No justice, no peace: an arts-based project with a college choir

ABSTRACT This study examined the changes in perception toward systemic racism of twenty-six first-year students at a mid-sized university in central New Jersey. All were members of the first-year choir and, with their conductor, participated in a three-week workshop called ‘No Justice, No Peace.’ The goal was to examine social justice issues and systemic racism in society and to produce multimedia works of art to express their changing attitudes. Reacting to prompts by the facilitator, they created original poetry, singing, movement, and visual art projects recorded and posted on YouTube for public viewing. Critical pedagogy, critical pedagogy for music education, and activist pedagogy provided the theoretical frameworks. Coding techniques from the grounded theory literature offered a structure for the data analysis. We invited four students from the choir to participate in open-ended interviews and to share their final projects. We found that the students had positive feelings about the project, which did provide a safe space for dialogue among the students. But little changed in their attitudes and understandings about systemic racism and/or their commitments to social justice by condemning acts of racism and injustice when they see evidence of it in society.