Welcome to Art of Ethics!
The Arts of Ethics project seeks to engage the moral imagination of children and youth. We invite adult leaders, teachers, and caregivers to join children and youth in envisioning a better world through visual and language arts.
Conversations on ethics and values usually start with adults. We want to change that. Not because we have some simplistic vision about “the children as our future” or “child-like understandings.” Not at all, we believe the opposite is true. Children and youth are not naïve to the daily survival and thriving of their families, communities, and the planet. They respond to it and generate new possibilities in the process. Using moral imagination requires us to be aware of current realities and seek a new vision. Children participate in constructing their worlds in and through the relationships around them, first with family, and then friends, broadening out as they meet new people. Play and artistic expression is one way that children “do ethics.” The practice of play, storytelling, and art provides the forum for moral imagination to contribute to self-transformation and world making.
What is Arts of Ethics?
An online art gallery featuring children’s and youth’s visual and language arts contributions that reflect how they understand ethics and values or what’s right and wrong. Participants can submit individual or group contributions.
It’s also a curricular resource site for adult leaders, teachers, and caregivers to start conversations about ethics and values with children of all ages. Curricular resources:
- are suitable for learners of all ages and stages of life (intergenerational).
- feature lesson plans for Christian, faith-based, and secular audiences.
- provide leader guides.
Bring Art of Ethics into your liturgical planning with this worship layout and service conducted at Garrett for review and adaptation in Christian faith communities.
Learn More
To learn more about the Arts of Ethics project, please fill out this form and stay in the loop as our project develops. Your enthusiasm and support in this endeavor is much appreciated.
Check out the contribution of August Venuh, PhD student in Theology and Ethics at Garrett for her perspective on theology and art. For more on ethics, children, and creativity, read Dr. Ott’s article “Taking Children’s Moral Lives Seriously: Creativity as Ethical Response Offline and Online.”
For Kids
From the moment we interact with the world around us, we develop a thing called “ethics and values” — figuring out the right and wrong of things. Our families, schools and communities help us, and sometimes impose on us, to make certain decisions. As children and youth, we know you have your own ideas and experiences.
Make your voice and vision heard and seen.
Sometimes the best way to describe this new thing—“ethics” —is through language and visual arts. Ethics and values – figuring out right and wrong – takes creativity, listening, testing. Sometimes we fail. Sometimes we make things better. How would you explain “ethics and values” through drawing, storytelling, a short movie, a poem, painting, song writing, and so on?
Share your ideas. Imagination and creative action have the power to make our world a better place!
Join the Arts of Ethics project here.