“But isn’t it illegal?” Using Street Art to Engage Students on Issues of Social Justice
Bibliographic record
Abstract
For the past 15 years I have been researching and documenting, through photography and video, street art from different parts of the world.As a longtime educator whose teaching practice is rooted in the principles of equity, inclusion and cultural responsiveness, I regularly integrate street art in my courses when discussing issues of social justice.I have witnessed how this art form encourages learners of diverse ages and backgrounds to have in depth discussions on accessibility, racism, decolonization and related issues.I see how street art not only engages students but also opens pathways to difficult discussions.This is something I experienced personally when I was eight years old.At that age, I became aware of the importance of political freedom for the first time.I didn't learn about it in a classroom, or by reading a book, or from watching or listening to a news report.I learned about politics through messages posted anonymously on the walls and streets of a bustling city.In the summer of 1976, when I was visiting Lisbon, Portugal with my family, I first saw political street art.It was fanned out like the pages of a newspaper, providing information and personal opinions everywhere I looked.One image was painted and posted repeatedly: a red carnation.I remember a specific piece of street art on a wall at a busy intersection.It depicted a soldier with a rifle and a red carnation stuck in its barrel.There were no words with the art, but I remember thinking that it meant something important.I asked my parents, who were both Portuguese, what the message was communicating to the many people who were crossing paths with it daily.They explained that the red carnation, already a symbol associated with socialism in Portugal, was adopted during a revolution that started on April 25th, 1974.Known as "The Carnation Revolution," it led to the fall of a dictatorship and the installation of a democratic socialist government backed by ordinary citizens, who despite the risk of imprisonment took to the streets to support the risky coup started by a handful of low-ranking military officers.The dictatorship, which had been in
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.015 | 0.017 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.016 | 0.011 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.014 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.012 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.016 | 0.005 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".