For her thesis, Kira Wu-Hacohen ’25 did much more than just examine art education—she embodied it. Drawing on her sophomore-year experience teaching an afterschool workshop at Asian Arts Initiative (AAI), a community-based arts organization in Philadelphia, she leveraged her own classroom as a site for both learning and research. Her project, “Planting Seeds,” explored how young people develop political agency through art-making and the role educators can play in nurturing that process.
While working in AAI’s youth art education program, she witnessed firsthand how creative practice could spark broader conversations. “I was particularly interested in the way that art could be used to teach students things that were not just about art,” Wu-Hacohen, an anthropology and education double major, says, “like using art to explore identity and culture.”
Her thesis asks, “What does it mean to engage young people in social justice work through creative expression?” Rather than conducting interviews or relying solely on personal observation, Wu-Hacohen sought a research practice that would allow her to work with others and learn from the act of teaching. Throughout the process, she relied on the feedback of fellow educators and mentors, drawing from community-based research methodologies that emphasize mutual benefit and shared learning.
“One of my biggest takeaways from my thesis was gaining a deeper understanding of what it means to do research that is reciprocal and in partnership with people that participate in research,” she says.
Support from her thesis advisor, Visiting Assistant Professor of Anthropology Sophie Schrago, helped Wu-Hacohen navigate the complexities of approaching the classroom as both educator and ethnographer. Wu-Hacohen credits Schrago’s encouragement with helping her stay attentive to detail and to bring her own voice into the final work. That spurred Wu-Hacohen’s realization that reciprocal research can be just as rigorous—and often more impactful—than traditional academic models.
Wu-Hacohen describes her project as an effort to translate academic ideas into something useful for people outside of academia. Her workshop created a space where students could reflect on justice, share their thoughts, and begin imagining the change they want to see. “At the end of the day, I wanted this research process to benefit the people—educators and students—that I was working with, and I feel successful in this mission,” she says.
The thesis also shaped her sense of what’s next. “I came into college thinking that I might want to teach in the future and am graduating knowing that whatever I do will be very intertwined with education,” she says. This summer, she’ll be working at a youth social justice program in Philadelphia and bringing the lessons of her thesis with her into another community of learning.