Creative Civics in Higher Education: Evaluating Implementation of Artistic Activism Pedagogy through the Unstoppable Voters Faculty Fellowship

This study evaluates the pedagogical impact of the Center for Artistic Activism’s (C4AA) Creative Campaign Framework, as implemented through the 2024 Unstoppable Voters Faculty Fellowship. The fellowship was a United States-based initiative designed to foster creative, non-partisan civic engagement in higher education using C4AA trainings and materials as outlined in their Creative Campaign Framework. The fellowship supported a cohort of nine faculty members across seven institutions, ranging from research universities to liberal arts colleges and a historically black university, that integrated C4AA materials into courses spanning clinical psychology, political science, theatre, design and the visual arts. Using a Faculty Learning Community (FLC) model and grounded in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL), the study employed qualitative methods to examine how fellows adapted the Creative Campaign Framework, the strategies they used to engage students and the outcomes of their campus-based civic engagement projects. Key findings include the Framework’s adaptability across disciplines, student responses to this approach to creative civic learning and the opportunities and challenges of translating activist language to academic settings. This is the first study to assess the application of the C4AA’s artistic activism pedagogy in a coordinated higher education initiative, offering new insights into the potential of creative civics pedagogy using the C4AA Creative Campaign Framework as an impactful and adaptable approach to teaching democratic habits and civic engagement.