The purpose of this article is to explore the potential of artistic design to promote critical literacy among adult learners. Conducted by a university literacy educator and a university art educator, this qualitative study examined adults’ divergent perspectives in the design of a mosaic at a center for the homeless. Participants included a university art educator, undergraduates, and outreach center clients. Data included transcribed interviews, written reflections, and field notes. Data were coded and themes identified and reexamined to accurately describe the project's potential for promoting critical literacy. Findings demonstrate how design, a contested literacy space, disrupted social habits, challenged stereotypes, negotiated texts, and transformed perceptions. Yet, time, institutional constraints, missed opportunities for critical dialogue, and other coercive elements limited the project's transformative potential. This suggests that such projects can be an important step toward adults’ critical literacy but are insufficient for garnering long‐term consequences.

Claims that the arts are a kind of research is nothing new, finding relevance for scholars in the social sciences and the arts (Barone & Eisner, 2011; Cahnmann Taylor & Siegesmund, 2018; Leavy, 2019, 2009; Sullivan, 2005). Given that art is continuously being reimagined, it follows that arts-based research takes into account contemporary artistic processes and materials and the theories, aesthetic philosophies and contexts that shape them. In this paper, this author considers socially engaged art in the context of arts-based research and raises the question, what can be learned from social practice as an arts-based methodology?  The work of three socially engaged artists are referenced to demonstrate how distinct qualities associated with social practice, such as shared participation, multiplicity, and collective action offer new considerations for arts-based research that aims to bring about social change.

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