Citizen Shapers

World Citizen Showcase will be an inspirational, one-time, competitive arts-based event involving eighth-grade students from one school from each of Charleston, Berkeley, and Dorchester counties. The project seeks to increase student engagement and foster their creative thinking, self-expression, goal setting, and career aspirations at a critical transition point between middle and high school. World Citizen Showcase team members and their community partner Engaging Creative Minds will select the three arts teachers and work them in summer of 2015 to develop a shared, semester-long curriculum. Teachers will be provided with a stipend to help fund the project work. Students will be asked to depict what it means to be a citizen of the world and how they will personally change their communities. Students will work throughout the semester in a variety of visual art mediums such as ceramics, drawing, painting, sculpture, printmaking and photography. Members of a “speakers bureau” of people who are working in interesting ways to strengthen their communities will engage with students throughout this time. At the end of the semester, judges at each school will choose four entries for a juried art exhibit. Jury members will then select two semi-finalists and a winner from the 12 entries. At a barbeque lunch event attended by teachers, administrators, students and families, awards will be given to the two finalists and the winner, and a small grant will be given to the arts department of the winning school.