DRIVING QUESTION: How might I communicate my understanding of a social issue surrounding poverty through art?
This provocation had the C7-8 learners diving into such topics as malnutrition, access to education, barriers to employment, natural disasters, extreme budgeting, and more. They looked at how economic decisions affect the well-being of individuals, businesses, and society in order to evaluate alternative approaches or solutions to economic issues in terms of benefits and costs for different groups of people.
Learners demonstrated this learning by taking part in the VERSO Microfinance Legacy project and identifying a person requiring microloan assistance to break the poverty cycle. The learners created individual art pieces to auction off during Showtime, with the proceeds being invested in their borrowers. This empowering experience required them to learn many of the theoretical and practical components of creating artwork, such as line, balance, color theory & connecting it to emotion, as well as sketching inanimate objects and humans, and finally painting techniques to achieve texture.