanding of how you can peacefully communicate your message about injustice. Students will learn what makes a message powerful and consider how they can craft their message of change.

In the second part of the unit, students begin creating their social justice projects through extensive research and applying information and skills they have learned throughout the program. Their final project includes various arts-infused sources, including digital media, artwork, creative writing—songs, raps, poetry, spoken word, stories, skits—and performances.  Rigorous standards-based expectations will apply to all projects, while students will also have the freedom to develop a format that draws on their interests, strengths, and experiences. We provide professional media, music, and arts-makers who work closely with students on their final projects.

At the end of the unit, students are challenged to harness their academic skills, individual interests, personal experiences, and artistic vision to develop their Messages of Social Change projects and share them with their school community. Students work individually and in groups on culminating social-justice-themed projects, self-selected by students and based on personal interests, presented en masse as a showcase in the school auditorium, giving students a chance to feel proud of their accomplishments. Reflections and self-assessments of the effectiveness of their project will increase students’ self-awareness of their strengths and areas of growth within the integrated content areas in the unit.