548134
research-article2014
CSCXXX10.1177/1532708614548134Cultural Studies <span class="symbol" cstyle="symbol">↔</span> Critical MethodologiesFinley et al.
Article
At Home At School: Critical Arts-Based
Research as Public Pedagogy
Susan Finley1, Carmen Vonk2, and Madeleine L. Finley3
Abstract
This article demonstrates the pedagogy and performance of a radical ethical aesthetic. It emerges from a mural-making
project that exists in the confluence of critical arts-based research and emancipatory and transformative educational
practices. Critical arts-based inquiry is a methodology for ethical research that is futuristic, socially responsible, and useful
in addressing social inequities. The critical arts-based research that is demonstrated here was constructed to be deliberately
transformative of repressive social structures, and to inspire its participants and its audiences to both, reflection and
ethical, political action.
Keywords
arts-based research, critical pedagogy, arts and learning, public art
Introduction
This article describes the design and production processes
as well as the pedagogical purposes for creating a commu-
nity-based mural. The At Home At School (AHAS) pro-
gram is an arts-integrated educational project that enrolls
underserved and marginalized K-12 students and univer-
sity students in after-school and summer learning. Creative
arts projects have included choir and dramatic perfor-
mances in the community, the design and building of a
cord-wood outdoor classroom for environmental educa-
tion, establishing a horticultural exhibit and park in a
neglected city lot, producing nature photographs and vid-
eography, gallery exhibits of paintings and several portable
mural-making projects in our local community. The focus
of artworks range from those done in service to the com-
munity (e.g., the outdoor classroom) to projects that are
directly intended for empowerment and social transforma-
tion to improve the lives of the students themselves (e.g.,
individualized electronic self-portraits and the scripts and
performances of the student-named “Not at Risk Theatre
Troupe”). Project leadership has come from university stu-
dents and the AHAS Youth Advisory Board and has
included art teachers from local schools who have led par-
ticular projects and artists-in-residence. Funding for AHAS
comes from a variety of sources, primarily foundations and
individuals, and through partnerships with school districts
and non-profit organizations. Participating youth learn to
be researchers of their own lives and of social justice issues
in their community. Participating teachers and teacher can-
didates research teaching and learning in diverse commu-
nities. We are all learners at AHAS.
Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies
2014, Vol. 14(6) 619­–625
© 2014 SAGE Publications
Reprints and permissions:
sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav
DOI: 10.1177/1532708614548134
csc.sagepub.com
Murals as Public Pedagogy
Planning, Project Design, and Funding
AHAS students have participated in several mural-making
projects in our local community. This history of student par-
ticipation has shaped the Garden to Table mural project in
several ways, most importantly by creating a context in
which public art displays are a community expectation for
our organization. AHAS exists in collaboration with many
community partners, governmental entities, school districts,
and non-profit organizations. Urban Abundance was our
primary partner in the Garden to Table mural project that is
represented in this article, with each of our organizations
sharing costs for materials and supplies. Urban Abundance
also worked with its partnering growers and local restau-
rants and catering companies to provide 30 days of healthy,
nutritious, locally and organically grown breakfasts,
lunches, and snacks for participating students.
Form and Function
The 16-feet by 4-feet Garden to Table mural is designed
to be exhibited as one continuous display or it can
1
Washington State University Vancouver, Vancouver, WA, USA
2
Independent Scholar, Silverton, OR, USA
3
Vancouver School of Arts and Academics, Washington, DC, USA
Corresponding Author:
Susan Finley, Professor, Education and Public Affairs, Chair, Masters
in Teaching, Director, At Home At School (AHAS), Washington State
University Vancouver, 14204 NE Salmon Creek Avenue, Vancouver,
WA 98686, USA.
Email: finley@vancouver.wsu.edu
620 Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies 14(6)
Figure 1.  Garden to table tetraptych.
be disassembled and each of its individual four panels
exhibited as independent artworks. Its theme is “Food
Justice” and its panels depict the sub-themes that organized
our 2013 summer curriculum: (a) Healthy Eating, (b)
Community Food Systems, (c) Urban Gardens, and (d)
Food Heritage. In addition to the project’s function in teach-
ing a variety of artistic concepts, content about food and
nutrition, community, collaboration, and so forth, the com-
pleted project is intended as a mobile exhibit and teaching
tool to be displayed in urban farmer’s markets, food banks,
and schools. It will also be used in educational workshops
when displayed at local food banks and it will be used in
teacher education workshops. In these workshop models,
the mural will present talking points for performance-dia-
logues with viewing audiences.
Context, AHAS
Beginning in 2002, the AHAS program has operated as an
arts-integrated, out-of-school time academic support pro-
gram for students who are homeless, sheltered, and unshel-
tered. After the first two years, the population expanded to
include students who are immigrants, children of incarcer-
ated parents, students living in foster care, and other preK-
12 students who face systemic barriers to educational
equity. In 10 years, AHAS after-school and summer pro-
grams have enrolled more than 1,200 K-12 students. Nearly
half are racial minorities (in a county with a less than 25%
minority population), and nearly one fourth are non-native
English speakers. AHAS serves three primary functions:
1. AHAS improves educational possibilities for home-
less, high poverty, and immigrant K-16 students and
their families through arts-based curriculum and
instruction.
2. AHAS functions as a “lab school” to prepare future
teachers and principals to teach in culturally diverse
public schools and to transform those schools into
models for 21st century education. All pre-service
bachelor’s and master’s in elementary teaching and
candidates for principal certification have inte-
grated, credited course work that takes place as part
of the AHAS program. In addition to teacher educa-
tion, students from English, Political Science,
Human Development, Digital Technology, Public
Affairs, and Environmental Science have completed
internships and independent study projects with
AHAS.
3. AHAS is a setting for research about teaching and
learning.
The title of the AHAS program is a tad unfortunate
because it sometimes leaves false impressions that the pro-
gram has something to do with homeschooling or full-time,
separate schools for homeless students. These are not the
case. The name is, however, important to the program. The
program title was chosen during a group discussion by the
first 25 or so students who enrolled. During that conversa-
tion, students talked about their experiences of being out-
siders in their schools, of being treated differently than their
classmates who were not economically poor or homeless,
and of the lack of empathy and understanding they some-
times faced over the need for adjustments to be made to
homework and some other assignments. The tenor of the
discussion became one of advocacy. Students were assured
that they had rights to full educational access and that their
inferior status in schools was something they might need to
resist. Indeed, they (and their families) were encouraged to
actively claim their educational rights—to insist on trans-
portation to keep them in their homeschools; to assure
proper placements in appropriate grade levels, college-pre-
paratory courses, and special education; as well as access to
materials, supplies, and teaching support for their unique
learning needs. The conversation took a turn toward how
claiming their rights to equal educational opportunity could
actually improve their social standing, such that they would
feel at home at school. In truth, I cannot recall who first
uttered the phrase, but it became something of a refrain; the
name was put to a vote and so it has been ever after—At
Home At School or AHAS.
The first primary function of AHAS is to advance the
educational skills of our K-12 students and their families.
Improving individual educational opportunity implies much
more than tutoring or “catching-up” with missed work due
Finley et al. 621
to transience and absenteeism, important as those educa-
tional purposes might be. To that end, we create individual-
ized learning plans for addressing student’s personal
learning needs that we include in an electronic portfolio
used to facilitate communications among students and their
peers, AHAS faculty, tutors, mentors, teachers, and fami-
lies. The goal of advancing educational opportunity must
also be the performance of emancipatory education: so, we
teach students how to be advocate for themselves and their
community, we teach critical thinking skills, and we use
service learning projects such as mural painting as a forum
for challenging social determinism. It is our challenge at
AHAS to encourage students to write their own futures, to
use their critical and creative skills to shape their own lives.
Personal reflection and autobiographical narratives are key
to the AHAS curriculum. For example, Carmen Vonk (co-
author of this article and former AHAS intern) has created
individualized, electronic murals with high school students
who have been expelled from area schools in which the stu-
dents tell their life stories in images while they also learn
visual editing and other software applications.
In the project described in this article, Carmen and Susan
collaborated with about 50 AHAS students on the design of
a four panel, From Garden to Table mural. Madeleine
Finley drew the design in charcoal on gesso-primed ply-
wood boards and (with Susan) instructed students on the art
and mechanics of mural painting while organizing groups
of between 3 and 10 late elementary, middle, and high
school students as they painted the mural. Several of the
participating students had been involved in previous mural
painting projects through AHAS.
Teacher Education
We initiated the project with a teacher education compo-
nent. About 30 university students enrolled in Diversity,
Social Contexts, and Arts-Integration courses participated
in some phase of the project. In one example of the teacher
education curriculum, Amber Heckelman, a doctoral stu-
dent in environmental science, volunteered her time to
share her research that centers on restoring food security
and sovereignty in the Philippines. “Essentially, food sover-
eignty ensures the rights to use and manage lands.
Territories, water, seeds, livestock, and biodiversity are in
the hands of those who produce food, and not in the hands
of the private sector,” says Heckelman. She also led the uni-
versity students through activities and discussions about
food deserts and controversy surrounding genetically modi-
fied foods (GMOs). Teacher candidate participants created
posters and designed curriculum devoted to these topics for
K-12 students.
Carmen Vonk facilitated multiple workshops for educa-
tors on the history and pedagogical significance of murals.
Her focus was Chicana/o Murals and political resistance,
the movement to organize communities, to educate and
reunite people with their cultural histories, to reclaim land,
and to resist dominant capitalist culture. She explained the
importance of iconography to the success of the movement.
Her workshops highlighted, among others, the works of
Diego Rivera and Judith Baca. In her biography, Baca (n.d.)
references her process as being “transformative” wherein
she engaged more than 400 youth and provided inspiration
for a “new wave of art” and a symbol of inclusiveness and
democracy (www.judybaca.com). Carmen encouraged the
teacher candidates who participated in the project to follow
Baca’s lead in working with youths in creating transforma-
tive, political, public art. Carmen consistently integrated
her workshops with the Teachers as Cultural Workers
(Freire, 1998) text the students had been assigned as a com-
mon reading. Says Vonk (2011),
Murals have long been a source of identity for individuals and
communities throughout the country. In Toward a People’s Art
Cockcroft and her coauthors state that “murals are primarily
intended for the community that lives with them, so it is
important that the muralists live in or have some strong bond to
the community” (Cockcroft, Weber, & Cockcroft, 1998, p. xi).
This strong bond provided artists and community members
with a basis from which to tell their story since “behind each
painted wall lies a story—not just a narrative depicted, but a
composite of all the stories, the debates and the ideas that
preceded and now underlie the completed images.” (p. xi)
From her emphasis on storied texts and her demonstra-
tions of personal, autobiographical murals, her design for a
diversity mural at Washington State University Vancouver
(WSUV), and her design for a separate, larger AHAS his-
torical mural, Carmen encouraged the teachers to produce
lessons for K-12 students that involved narrating their art-
works and storying their examples of artworks for inclusion
in the Garden to Table mural.
K-12 Student Education
We began the project with the K-12 population with six,
three-hour workshops during Spring-semester AHAS Art
Saturdays, on campus at WSUV. During these sessions, we
presented curricula to introduce our four themes, as well as
the history and educational purposes of murals and other
community art forms. Supplementary example lessons
included playing non-competitive games such as Rivers,
Rails, and Roads in which students assemble an unformed
puzzle by connecting transportation systems from a series
of photographs and drawings. We included investigations of
salmon habitats and collection of indigenous plants that
could be eaten, as well as turned into dyes and stains for
various student art projects. They visited murals virtually
and they learned about the history of murals as educational
projects. Several events were held that included field
622 Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies 14(6)
activities and nutritional food educational stations in which
the students were the community educators for peers who
visited and participated in the events. During summer ses-
sion, students visited a farmer’s market, planted container
gardens, and took field trips to Heritage Farms where they
harvested vegetables and prepared their lunches.
Working up the mural included students’ creations of
mini-murals, topical posters, and the conceptual beginnings
of an art installation for the Respect Park horticulture proj-
ect that depicted the many fruits and vegetables the students
were experiencing. Students composed and produced a
radio broadcast on genetically altered foods, food justice,
and the politics of health and nutrition. In one fascinating
exercise on food heritage, students were asked by a teacher
candidate in very broad terms to use a new painting tech-
nique to “portray a food that is traditionally eaten in your
family. Something that is well-liked and considered special
by multiple generations of family members, you, your par-
ents, your grandparents.” Within minutes, she realized that
almost all students had produced an artifact on pizza—
which then turned into a dialogue on nutrition, advertising,
and the proliferation of pizza as a cultural construction of
the U.S. diet. Students left the session with an emerging
understanding of social construction and the social, eco-
nomic, and political processes it involves.
Critical Arts-Based Research
By its integration of multiple methodologies used in the arts
with the post-modern ethics of participative, action-
oriented, and politically situated perspectives for human
social inquiry, critical arts-based research has the potential
to facilitate critical race, indigenous, queer, feminist, and
border theories and research methodologies. As a form of
performance pedagogy, arts-based inquiry in this example
addresses issues of social inequity. Participants in this work
identify and confront systemic oppressions, targets sites of
resistance, and map possibilities for transformative praxis.
Critical arts-based research is the dialogical performance
of critical theory using art-making as method (with refer-
ence to the complete works of Conquergood; see also
Kincheloe & McLaren, 2000; Madison, 2005). “Dialogical
performances” are the ongoing conversations that occur
among communities of individuals—in this instance, mar-
ginalized students, teacher candidates and other educators,
and researchers/art-teachers/community activists—and the
audience(s) to the project. At AHAS, we consider the pro-
cess of art-making to be at least as important as the product
of art-making because it is during the process that we
exchange information. The product is only useful as a dia-
logic performance of research when we make opportunities
for opening the dialogue to audiences of the performance,
so that the audience members themselves enter the dialogi-
cal performance of art.
Marling (1982) discusses matters of popular culture and
taste—local and regional—in an examination of art and cul-
ture as they played out in the 1930s New Deal post office and
courthouse murals that began the “mural renaissance” in the
United States. He writes about how interests of the parties to
the creation of the murals—the patron, the painter, and the
public—overlapped and conflicted. According to Marling, the
patron was governmental staff who were “experts in the fine
arts” and held among them a collective notion of “good”
mural art—“good, that is, for the progress of American art and
the improvement of American taste . . . as well as a conduit for
transmitting the often inchoate preferences of the public to the
painter” (p. 11). The painter, then, was put in a squeeze
between the patron and the public, while also exercising his or
her own responsibilities and preferences as an artist. Although
we appreciated the New Deal contribution of murals to
Americana and traditions in mural painting, we certainly did
not intentionally emulate any of their patterns of conflict.
Nonetheless, the Garden to Table Mural group had a
patron to please—our partner in this project was an organi-
zation that touts organic food production, local farms and
food purchases (100 miles) and advocates food justice pri-
orities, as well as our own acclamation of social justice
issues and interest in advancing the use of murals for the
purpose of public education. Together, the patron-partners
had determined the themes for the mural, with input from
the AHAS Youth Advisory (a committee of middle and high
school students). Carmen probably felt the pressure of being
in the middle more than the rest of us. Our process had us
collecting preferences from our public—children and
youths—and Carmen would pull the images children cre-
ated, lesson plans, and input from the patrons into an elec-
tronic design. At one point, real debate ensued over
Carmen’s inclusion of ghostly figures of native Americans
in the fourth panel, on the theme of “food heritage.” First,
the youth participants rejected the notion that the figures
represented their heritage or even their lack of claim to the
land. For them, the figures didn’t tell the immigration story
many of them shared, but that also was very different
depending on whether they had immigrated as refugees,
undocumented, or by relationships to families in the United
States and in countries of origin. For me, as patron, I was
concerned that we would be politicizing local tribal con-
flicts and that we didn’t have sufficient understanding of
their issues to make informed choices of how to depict the
area’s indigenous peoples. Furthermore, the whole project
broke down when both children and youths revolted against
the process of creating the design because the photographic
method used was “too realistic” and would be difficult to
paint. Equally unacceptable to those stakeholders was a
design with cartoonesque landscapes and figures. A great
deal of effort by Carmen went into her assurances that the
design and the actual mural would be remarkably different,
and that literal translation was not the goal. Repeatedly,
Finley et al. 623
Figure 2.  Panel 1: Healthy eating/abundance.
Figure 3.  Panel 2: Community food production.
Carmen revised the electronic mural design until it was,
finally, acceptable to patrons and public.
Even so, when Madeleine converted the mural landscape
from its electronic vision to actual charcoal on board, she was
averse to laying in detail that would render the work of the
student artists to “paint by number.” For instance, at her insis-
tence, the entire area of the first panel “abundance” that con-
sists of fruits and vegetables was left open for students to
draw in the fruits and vegetables from their original “con-
cept” drawings. Look closely and there’s a very nicely drawn
example of “Dragon fruit” in the wide array of items to depict
abundance. Susan, acting in the role of patron, objected to
Madeleine that Dragon fruit didn’t fit the mural and con-
flicted with the purpose of promoting foods locally harvested.
Madeleine protested—“kid likes Dragon fruit,” she said with
a shrug and a nod of her head toward the artist. She started to
walk away, but turned back to say, “And besides, the kids
who were painting were all from Vietnam and Thailand and
even Mexico, where Dragon fruit is local.” Point made.
“In order to keep pace [with] a postcolonial world,” says
Conquergood (2002),
Our understanding of local context expands to encompass the
historical, dynamic, often traumatic, movements of people,
ideas, images, commodities, and capital. It is not easy to sort
out the local from the global; transnational circulations of
images get reworked on the ground and redeployed for local
tactical struggles. (p. 145)
The conflict between patron expectations and public is
captured in the depiction of Dragon fruit and compromise
was called for; the fruit stayed.
The public, our students, who were also the painters,
held an expectation that the concept of painting murals at
AHAS included the ethics we have promoted in the pro-
gram from the beginning—if these paintings were to be
consistent with our educational practices, then they were
also an opportunity for the “I” story. Here, we were even in
conflict thematically, with one of our themes being respect
for “local and indigenous” foods and another being “food
legacy.” One of the difficulties we know to exist for many
immigrants in this area of the Pacific Northwest is the lack
of availability of traditional foods and ingredients. In the
example of the New Deal murals, sometimes alterations to
content were required when iconography depicted ideas and
sentiments outside the range of the patron’s purpose—such
as one example “under fire for its ‘pessimistic attitude.’”
Still, the notion of place is important to considerations of
mural work. Quite a bit has been written about the role of
murals in establishing a sense of place for outsider popula-
tions. Yet, Lippard (1998) writes “Murals are not often
enough considered in the context of their specific urban
landscapes.” Regionalism was an important consideration
in constructing the New Deal murals. Specifically, the
patrons required mural artists to include “factual content
derived from the local scene.” Yet, Marling (1982) also
notes that history has not recorded any clear mechanisms
for the production of New Deal murals “whereby a Section
artist was commissioned for service; betook him or herself
to Anyplace, USA; mingled with the natives; and painted a
mural that local tastemakers deemed satisfactory, abhorrent,
or ignorable” (p. 84). Artists were primarily from urban
centers like New York and California and regionalism was
624 Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies 14(6)
Figure 4.  Panel 3: Urban gardens.
Figure 5.  Panel 4: Pacific Northwest food heritage.
sometimes achieved by changing details of commissioned
art to fit the locale. Marling draws the example of a mural
design which showed a cattle train on the plains of the
Dakotas, altered into a prairie campfire scene of lumber-
jacks in Oregon. “Goodbye, bandana. Hello, oilskin”
(p. 85). It would have been a violation of the ethics of care for
individuals to make any such changes to the AHAS mural to
accommodate allegiance to a patron-introduced theme.
Quite a different question of place emerges among peo-
ple who are placeless but who live in every urban and sub-
urban enclave of America. Children who do not have
permanent dwellings but who move as visitors to the homes
of friends and relatives, reside in shelters and in dwellings
not intended for residences, even living in campgrounds
and cars, experience transience more so than the turnover
that takes place in the specific boundaries of urban neigh-
borhoods; thus, the notion of mobile murals has resonated
with AHAS participants and we have created quite a num-
ber of these movable displays over the years.
Again, however, the pedagogical purpose of the AHAS
program is to actually lay claim to space; we propose that
our marginalized students have every right of full citizen-
ship in their schools as any housed or majority student
would have. It is our purpose to assure that our students are
not regarded as “transient strangers” in their neighborhood
schools. Thus, although flexible as to placement, we also
needed these murals to both create and represent an ethical
claim to belonging.
The Garden to Table mural represents a pedagogy of
hope—it is futuristic, rather than merely historical. In keep-
ing with feminist art and feminist research traditions that
are undercurrents in the pedagogical approaches taken at
AHAS, it exemplifies empowerment in an artwork that is
visionary of what we might become.
AHAS students have a poignant story to tell about their
experiences of hunger, food insecurity, and nutritional
imbalance. Susan and Madeleine have their stories to tell
from years of AHAS participation—the little girl who
stuffed her pockets with berries and ruined her clothes; the
young boy who licked food off the outside of a garbage
can while waiting for breakfast after his family of four
parsed out one McDonald’s salad over an entire weekend;
the fourth-grade girl who carefully preserved one half of
every meal she was given to return to her mother who
might otherwise not eat that day; the child who carefully
replicated the solar panels we built for a cooking class
because her family couldn’t afford to purchase wood for a
campfire while they lived in a tent; the conversation
Maddie participated in where every student in economic
poverty had eaten fast food the previous day. These are not
the stories told in the Garden to Table mural. Rather,
because of the educational purpose of the mural, the stu-
dents chose to depict abundance and variety of fruits and
vegetables; they wanted to demonstrate their experience
of shared, community gardens, and their hope for a future
in which urban buildings include “green” rooftops with
ample plant life. Their vision of regional food heritage
was the one homage to history—but it also underscores
wild-caught salmon (as opposed to farm raised) and
includes vegetables that are indigenous to the Pacific
Northwest and are available in the students’ expanding
conceptualization of locally available foods.
Finley et al. 625
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with
respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this
article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research,
authorship, and/or publication of this article.
References
Baca, J. (n.d.). Biography. Available from www.judybaca.com/
Cockcroft, E., Weber, J. P., & Cockcroft, J. (1998). Toward a peo-
ple’s art: The contemporary mural movement. Albuquerque:
University of New Mexico Press.
Conquergood, D. (2002). Performance studies: Interventions and
radical research. The Drama Review, 46, 145-156.
Freire, P. (1998). Teachers as cultural workers: Letters to those
who dare teach. Boulder, CO: Westview.
Kincheloe, L. J., & McLaren, P. (2000). Rethinking critical
theory and qualitative research. In N. K. Denzin & Y. S.
Lincoln (Eds.), Handbook of qualitative research (2nd ed.,
pp. 279-313). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Lippard, L. R. (1998). Foreword. In E. Cockcroft, J.P. Weber &
J. Cockcroft (Eds.), Toward a people’s art: The contempo-
rary mural movement (pp. xi-xv). Albuquerque: University of
New Mexico Press.
Madison, D. S. (2005). Critical ethnography: Method, ethics, and
performance. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Marling, K. A. (1982). Wall-to-wall America: A cultural history
of post-office murals in the Great Depression. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press.
Vonk, C. (2011). The physical expression of diversity on uni-
versity campuses. Unpublished report, Diversity Council,
Washington State University Vancouver.
Author Biographies
Susan Finley is a professor at Washington State University. She bases
her pedagogy and inquiry in arts-based approaches to understanding
social and cultural issues in educational contexts. She is a community
activist who has implemented educational efforts with street youths
and economically poor children, youths, and adults, housed and
unhoused. In 2010, she and Marcelo Diversi co-edited a special issue
of Cultural Studies↔Critical Methodologies devoted to critical home-
lessness. Her chapter about critical arts-based research in the Sage
Handbook of Qualitative Research inspired this special issue.
Carmen Vonk is an independent mural consultant who has partici-
pated in several mural projects in Oregon and Washington and who
has extensively photographed murals in the United States and
Mexico. She has provided mural design and educational support to
the At Home At School (AHAS) program and Back on Track in the
Vancouver, Washington, public schools. She is the author of a white
paper The Physical Expression of Diversity on University Campuses,
prepared for Washington State University Vancouver, Diversity
Council.
Madeleine L. Finley is a high school student at Vancouver School
of Arts and Academics (a public school). With her mother, Susan
Finley, she has participated in 13 summer sessions of the AHAS
program. She has exhibited her artwork at the Sixth Street Gallery in
Vancouver, WA, and other venues. Her volunteer work for the
National Honor’s Society includes painting and mural projects with
AHAS and theatre workshops for Vancouver Public Schools ele-
mentary school students.