Arts--Leadership--Access to College?

[avitale]

Hello,

I'm working at the University of Michigan with the Residential College Community Theatre Collaborative to develop a Summer Arts Institute for middle and high-school students, many of whom are "at-risk" and to whom attending college is a foreign concept. The Institute will be a free, weekend-long program for 20 students who stay in the dorms at U of M. There will be theatre, writing, and visual arts engagement as well as a culminating event to showcase their work.

The purpose of this camp is to build leadership through the arts and to use the participants arts and leadership skills to increase their college attainment.

I've done some searching around the CAN site for articles that bring together arts, leadership, and college attainment, but haven't found any. Does anyone know of any programs that have goals that tie arts to college attainment? I've found some of the research out there, but I'd really like to find some programs to learn from, some folks to talk to about developing a program like this . . . a program that takes place on a college campus . . . maybe there aren't any???

Thanks so much,
Anna Vitale

[Linda Frye Burnham]

You might look at "What Does Democracy Look Like? Students in SUNY's alternative adult college create The Museum of Democracy's Hall of Curiosities. (April 2005),
and
"Mapping Within: The Making of a University-community Arts Partnership" Community artists at Harvard explore the intersection of theory and practice in collaboration with a children's writing group. By Amanda Leigh Lichtenstein and Rachel McIntire (December 2005)
and
"Art in Context: Industrial Pittsburgh catching up with Bill Strickland" A profile on the founder of the Manchester Craftsmen's Guild in Pittsburgh. Published in High Performance #67, Vol. XVII, No. 3, 1994. (December 1999) or, from "Making Exact Change," "Manchester Craftsmen's Guild" (November 2005)

While none of these stories drills down on college attainment, it's a feature of the programs in the essays.