An act of hope: Developing social responsibility through issue -oriented community -based art education

This study was an ethnographic case study about a Peace Park---a public art and playground space---that was designed and built by young people from an ethnically diverse, economically depressed mobile home community. This study explored how the Peace Park project, an educational intervention that combined social responsibility education and issue-oriented community-based art education, supported young people in developing the skills needed for the development of critical consciousness.;The findings suggest that the Peace Park project facilitated young people's movement through Freire's (1973/1994) stages of critical consciousness (from semi-intransitivity to naive intransitivity to critical consciousness/social responsibility) in five characteristics of social responsibility (including level of awareness, type of engagement, mode of envisioning, sense of efficacy, and level of action). This movement occurred as a result of the youth participants gaining new skills and strategies of interaction during the project which allowed them to engage in new presentations of self and to try on new roles which provided them with alternative identities to live into.;This study contradicts notions that awareness and efficacy must precede the capacity to take action. The data suggest that the youth participants from the Peace Park project needed to experience action before they developed any other characteristic of social responsibility or social awareness.;This study has both theoretical and practical implications for the field of education. It furnishes empirical research on the impact the arts have on individual and community transformation. In addition, it outlines the essential components of issue-oriented community-based art education; demonstrates how arts education can successfully be combined with social responsibility education; and reveals the importance of experiential education.