Sonia BasSheva Manjon, noted leader in community-arts education, leaves California College of the Arts July 1, 2008, for a new post at Wesleyan University in Connecticut. Manjon, who will be Wesleyan's vice president for diversity and strategic partnerships, served in multiple positions at CCA, including as faculty. She developed and chaired its Community Art major and she is replaced by Sanjit Sethi, former director of Memphis College of Art's MFA Program. She was director of CCA's Center for Art in Public Life and chair of the Diversity Studies program; both positions are now open. A new tenure-track position in Community Arts has been created, now filled by media artist John Leanos. Manjon will work with Wesleyan’s leadership team developing programs to attract, retain and inspire students, faculty and staff from groups currently under-represented on campus. [LINK]

Harlem Girls Quilting Circle will talk about how they share social commentary through quilts during a discussion at the Caribbean Cultural Center in N.Y., April 30, 2008. The urban quilters are participating in events around "Speak Out!" an exhibition of their work at CCCADI, March 22- June 27. Identifying themselves as "fiber correspondents," the artists use quilting to speak out about issues affecting their lives -- matters of community, family, human rights, gentrification, politics, culture, solidarity, economics, education and religion. Participating artists include Lucinda Alexander, Anna Alvarez, Michelle Bishop, Valerie Deas, Ife Felix, Laura Gadson, Paula Wynter, Gwen Jones-Diallo, Pat Mabry, Myna Majors and Robyn Mahone-Lonesome. [LINK]

Forty-eight Theatre of the Oppressed-based events took place in 23 countries on six continents on March 16, 2008, the Jokers International Day of Action on Global Warming Organized by Headlines Theatre from Vancouver, B.C. , Jokers Day included events presented by the Mozambican Community Theatre Network, the Atelier Théatre Bourkinabé (Burkina Faso), the Interactive Resource Center (Pakistan), the Vidya Educational & Charitable Trust (India), Drama Kidz (Malaysia), Kazakhstan English Language Theater, Clean Energy For Eternity (Australia), Centre do Teatro do Oprimado do Rio de Janeiro (Brasil), Association for Socio-political Theatre (Italy), Theatr Fforwm Cymru (Wales), RiffRaff Theater (Denmark), Paulo-Freire-Gesellschaft (Germany), No Nonsense Theatre (U.K.), Les Echomédiens (France), Tiyatro Boyali Kus (Turkey), Zagreb's Youth Theatre (Croatia), The Earthling Collective (Canada), Mandala Center for Change (Wash., USA) and more. A full listing of events worldwide is on the Web. [LINK]

2008's "Beyond Broadcast" conference in D.C., June 17, will examine shifting forms, functions and fiscal strategies for public media projects. The Center for Social Media at American University is the host for this year's conference, themed "Mapping Public Media." It's expected to draw creators of digital media for public knowledge and action; participatory mapmakers, citizen journalists, DIY videographers and global bloggers; public-media leaders from PRX, The National Minority Consortia, ITVS, P.O.V., PBS, NPR, and more; media scholars from the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, MIT's Center for Future Civic Media, NYU's Center for Media, Culture and History and Annenberg West ; and policymakers and advocates concerned with universal internet access, supporting public media and fair-use issues. Early-bird registration ends April 30. For this year’s conference, the presenters have also set up a very interesting and useful social network on the Web. [LINK]

Our series "Bridge Conversations: People Who Live and Work in Multiple Worlds" continues this week with dialogues on politics, action research and indigenous social justice. They include: cultural organizer Caron Atlas and politician Mark Ritchie on politics and humanity, balancing work and life; organizer Isao Fujimoto and rural strategist Tim Marema on connecting action and academia in California's Central Valley; and Indigenous issue advocate Tia Oros Peters (Zuni Pueblo) and consultant Vanessa Whang on maintaining your vision and integrity in rooms of power. The series was commissioned by CAN and the Arts & Democracy Project of the Center for Civic Participation. The project is directed by Caron Atlas and coordinated by R. Lena Richardson; they co-edited the interviews with help from Vanessa Whang and Linda Frye Burnham. [LINK]

Vocal artist Rachel Bagby, founder of Choral Earth, has received the 11th annual $10,000 AHN Award for excellence in the field of art and healing. The Arts & Healing Network honors Bagby, who in 1986 pioneered vibralingual practices that help people form vocal communities for ecological and social healing. In 2006, Bagby founded Choral Earth’s Sing Your Part™ initiative "to inspire choirs and their audiences to exercise their power to create sonorously vital — i.e. environmentally just and healthy — communities." Historically, says AHN, choruses have proved influential in movements for social change in South Africa, Chile and England and the U.S. Today an estimated 28 million people regularly sing in a chorus or choir. Choral Earth offers training materials and programs that help choristers green their communities and raise their voices proactively in the current struggle for environmental balance." [LINK]

Training for interviewing vulnerable and traumatized communities will be offered during "Oral History, Advocacy and the Law," the 2008 Summer Institute at Columbia University in June. Workshops and case studies will include the use of oral history to document violations of civil liberties in the aftermath of 9/11; developing archives of cultural memory; land claims work involving oral memory in indigenous communities; and using digital technology to record and preserve interviews. Presented by the Columbia University Oral History Research Office, the institute, June 8-22, will explore the parallel uses of oral history and legal testimony in the classical definition of advocacy as “finding and giving” voice. Deadline for applications is April 15, 2008. [LINK]

“Intended to Provoke: Social Action in Visual Culture[s]” is a conference organized by doctoral students at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va., March 27, 2008. This Fifth Annual Visual Cultures Symposium is an interdisciplinary, multimedia inquiry into the use of art as a form of social action. Featured speakers are artists and academics from Mason and across the country. Topics include: “Counter Culture/Pro-Public: Artists on Art in the Community"; “Creative Visual Practice in Third-Party Nonviolent Intervention”; “Images of Anguish: Social Protest in Recent Ecuadorian Art”; “Seeing Birth: What Happens When Visual Taboos Are Challenged?”; and more. Events inlcude a juried student show, “Provocations: The Art of Social Action.” [LINK]

Sandglass Theater in Putney, Vermont, is hosting artists Anisa George and John O'Neal in residence as part of its "Voices of Community: Theater as Social Activism" series. Anisa George was at Sandglass March 10-15 through a National Performance Network (NPN) residency, conducting workshops and discussions with community groups and schools. Her March 14-15 solo performance, "Khouraji/Foreigner," was an account of her search for God in Iran, where her Baha’i faith was founded and where Baha’is are persecuted. John O'Neal will be at Sandglass April 6-12 through a collaborative partnership between the Network of Cultural Centers of Color and NPN, conducting story-circle workshops on civil-rights movements. His solo performance, "Don't Start Me To Talking or I'll Tell You Everything I Know," as the folk character Junebug Jabbo Jones, is set for April 11-12. [LINK]

The Arts Education Track of this year's Americans for the Arts Convention, in Philadelphia, June 20-22, will focus on quality and access The track features research and coaching on systemic arts-education change, including No Child Left Behind, new creative workforce research, RAND research on systemic provision of arts education, and Dick Deasy discussing arts education in his final weeks as director of the Arts Education Partnership. This year, AftA offers the first-ever national convening for and by teaching artists, including how-to’s on healthcare and conversations about core competencies. Peer-to-peer and expert-to-audience formats will deliver "current and comprehensive arts-education information to help you to improve the quality of and access to arts education in your community." [LINK]

The Spring 2008 issue of Teaching Artists Journal, edited by Nick Jaffe, is out from the Center for Arts Policy at Columbia College Chicago. Highlights include Susana Halpine on the historical and organic connections between visual art and the sciences; Terry Hermsen on powerful criteria for assessing, critiquing and improving student poetry; Dan Serig on visual metaphor theory and its relevance to teaching artistry; Judith Tannenbaum on the ethos, organization and practice of WritersCorps; Christa Treichel on going beyond the residency model for teaching artists; news and interviews from the field; a review of Ann Markusen's research on the economic contributions of artists by Judy Hornbacher; and in-depth reviews of books and other resources. A subscription to the 80-page print quarterly includes online access. [LINK]

CAN's Places To Study database has added two courses available through an interesting resource: the Higher Education Consortium for Urban Affairs (HECUA). HECUA's two 16-credit college arts courses, "City Arts" (Spring) and "Writing for Social Change" (Fall), are taught by poet William Reichard. Both embrace creative practices as essential tools for civic engagement, participatory democracy and social justice. Both include classroom seminars, field visits and a professional internship. HECUA is an inter-institutional consortium of 17 colleges and universities in the Minneapolis-St. Paul, Minn., area that offers experientially based off-campus study programs focused on social change/social justice. HECUA's roots go back to the 1968 riots and fires in north Minneapolis following the assassination of Martin Luther King: a program for college students called Crisis Colony developing new ways to understand the nature of the urban crisis. [LINK]

As part of its "Green Docs" series, MASS MoCA is showing an interesting, award-winning film: "Plagues & Pleasures on the Salton Sea," March 27, 2008. John Waters narrates this history of a place once called the California Riviera and now known as one of America’s worst ecological disasters: a fetid, stagnant lake coughing up dead fish and birds by the thousands. Part environmental exposé and part portrait of the hardy eccentrics who have carved out lives for themselves around the Salton Sea’s edge, Chris Metzler and Jeff Springer's film is described by the Village Voice as “a heartbreaking, sidesplitting parade of humanity" -- Hungarian revolutionaries, Christian nudists, pop stars, land sharks, hard drinkers, empty cities, failed resort towns, tons of dead fish, a dying café and a man who built a mountain. [LINK]

Today on CAN we're excited to launch a series of 18 interviews called "Bridge Conversations: People Who Live and Work in Multiple Worlds." The series was commissioned by the Center for Civic Participation’s Arts & Democracy Project and the Community Arts Network. These conversations highlight a diverse group of people -- including artists, community activists, educators, funders, political leaders and scholars -- who are building bridges and creating hybrid and integrated programs, strategies and lives. They illustrate how some of the most creative strategies for positive social change live in the intersections of disciplines, sectors, cultures and generations. The project is directed by Caron Atlas and coordinated by R. Lena Richardson; they co-edited the interviews with help from Vanessa Whang and Linda Frye Burnham. We start the series this week with conversations on "New Paradigms of Artful Change," between Dudley Cocke, Craig McGarvey and Peter Pennekamp; "The Creativity of Community Development," between Gayle Isa and Jeremy Liu; and "The Power of Art To Move People," between Anan Ameri and Ismael Ahmed. Watch for more soon. [LINK]

CAN's Places To Study database has added a new Master of Arts in Applied Theatre at City University of New York's School of Professional Studies, launching in Fall 2008. The ensemble-based program in the use of theater to address social and educational issues in nontraditional contexts and venues is linked to the professional applied-theater work of the Creative Arts Team (CAT). A 36-credit program in New York City, full-time or part-time, it offers apprenticeship opportunities with CAT's professional outreach programs or appropriate programs elsewhere. It culminates in a project thesis in which students research, create, implement and document an original applied-theater model. Deadline to apply for fall is April 21. [LINK]

Barefoot Artists recently purchased 100 goats for the Rugerero Survivors Village in Gisenyi, Rwanda, writes artist Lily Yeh in the Barefoot newsletter. "100 families will care for the goats and benefit from their milk," says Yeh. Other news: Barefoot volunteers in Gisenyi have been strengthening a sunflower-seed-oil production initiative, helping set up a small business for trainees in their sewing program, training local potters to recycle agricultural waste to fire their pottery, helping area youth access secondary education and investigating strategies for improving sanitation in the village. Jean Bosco Musana, Barefoot's host in Rwanda, will visit the U.S. in April to build more partnerships, and three Rwandan medical students are at Philadelphia's Thomas Jefferson University studying community medicine. Twelve Jefferson students go to Rwanda next summer to work with their new Rwandan colleagues in Butare. [LINK]

The Curriculum Project is gathering information on the current state of community cultural development education, its strengths and its needs. Project directors, under Imagining America’s auspices, are veteran community arts educators and activists Jan Cohen-Cruz, Dudley Cocke and Arlene Goldbard. They launched the Project early in 2007 when they recognized the field’s rapid growth in writing and documentation, educational programs and work bridging culture, community development and social change. Along with national advisers Ludovic Blain III, Jamie Haft and Sonia BasSheva Mañjon, they see a unique opportunity to take stock of how we educate community arts practitioners. Deadline for artists, educators, organization leaders and others to take the online survey is May 15, 2008; participants will receive the project’s fall report, which will launch an implementation phase involving dialogues and information exchange across sectors. [LINK]

Another syllabus on "Art and Activism" has been added to the CANuniversity collection of resources for community-arts education. The course, created by Maggie Leininger at Roosevelt University in Chicago for Spring 2008, will investigate current theory as it relates to public, guerilla and political/social-based art work. In addition, students will develop a collaborative public artwork that will take place in the North Lawndale community of Chicago with Umoja, a nonprofit group that helps students at Manley High School to enter college. Students will be responsible for initiating, implementing and completing this collaborative process and will have direct interactions with members of Umoja and the North Lawndale community. A bibliography is included. [LINK]

Human Kinetics has published a new book that crosses the sectors of arts programming and leisure activities. "Arts and Cultural Programming: A Leisure Perspective," edited by Gaylene Carpenter and Doug Blandy, is intended to speak to a broad audience, pointing up conventional wisdom and best practices from both those sectors and integrating them "to challenge our ways of thinking" about both. Carpenter and Blandy are faculty members in the graduate Arts and Administration Program at the University of Oregon in, respectively, recreation and arts education. They saw important associations and intersections between their two disciplines, but a lack of literature connecting those bodies of knowledge. This book covers theory, practice and context, with contributions from 12 experts in the fields. It's an addition to recent perspectives on "informal arts" by Alaka Wali, Maribel Alvarez, Tom Borrup and others. [LINK]

Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation has awarded 13 grants totaling more than $213,000 through its Artists & Communities residency program. The grants will support 13 artists who will spend more than 600 days in communities creating new work throughout the mid-Atlantic region in 2008-09. Projects include a collaboration among photographer Dan Burkholder, the Huntingdon County Arts Council and members of a rural Pennsylvania township to create a permanent installation at a local hospital celebrating the institution's centennial anniversary; theater artist Ping Chong working with the Village of Arts & Humanities and youth from North Philadelphia to develop a new play that explores the effects of urban violence on their lives; sculptor James Simon partnering with a neighborhood in Braddock, Pa., to transform a 4,000-square-foot abandoned lot into an urban park with mosaics, waterfalls, streams, ponds and sculptures; and more. [LINK]

New critical texts about public art and community interaction have been commissioned by ixia, England's public-art think tank, and they're posted online. Available are: "A New Year Provocation for 2008" by artist David Patten, arguing that keeping artists out of the public-art development process, sheltered by agencies and curators, can add to the sense of unease and mystery over the artist’s role; "Maggie, Maggie, Maggie, Out, Out, Out! " by Freee (artists Mel Jordan, Andy Hewitt and Dave Beech), introducing their work and challenges readers to rethink the role that artists continue to "quietly and predictably" occupy in public space; and "Art with Communities: Reflections on a Changing Landscape" by artist Loraine Leeson, reflecting on how her community practice has had to shift in relation to the changing politics from the '70s to the present. [LINK]

The Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Festival, March 21-April, 25, 2008, in Houston, Texas, celebrates a poet who wrote "the first feminist manifesto" in 1691. Sponsored by the National Museum of Mexican Art (NMMA, Chicago) and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the festival is sited at MECA in the Sixth Ward's historic Dow School. Initiated by the NMMA in 1993, the Sor Juana Festival is now celebrated nationwide, the country's largest Mexican performing-arts festival in the country and the only festival of its kind dedicated to Mexican women. Sor Juana was a self-taught scholar, nun, poet and a writer of the baroque school, born in Mexico c. 1650. Her "Respuesta a Sor Filotea" defended women's right to any education they desired. The Houston festival includes a Latina photo exhibit and a ballet, "The Self Portrait: The Life of Frida Kahlo." [LINK]

"Public Art 360: Symposium from Seven Perspectives," is a conferene April 11–12, 2008, at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. This conference, say the sponsors, will "address current and future orientations on public art from the perspectives of the artist, architect, landscape architect, government, private interests, community and critic, recognizing the inherent complexities in a public art process when multiple constituencies need voice and there is potential for conflicting perspectives among commissioning organizations, review agencies, elected officials, taxpayers, design professionals and artists." Seven keynote discussions will frame critical issues associated with how public art projects can be initiated, approved, funded and implemented; how to reinforce shared objectives through a public review process; and implications for public policy. Speakers include nationally prominent practitioners from the field. Area tours feature local public art and artist studios, including Durham's Golden Belt, a new artist live-work housing-redevelopment project. [LINK]

Another syllabus has been added to the CANuniversity collection of resources in community-based art education: "Who's Hungry?" at UCLA. This special course in UCLA's World Arts & Cultures Department is being taught during Winter Quarter (ends March 21) by artists Dan Froot & Dan Hurlin out of their latest interdisciplinary performance project "Who’s Hungry?" which tells the stories of five diverse individuals living with food insecurity. Students studied local hunger issues and conducted mini-oral-history projects in the community, presenting them in class as toy theater. They also had the opportunity to work with Froot and Hurlin on all phases of the adaptation, design and construction of three larger-scale oral-history/toy-theater works.This is an interesting model for a participatory course with working artists. "Who's Hungry?" opens in West Hollywood's Plummer Park in June. [LINK]

"Public Engagement in a Diverse America: Layers of Place, Movements of People" is the theme of Imagining America's ninth annual conference, and a call for proposals is out. IA (Imagining America: Artists and Scholars in Public LIfe) is inviting faculty, students, and community partners to participate in the conference, October 2-4, 2008, in Los Angeles, hosted by USC. A particular focus will be the diverse layers of people, places and disciplinary intersections that shape the work of public engagement. Deadline is April 25 for proposals for seminars, roundtables workshops and panels on these topics as they relate to public scholarship: Layers of Peoples, Places and Histories; Social Movements & Diversity; and Engagement across Sectors. Also,sought for display at the conference are posters about off-topic research. For details on session formats and more (not yet on the IA Web site at this writing), e-mail Juliet Feibel: jufeibel@syr.edu. [LINK]

The March 2008 issue of The School Administrator is entitled "The Arts at K-12's Center Stage, Finding ways to increase student access to creative learning." This monthly publication of the American Association of School Administrators (est. 1865) is delivered to every school administrator in the U.S. The issue overflows with articles about the benefits of arts education (all online): "Why the Arts Deserve Center Stage" by Richard Deasy; "Basically, Arts are Basic" by Harvard's Project Zero's Lois Hetland; "Bucking Trends: Expanding the Arts" by Kathi Levin; "Creating a Brighter Workforce with the Arts" by Robert Lynch; "Collecting Arts Data Under No Child Left Behind" by Narric Rome; "Why the Arts Change the Learning Experience" by John Eger; "Creating a Whole New World" by Paul Houston, director of AASA; and more. [LINK]

Today CAN brings you "Challenging Our Students' Place through Collaborative Art: A Service-Learning Approach" by Karen Hutzel. Hutzel, assistant professor of art education at the Ohio State University, asks, "Are we challenging college students to be critical of their current places? Or do we keep them 'safe' on campus to do the work of 'real' learning?" She details two art-based service-learning experiences that can serve as models for authentic community-university partnerships by challenging college students’ sense of place through an examination of “others’” places. "Collaborative art ," she says, "provides a mode of reflection as well as a vision for change, as the negotiation among partners requires an intimate dialogue of values and beliefs as well as visions and ideas." This story was first published in the Journal of Higher Education Outreach and Engagement, University of Georgia. [LINK]

The Ford Foundation has awarded the New England Foundation for the Arts (NEFA) $300,000 in support for Native Arts @ NEFA. This program, designed to address needs expressed by Native American artists, supports Native artists and organizations in New England and nationally through grantmaking, professional development and network development, including a New England Native Artist directory. NEFA is part of a national IllumiNation cohort of seven organizations brought together by Ford: the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian; First Peoples Fund; Seventh Generation Fund; American Composers Forum; Eiteljorg Museum of American Indians and Western Art; and the Evergreen State College Foundation Longhouse Education and Cultural Center. Later this year, the foundation will extend the work of the IllumiNation program, launching a new Native American arts-and-culture fund with an initial endowment of $5 million. [LINK]

Neighbors will gather at Intermedia Arts in Minneapolis, Minn., March 14, 2008, for "A Community Conversation" on the role of artists and creativity in neighborhoods. They'll be talking with a panel of artists, policy-makers and community activists before the opening of "Minneapolis 55408," the annual exhibition of artworks by people in the Intermedia neighborhood, "the most creative Zip Code in Minneapolis." For over a decade, Intermedia Arts has opened its galleries to 55408 artists of all levels of experience. "Minneapolis 55408 creates a sense of community for many artists who may not have an opportunity to show work in more traditional gallery settings," says Intermedia on its Web site. "This annual exhibition ... serves an avenue for neighborhood artists to connect to each other, share experiences and sell their work." Come back to the Web site for photos. [LINK]

Artists Brett Cook and Wendy Ewald will lead “A Dialogue on Art and Social Collaboration” at Duke University's Nasher Museum of Art, March 17, 2008. Photographer Wendy Ewald and painter Brett Cook first worked together in 1999, when Ewald invited Cook to work with teachers in Durham, N.C. Since then they have been discussing and refining the ways in which they make collaborative art. Last fall, at Amherst College, they created their first public installation/exhibition together. In Monday's dialogue, they will describe how they each formerly conceived and carried out a collaborative project, one that involved constructing rich, welcoming environments for their community partners to work in – in addition to making their own photographs and paintings. The event is part of the "Engaging Documentary: Community Values and Artistic Visions" series by the Center for Documentary Studies. [LINK]

“Collaboratory artists are the future," says Great Leap Director Nobuko Miyamoto. "They give us new eyes to appreciate and negotiate the complex cultural maze we live in.” The occasion is "Collaboratory V," the fifth work in an Great Leap’s ongoing mentorship initiative designed to train emerging artists in cross-cultural collaborative performance and community-based leadership skills. The piece is "Leaps of Faithm," a collaboration among ten new interfaith artists, March 8-9, 2008, at L.A.'s Japanese American National Museum’s National Center for the Preservation of Democracy. The artists worked together for eight weeks, visiting religious centers, meeting with local mentors/elders/“wisdom-keepers," experiencing master classes and sharing personal stories of faith. Led by artists Dan Kwong, Young-Ae Park and Miyamoto, it's co-sponsored Nikkei for Civil Rights and Redress, Jewish-Muslim Dialogue Group, Three Cousins, Metivta and Hyphen Magazine. [LINK]

The Southern Poverty Law Center's online Teaching Tolerance magazine features a story by Kimi Eisele in its Spring 2008 issue analyzing the value -- and funding problems -- of arts education. Profiling a successful school program in Tucson, Ariz., where guest artists help refugee students connect throughout the learning process, Eisele discusses challenges posed to such programs by recent cutbacks in arts-ed funding, blaming the No Child Left Behind Act. "Many schools, particularly those labeled [by NCLB] as 'failing' or 'low performing' have had to decrease teaching time in the arts for other subjects. The irony is that arts programming may be exactly what such schools most need to improve student achievement." She quotes experts like CAN writer Arnold Aprill on how and why arts cutbacks may impact most heavily on children from "low socioeconomic backgrounds."url= [LINK]

The internationally known Saatchi Gallery has launched an online art gallery for schools around the world, allowing teachers to upload their students' artworks to the site. Describing the new Portfolio feature, Saatchi's Rosie Stewart says, "Not only will this encourage children’s creativity, it will also provide an invaluable vehicle through which children can connect with different countries and cultures. The Portfolio will be placed alongside our interactive studio 'Artshow,' which is a place for children to create pictures online allowing them to develop fundamental ICT skills. We want children aged 4-18 from all schools and backgrounds to be represented." Saatchi's Portfolio School Prize, awarding a total of $45,000 to Portfolio-registered "art departments and pupils of promise." One hundred shortlisted works will tour the world’s capital cities and winning pieces will be exhibited in the Saatchi Gallery. [LINK]

Arts organizations are becoming aggressive in getting the U.S. presidential candidates to talk about arts funding, says Allan M. Jalon in the L.A. Times (3/5/08). His story, "The Arts of the Campaign Trail," covers the arts platforms of all the candidates, including Obama's proposed Artist Corps to send young artists to teach in low-income areas, and Clinton's "Putting Arts in Reach" initiative. And he goes into detail about the election-year initiatives of organizations like Americans for the Arts and its "political arm," ArtsVote 2008. He discusses ArtsVote's ten-point plan for the arts in public life and its tracking of the candidates' responses; the Arts Education Partnership's poll of likely voters; and the work of arts advisors to the campaigns. He quotes CAN Co-director Linda Frye Burnham on the chances of campaign promises coming true. [LINK]

Artists and community members will reflect on the 2007 shootings at Virginia Tech in an event called "Community Conversations through the Arts," April 13, 2008. The performance and visual-art event at the Lyric Theatre is presented by HERE (Honoring Experiences, Reflections, and Expressions), a group of citizens who have come together to develop and sponsor a program of community response to the violence that took place on April 16, 2007, on the campus in Blacksburg, Va. Shannon Turner, program coordinator for HERE and director of "Conversations," describes the afternoon as "a multidisciplinary arts performance event to hold space for our community to come together and have the opportunity to celebrate itself, reflect on what we've come through, and look toward the future in a way that is unique and gives us ownership of our own stories." [LINK]

Two syllabi have been added to the CANuniversity collection of resources in community-based art education. They come from Beverly Naidus in Washington. Naidus is an associate professor of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences at U.W. Tacoma. She contributed a syllabus for "Eco-art: Art in Response to the Ecological Crisis" from Spring 2007, examining the eco-art movement and exercising the artistic voice "to express concerns about the world we live in." The course involves journal keeping, experiments with the four elements, a collaborative project and an oral presentation on an eco-artist's work. She also contributed the syllabus for "Labor, Globalization and Art" from Winter 2008, requiring numerous activities that help look at labor issues in relation to global justice: reading of e-reserve articles, a journal, photo/text and mixed-media projects, a collaborative puppetry project and a research project. Bibliographies are included. [LINK]

Good news: The role of community-based arts and culture in neighborhood revitalization is the subject of a new publication from three major entities in the field. "Creativity and Neighborhood Development: Strategies for Community Investment" is a monograph resulting from and 18-month collaboration among The Reinvestment Fund (TRF), the Social Impact of the Arts Project (SIAP) at the University of Pennsylvania and the Rockefeller Foundation. the monograph recommends investing public, public and philanthropic resources in "community-based creative activity" to enhance the community's place-making role and potential. Place-making ventures worth investing in: art-making projects that engage communities; artist live-work space; creative partnerships between individuals and organizations; commissioned research and "the creation of a data infrastructure that can highlight emerging trends, markets and opportunities, influence policy, and inform ongoing evaluation geared toward increasing investment impact." Download it on the Web. [LINK]

CAN's Bookstore has just added a brand new book from the Center for Community Arts Partnerships (CCAP) at Columbia College Chicago. "AIMprint: New Relationships in the Arts and Learning" tells the story of CCAP's Arts Integration Mentorship (AIM) Project. Edited by Cynthia Weiss and CAN writer Amanda Leigh Lichtenstein, the book includes essays, first-person testimony and curriculum samples. The CCAP model for arts integration places relationships -- among people, processes, concepts and curricula -- at the center of effective teaching practice. Topics addressed include: higher-order thinking strategies that link arts and literacy, building partnerships between educational and community interests, and creating a community of learners at every level of an arts partnership. The editors will launch the book at 5 p.m. March 12, 2008, at Columbia's The Museum of Contemporary Photography. [LINK]

Place Matters will take part in an interesting program March 6, 2008, "Recovering Community History: Puerto Ricans and African Americans in Postwar New York City." As part of an American Social History Project series of public seminars on the presentation of the past, the evening at the CUNY Graduate Center features an excerpt from a new documentary by Lillian Jimenez on the late educator, social worker, feminist and civil-rights leader Antonia Pantoja and her work on Puerto Rican self-identity, educational rights and bilingual education. Other speakers include historian Craig Steven Wilder, discussing the history of African Americans and public education in Brooklyn in the 1940s and 1950s, and Marci Reaven on her work at City Lore/Place Matters in preserving local cultural heritage and her research into community organizing on the Lower East Side. [LINK]

The Journal of Cultural Research in Art Education (the JCRAE) is calling for papers for a special issue on "Art Education and Cultural Violence." August 1, 2008 is the deadline for the issue, edited by scholar Kristin Congdon. It will focus on "the ways in which we understand our cultural selves in relationship to others," which, she says, "is not always positive. Violence often has been perpetuated in the name of cultural pride and identity. Hatred that comes with violence can be associated with race, ethnicity, religion, gender, class, and sexuality, as well as other cultural identifications." Among other things, the issue will ask "whether art education has responsibility to address the topic of cultural violence, and if so, how art educators feed into cultural stereotyping and how curricula can work to counteract and change this trend." [LINK]

CAN is happy to welcome Arnold Aprill to our Blognet, a collection of Weblogs from all over our community, relayed electronically to the CAN site through rss feeds. Arnold Aprill is an artist who wrote our Community Arts 101 essay on arts education. He is founding and creative director of Chicago Arts Partnerships in Education (CAPE), a network of artists and arts organizations, educators and schools, that are dedicated to school improvement through arts education partnerships. He is a co-author of "Learning Partnerships: Improving Learning in Schools with Arts Partners in the Community," published by the Arts Education Partnership, and is co-editor of "Renaissance in the Classroom: Arts Integration and Meaningful Learning." So far, besides arts education, he's blogging about teaching and learning, sustainability, nonprofits, public policy and art history. He'd love for you to respond. [LINK]