Wake Up call: Advocacy in the arts education ecosystem

This manuscript appeals to arts education leaders to consider how their current advocacy messages may be missing an emphasis on learners who are excluded from access to any artistic learning in public education. I make a personal call for more critical and human-centered messages by drawing on exchanges among artists, learners and teachers. Maxine Greene’s theory of wide-awakeness is animated as an accessible advocacy theme in the form of four letters: one to the editors of this journal, one to a school board commissioner in a struggling urban district, one to a national arts advocacy leader and one to Maxine Greene. Issues of messaging are examined as part of a dynamic ecosystem among academic, policy and practice-based perspectives.