Combining Voices: Merging Art and Writing through Place-Based Principles

Place-based writing (PBW) allows students the opportunity to participate in writing engagements that are purposeful, authentic, and contextually situated. Utilizing community resources can offer students additional spaces and places for writing. This chapter will focus on a partnership with a local museum where students and teachers take part in a PBW, Combining Voices, project that connects art to a variety of writing engagements across multiple genres. As part of the Combining Voices program, students in K-12 settings use artworks as the inspiration for a series of conversations about writing, interpreting, and responding to art. Each year the museum selects four works of art to be the focus of a series of student writing activities. The students participate in a tour designed to introduce them to the selected artwork. On this tour they discuss ways in which these works can be the basis for generating narratives or poetry that are then submitted to the Combining Voices competition.