With a flick of the switch, a sixth-grader in teacher Linda Graham's art class at Whispering Pines Elementary School turns off the lights. A hush falls over the room as the slide presentation begins. The first slide comes into view.

"What do you see in that image? What strategy are they using in this ad?" Graham asks the 40 students being introduced to the Artful Truth-Healthy Propaganda Arts Project, an art education initiative created by The Wolfsonian-Florida International University which is designed to change youth attitudes about tobacco use.

Slide after slide of cigarette ads are presented. With each new image, more and more students become engaged in the discussion, eager to voice their opinions of the ads.

"They're not just showing you a flat pack of cigarettes in this one," Graham comments as they view a particularly enticing ad. "The pack is open, it's inviting, it's saying `come on in'...there are lots of contradictions here."

Graham is one of 106 educators around the state participating in Artful Truth. This innovative program is targeted at fourth through sixth graders, before they reach those vulnerable years - between 11 and 14 years old - when many adolescents try their first cigarette.

Artful Truth is based on the premise that tobacco prevention must begin during these years. Research indicates that the younger people start smoking, the more likely they are to become strongly addicted to nicotine and to use other drugs. In fact, teens who smoke are three times more likely than nonsmokers to use alcohol, eight times more likely to use marijuana, and 22 times more likely to use cocaine.

In the past, anti-tobacco media and educational campaigns have not appeared to be effective in reducing smoking. More recently, however, state initiatives in California, Massachusetts and, now, Florida, have proven that well-funded anti-tobacco campaigns can succeed in reducing youth tobacco use. Florida's campaign is unique, though, as the nation's first tobacco prevention program funded by the tobacco industry. In August 1997, the state of Florida won a landmark $13 billion settlement in the war against the tobacco industry. About $200 million from the settlement is funding a comprehensive, five-pronged Florida Tobacco Pilot Program aimed at reducing teen smoking. Education and training, the first of the five program components, focuses on school-age children. Students are instructed about the dangers of tobacco use and are helped to develop skills needed to avoid tobacco. Other program components include: youth programming and community partnerships, marketing and communications, enforcement, and evaluation and research.

Florida's campaign also is unusual because it asked teens themselves to be the program's leaders. The proposed campaign design was shown to 600 middle and high school students at last spring's four-day Teen Tobacco Summit. The teens helped refine the campaign strategy, assisted in the development of the pilot program, and launched their own teen-inspired, teen-driven brand: Truth - A Generation United Against Tobacco. "Truth" messages are disseminated through television/radio, print, and outdoor ads, and through SWAT (Students Working Against Tobacco), a grassroots advocacy organization.

The approach seems to be working. In a survey taken six months after the launch of "Truth," more than 90 percent of Florida teens could identify at least one aspect of the campaign. It appears that momentum is building and teen attitudes about tobacco are changing.

Artful Truth came about from a casual conversation between Cathy Leff, director of The Wolfsonian-FIU, and a representative from Florida's Office of Tobacco Control, an office of the Florida Department of Health.

"I was unaware of the Florida Tobacco Pilot Program at that point," Leff explained. "I was meeting with someone in Tallahassee who happened to mention that they had launched this program two months earlier that sought to change youth's attitudes about smoking. I suggested they give us a call and come look at our collection."

Founded in 1986 to oversee the Mitchell Wolfson Jr. Collection, The Wolfsonian is a museum and research center in Miami Beach, Florida. With more than 70,000 objects in its collection, the museum's goal is to educate people about the ways design reflects societal values and helps shape human experience. Its collection includes furniture, decorative arts, paintings, books, periodicals, and ephemera from the period 1885 to 1945. In July 1997, Mitchell Wolfson Jr. donated The Wolfsonian's historic Miami Beach museum and its collection to FIU.

"Staff from the Florida Tobacco Pilot Program came and looked at our collection and how we examine objects for the social, political, economic, and technological messages they convey about the period in which they were created," Leff continued. "They became very excited and asked us to submit a proposal for a program aimed at fourth through sixth graders, to teach them about the power of visual culture to convey persuasive and manipulative messages."

"Our goal is to prevent young people from becoming victims of a lame addiction that kills. We want them to become more educated consumers and to question what they see," said Bradley S. Coulter, special projects coordinator for the Florida Tobacco Pilot Program. "We selected The Wolfsonian as a partner in this effort because of their unique collection and specialization in propaganda art. We knew they could put their resources and professional experience to good use when it comes to showing the strength of propaganda, like tobacco ads, how those ads are created and why they are manipulative."

The Wolfsonian's proposal was based on a simple assumption: Teach students to recognize the persuasive tactics used in tobacco advertising and they will become aware of the ways in which tobacco use is promoted as a positive experience.

"Once students learn to recognize propaganda as such, we believe they will be less susceptible to it," Leff said. "To this end, Artful Truth also asks students to become propagandists themselves - to create their own artwork that conveys persuasive messages about smoking and tobacco use."

Thinking they would have two years to implement a program, The Wolfsonian staff began calling educators throughout the state to solicit input for their proposal. While excited about the ideas presented, state administrators sent them back to the drawing board to revise their timeline and shorten the program. Ultimately, the Florida Tobacco Pilot Program granted The Wolfsonian $1.42 million, of which $571,500 was earmarked for educators who would be awarded grants to teach young people about manipulation in art and advertising.

Leff and her team pared their proposal down to a ten-month program, which began last September and continues through this June. The program's ambitious timeline would leave even the most seasoned educator breathless:

• two months for Florida art educators to attend one of the seven workshops The Wolfsonian staff organized and implemented in museums throughout the state to introduce them to the program and the Wolfsonian's curatorial approach to examining objects and visual culture for its message;

• two months for The Wolfsonian staff to review commission applications, select participating schools, and notify the schools of their awards;

• three months to actually implement the Artful Truth program in the classrooms, with students creating their own works of propaganda art;

• two months for participating art teachers to select and submit their students' works of art for inclusion in the Artful Truth exhibition.

The program culminates this June with the opening of the Artful Truth Exhibition at The Wolfsonian and the publication of a catalog and companion interactive CD-rom containing students' submissions.

"We held the introductory workshops in museums because, as part of a statewide museum community, we wanted educators to become aware of museums as educational resources and to learn about the collections throughout the state," Leff said. "Many educators had not been to museums in years, so this was a wonderful opportunity to bring together art educators and museum professionals."

With a minimum of $3,000 and a maximum of $7,500 at stake with each commission, The Wolfsonian team designed the application as a conceptual test to determine how well the educator understood the goals of the project. While teachers were busy preparing their commission applications, The Wolfsonian developed a comprehensive Instructor Resource Portfolio to help teachers receiving funds implement Artful Truth with their students.

"We've asked art educators to use our Instructor Resource Portfolio as a guide in presenting at least five contact hours of instruction on how advertising messages are communicated, how they (the students) are being targeted, and how to begin to analyze the messages. We then expect them to spend at least four contact hours on the actual commission art project," Leff said.

In addition to these printed materials, the Artful Truth website (www.artfultruth.org) contains information for both teachers and students. Besides additional lesson ideas and resources for teachers, the website offers a section for viewing student art projects, a game section that reinforces Artful Truth's concepts, and information on The Wolfsonian and its collections.

The Wolfsonian ultimately divvied the $571,500 between 106 schools and not-for-profit museums, cultural institutions, and youth organizations.

"The Wolfsonian staff has been just incredible," said Coulter, with the state's Tobacco Pilot Program. "They are enthusiastic and well prepared. They have done an awesome job, from organizing the teacher education workshops, to creating an incredible Instructor Resource Portfolio that will live on long after this project is finished. They have fulfilled our vision of what this project can be and have even gone beyond that."

The heart of Artful Truth takes place in classrooms (as well as some other non-profit organizations) throughout the state where the concepts of propaganda and manipulative advertising are taught to the project's target audience, fourth through sixth graders.

After a field trip to The Wolfsonian where they learned how packaging is designed to deliver persuasive messages, a group of Rosemary Wolfson's sixth-grade art students from Biscayne Gardens Elementary School started creating their own persuasive anti-tobacco messages - on oversized facsimiles of matchbooks.

"Matchbooks are one of the tools that help promote and spread smoking culture," Wolfson said. "The students are designing their own `matchless' matchbooks with a persuasive, pro-tobacco message on the outside, and a truthful message showing the reality of what smoking can do on the inside. I wanted to encourage students to utilize a format that would best communicate their message and be unusual, easily handled, have shock value, and reach a wide audience."

"Now this student did an excellent job," she continued, pointing to Adley Charles' matchbook design. "On the cover, there is a beautiful illustration and it says, `Somebody just died. Grab a cigarette; it'll calm your nerves.' Then, when you open it up, the message inside says, `Get the point! Don't smoke or this will happen to you,' and he's drawn a picture of someone dying."

As students busily sketch away, the conversation among the students becomes animated.

"Did you ever smoke?"

"No," replied 12-year-old Kenasha Paul. "I think once, when I was smaller, I saw a cigarette on the floor and began playing with it and pretended I was smoking it...My cousin, he smoked and he died of lung cancer. I said, `I don't want that to happen to me.'"

"I think the people who smoke, like the parents, should be ashamed of themselves," said Keisha Bazile, 11, a classmate who was nearly finished with her matchbook design. "They're supposed to be our role models. Some kids see the grown people smoking and they might want to smoke, too."

By the time class was finished, all of the students had completed at least one matchbook design.

Wolfson said her class would like to have the "matchbook" art reproduced on real matchbook-quality paper and then distributed throughout the community, as "healthy propaganda" to restaurants, stores, and other businesses.

"It is an unparalleled opportunity to demonstrate the relevance of The Wolfsonian's collection of propaganda art to important issues of today," Leff said. "And while our collection is of a certain historic period, specifically 1885-1945, its messages are equally potent today."

Leff noted that besides supporting research and enhancing existing University curricula, the program shows how the museum's collection can be used to educate elementary and secondary school (K-12) students.

"We are grateful for the confidence the state has placed in us by inviting us to develop this project. Rarely does a museum get a chance like this," Leff said. "It's also given us an opportunity to support art educators and museums around the state who are doing such great work. It challenges them to demonstrate what they can do, given the right tools and resources. The bottom line is that art education is not peripheral to education, but integral."

While it's still too early to measure the program's success, pre- and post-tests already are underway to evaluate how successful it is in teaching youngsters about reading visual culture and appreciating its impact.

"We've put everything into making this project succeed. If successful, then it can be refined, upgraded, and continued next year, at a minimal cost and ultimately offered at no cost on the web site," Leff said. "If we find that we've changed kids' attitudes about tobacco use, then the state will have made an excellent investment."