Through World Savvy's media and arts program, students explore global themes like immigration, identity, and power through art and media from different perspectives. They then create their own art reflecting their views on these issues. Students have designed magazine covers, created self-portrait stencils incorporating poems about challenges and hopes, reflected on how other cultures have influenced them through clothing drawings, examined labels and stereotypes in poems and portraits, illustrated migration stories in comic form, investigated using art for advocacy through community collage portraits and letters, and designed ideal sustainable schools through sculpture and writing.

1. Through World Savvy’s Media & Arts
Program, students explore global themes
like immigration & identity, sustainable
communities, and power in a global society
through art & media from a personal, local,
national and global perspective; students
then create their own art & media that
reflect their perspectives on these issues.

18. Students designed the cover of the “green
issue” of a fashion magazine incorporating
content from units on trash, up-cycling and
environmental justice.

22. Students created three self portrait stencils:
one straight print, one creative free choice
with a background design of choosing, and a
third that incorporated the poem students
wrote in a World Savvy workshop entitled
“My American Dream”. These poems speak of
the challenges they have faced in their lives,
as well as their hopes for the future.

27. After participating in a World Savvy workshop
on cultural diffusion, students reflected on how
cultural diffusion had affected their own lives.
What music, food, religion or art was part of
their everyday lives yet came from another
culture? Students picked the culture that had
the greatest impact on them, and then drew
themselves in the traditional clothing of that
culture. Some students chose to do a variation
on this project by drawing themselves in the
clothing of their own cultural heritage.

30. Students examined labels and
stereotypes both personally and
with regard to immigrant
populations and created their own
“My People Are” poems and self
portraits to showcase their own
identity.

37. Students illustrated their own
migration stories in comic form

42. Students investigated the relationship between art and
advocacy: using art to affect change in communities. First
they explored what makes up their own communities, creating
“found art” collages that represent and reflect our home
environments with objects found in those very communities.
With the reality of their communities in mind, each student
then chose one social (in)justice issue to stand up for and
change. To help them do this, they created a Community
Super Hero persona that they became through photography,
words and collage. Switching from paint brush to pen, they
then wrote advocacy letters to local congressmen and
women, voicing the need for change.

52. Students created original sculpture from
found materials and writing as a way to
explore ideas of interdependence in the
environment and our lives. At a later date,
they returned to their sculptures to witness
the effects of time and decay.

58. Students in San Francisco explored green
architecture and what it means to “Go Green”
and then designed their own ideal schools with
sustainable resources. They considered
earthquake safety, space and capacity
requirements, and a building created with
sustainable materials can actually be an
educational tool in itself.