By empowering young people to express their ideas through the arts, we can expand our understanding empathy and society.
In this talk at the Templeton Annual Meeting, powered by TED, TWCF grantee Kurt Shaw of Usina da Imaginação shines light on the power that storytelling and creative collaboration have to bridge gaps in communication and understanding between different cultural groups, age groups, and policy makers.
Through years of creatively collaborating with youth across socio-economic divides in Brazil, Kurt Shaw and Usina da Imaginação have found that enabling young people to express their ideas through the arts adds to our understanding of empathy and society. In this talk, Shaw discusses how practicing arts with kids offers character development education value and also raises questions important to human flourishing such as: Who has the right to construct or produce knowledge? Who decides what is valued as important or beautiful?
The talk features a clip from one of Usina da Imaginação’s young artistic collaborators. Shaw also shares how The Brazilian Ministry of Culture invited some of Usina's young collaborators to contribute to discussions about cultural policy, recognizing that children are not just consumers of culture, but also producers.
For more than 2 decades, Kurt Shaw, Rita de Cácia Oenning da Silva, and Usina da Imaginação have been accompanying children and families across Brazil as they tell their stories through participatory audiovisual documentation.
View this related post to see how Usina da Imaginação has been putting this into practice. You'll get a glimpse into how collaborating on fictional films served as a vehicle for children and teens to put themselves in the place of a young person from a socio-economic background other than their own.
