Learning at Street Level: Columbia College Chicago's New Youth-Arts Master's Degree

I was a spy in a Chicago graduate school for a week in the fall of 2003. I was allowed to be present at orientation for the first class in Arts in Youth Community Development (AYCD), a new master's degree program in arts management at Columbia College Chicago.

I made this visit to get an inside look at the cutting edge of community-arts training and how it operates in partnerships between arts organizations and institutions of higher education. This article will cover in detail the whats, whys and hows of Columbia's particular approach, and will, I hope, be of use to students looking for training, teachers and arts organizations engaged in this work and professionals planning or administering degrees like this one.

I chose the Columbia graduate program because it is brand new, because it was created by an unusually imaginative team led by the resourceful Julie Simpson, and because it emphasizes something essential in learning about this work: experience in the field.

While in Chicago, I got to travel the whole city with the incoming AYCD students while they shopped arts organizations for jobs — the 20 hours a week of practicum fieldwork they will be doing while studying for their master's degrees. I got to meet seven incredible Chicago arts organizations up close — each one completely different — and can pass along to you what I learned there.

Meet the Students

OCAP staffer Carmel Avegnon-Sanders at orientation, grad student Angela Dedenbach at right. Click here for slideshow of students.

It was energizing to be back in grad school with people young enough to be inspired — and undaunted — by the prospect of entering a tough field like youth-arts administration, but experienced enough to examine their options critically. This diverse class of students in their late 20s and early 30s comprises people who have already had experience in community arts at many different levels. The gang of eight includes Angela Dedenbach, a theater artist who likes working with teenage girls; Iaroslava Babenchuk, a performance producer from Ukraine; Faith Humphrey Hill, a painter who works with foster children; Muneerah Maalik, an arts coordinator at a community school; Sarah Meyer, a writer who wants to change the portrayal of young women in the media; Walter Ornelas, a painter who is the director of a Mexican youth museum; Erin Patinkin, a Spanish-speaking actress; and Na-Tae' Thompson, a hip-hop-music manager who works for the Chicago Park District.

The students all wrote essays for Columbia about their involvement in youth arts and their hopes and dreams for a career in the field. Some of them are inspiring — as only the yearnings of hungry young minds can be. Take Sarah Meyer, a writer who worked in nonprofit organizations in Palatine, Ill., and Portland, Ore., and says she "grew up in community-based organizations and was trying to make social change as a 13-year-old." She wrote:

I dream of working with education, in all its forms. I dream of igniting a real change in the way we recognize the arts in education and education with the arts. I dream of working for a list of nonprofit organizations as an advocate for causes I believe in. I believe in empowerment. I believe in the role of art in the lives of young people and, most importantly, the roles of young lives in the community. I dream of working for projects like New Moon, who published a magazine for girls, by girls ages 8-14, "for every girl who wants her voice to be heard and her dreams taken seriously." I believe in expression. I believe in affirmation. I believe in change. I dream of gaining the practical skills necessary to organize and operate an organization of my own. I dream of joining the forces as a media educator, working to increase girls' visibility through more complex portrayals of young women in the media, through both the spoken and written word. I dream of motivating a collective voice to spread an enthusiasm for personal expression and exploration. I dream of opening a coffeehouse that will create an atmosphere for people to gather, a place of movement and diversity, enchanted and energetic, where the arts mingle and collaborate as the artists do. I believe in forming communities around shared passions. I dream of finding a job that's more of a pathway than a place. And I dream of a better place.

Erin Patinkin has wanted to open her own arts center for many years. While a student at the University of Wisconsin, she used her fluency in Spanish and her background in theater to work with after-school arts programs in Madison. She wrote an essay for CAN that accompanies this article. In it she talks about her "innate faith in youth" and her dedication to community service as a result of her Jesuit education and examples set by the women in her family.

My interest in this group deepened during the first orientation meeting between the students and some of the AYCD faculty and college staffers. Nicole Garneau, an energetic Chicago performance artist who coordinates the AYCD program, asked people to introduce themselves by naming a book they found inspiring. This brilliant strategy yielded an instant intellectual feast. As we went around the table, the students tended to keep their cards close to the vest, maybe downplaying their substantial experience in the field till they knew whom they were dealing with. But their spirits began to shine through as they talked about writers who inspired them: Henry Miller, Cormac McCarthy, Russell Simmons, Michael Moore, Sandra Cisneros, J.D. Salinger, Fyodor Dostoyevsky. They talked about "School Girls" by Peggy Orenstein, a study on young women and self-esteem. They talked about "There Are No Children Here" by Alex Kotlowitz, on growing up in the Chicago housing projects. They talked about "Women Who Run with the Wolves."

All this was delightful to Julie Simpson, director of CCC's Office of Community Arts Partnerships (OCAP), which organized the new master's program along with the college's Department of Arts, Entertainment and Media Management (AEMM). Simpson and her staff and faculty joined in the eclectic orientation discussion, naming Paolo Freire, Isabel Allende, "Zen and the Art of Archery" and Stanisklavsy's "My Life in Art."

Columbia, AEMM and OCAP: Choosing Youth Arts

Julie Simpson

Simpson then introduced the students to the college and the new degree program. Columbia College, she said, is a unique institution that began in the 1960s and is now the largest arts-and-media college in the United States. The student body of nearly 10,000 is extremely diverse, as is the faculty. Undergraduate applicants must have a GED, but do not have to show a portfolio; admission is open to anyone with passion and commitment. Most classes are held at night because many students work full time. The campus buildings are spread throughout downtown Chicago.

The important thing about the AYCD program, said Simpson, is that it's about putting the field of youth-arts management on the map and training a new generation of leaders. The first degree of its kind, she hopes it will serve as an international model.

Before designing the degree, OCAP and AEMM conducted a feasibility study that made evident the demand for such a program. Over the past ten years, said the study, there has been a steady increase in research, policy and funder interest in the important role the arts play in youth and community development. There are now more than 200 outstanding programs serving young people through the arts and humanities across the U.S., with ten of the most exemplary programs recognized each year with a Coming Up Taller Award from the President's Committee on the Arts and Humanities. Research shows that in comparison with a national sample, kids who participate in these arts programs are four times more likely to take part in a math or science fair, three times more likely to win an award for school attendance, and four times more likely to have won schoolwide recognition for academic achievement.

While there are a number of short-term training opportunities available, like a summer program in arts management offered by the National Guild of Community Schools of the Arts, there is a need, said the study, for more intensive, longer-term training to begin to build the theory, practice and network of professionals necessary to support and sustain the youth-arts field.

The process of developing the degree program originated in 2000 with a series of meetings convened by the David and Lucile Packard Foundation called " Building a Field: The Arts in Youth and Community Development." They brought together artists, arts workers, arts advocates, researchers, funders and young people to talk about building a systematic understanding of the work and promoting career entry and sustainable involvement of professionals in the field. OCAP took a major role in the meetings, where it became clear that training opportunities in higher education are essential to these goals.

Throughout 2001, representatives from OCAP and AEMM talked to everyone they could about developing institutionally based programs in the field of youth arts. They met with other art schools, a youth advisory committee and others in a wide variety of settings — organizational, academic and governmental. Major inspiration came from their interaction with scholar Shirley Brice Heath, an award-winning cultural anthropologist and linguist with an abiding interest in the arts and human development. With a long and distinguished career in research and publication, Heath directed "Art Show," a documentary film and resource guide on youth and community development by Partners for Livable Communities for PBS. Heath's in-depth research into youth arts and development were key to OCAP's study of the field. The Columbia College Chicago team is exceedingly proud of snaring Heath to work on development and evaluation and to teach a symposium in AYCD with Columbia's Michael Warr.

In all their research, the Columbia team found that there is a crying need to strengthen youth-arts organizations and the people who run them. They designed the AYCD master's degree program as part of a whole Youth Arts Impact Project in professional development at Columbia that Simpson hopes will eventually include a one-year, non-degree-based certificate program for people who want to sharpen their skills in nonprofit youth-arts-organization management, and a fully funded five-month fellowship program aimed at renewal and sustenance of current leaders in the field.

"It's all about leadership," Simpson told the first graduate class in orientation that day. "It has come about because there has been a lack of thoughtfulness about leadership."

When I asked Simpson later about her fondest hope for the graduate program, she answered:

That we would truly offer a program that was not "same old, same old." It was our hope that we would really let the wisdom that exists from the practitioners' perspective guide the development of this program. I was really hopeful that the program would remain vital and relevant at all times and that the fact that it was housed at a higher-education "academy" would not in any way prevent it from remaining really attuned to the needs of the future leadership of community-based youth-arts organizations.

It's not easy to get a degree program like this started at a U.S. college or university. Community arts as a field of study is only beginning to make its way to legitimacy in academia. As is evident in CAN's listing of "Places To Study" across the country, courses have been snuck into higher education under the cover of education departments or applied theater or even public administration. It takes ingenuity to bring this kind of vision to an established academic institution, and Julie Simpson and her crew did it in only a few short years.

Simpson's accomplishments at Columbia have been phenomenal. She founded the Office of Community Arts Partnerships six years ago to facilitate real working partnerships among faculty, students and community arts organizations. She has a culturally diverse staff of several dozen gung-ho professionals (all artists) and strong relationships all over the city and the country, going back to the days when she was one of the most important dance presenters in the Midwest. OCAP has a multimillion-dollar budget and an ever-expanding reach into schools, small and large organizations, after-school programs, city and county government partnerships and even national coalitions like the U.S. government's 21st Century Community Learning Centers.

OCAP's imaginative programs include community partnerships like:

• the Urban Missions collaborations with more than 30 youth-arts projects;
• financial and mentorship assistance for exceptional Columbia students in the Community Scholars Program; and
• the Arts in Civic Engagement program that infuses courses with a service-learning component.

OCAP's school partnerships include:

• the holistic Community Schools project that closely involves family and community in children's school lives;
• College Readiness programs that help arts-inclined students complete high school and enter college; and
• professional-development opportunities to help artists and teachers integrate arts-based programs into Chicago's elementary and secondary schools.

And one of OCAP's oldest programs is the annual DanceAfrica Chicago Festival, called the largest celebration of African and African-American arts and culture in North America, along with a DanceAfrica community connection that takes place year-round in more than 50 schools and organizations.

There are a handful of community-arts partnership offices at universities and arts schools across the country, but OCAP may be the most ambitious. Its scope and strength are due in part to Columbia's own college-wide determination to be a strong participant in the community life of Chicago. And it is Simpson's particular tendency to keep human needs high on the list of OCAP priorities, so it's comfortable yet exciting to work there. In a half-dozen visits to OCAP during 2003, I always felt like I was with friends, but at the center of an intense brainstorm.

On top of all this, Simpson still had time to serve her obsession with putting youth arts on the national map by instituting a strong model graduate program at Columbia. I asked her what her secret was.

Columbia is not just any college or university. I was lucky to have, as a partner in crime, Dennis Rich, the chair of the Arts, Entertainment and Media Management department, the academic department where this program was to be housed. Dennis is a visionary as well, and could immediately see how much value this program could bring to both his department and the college. The AEMM program had always placed a large amount of its programmatic philosophy in true practice, so this was not taking them off course at all. But the amount of input from community practitioners was unlike that of other AEMM programs, and Dennis and Phyllis Johnson, the person in AEMM really responsible for the program on a day-to-day basis, were both willing and excited to explore this new concentration with us.

"What's new about this program," Dennis Rich told the students at orientation, "is who will manage the field in the future, and where that vision comes from. What we are expecting from you guys is the devotion, discipline and commitment to envision this program in ten years, in 50 years."

The focus on leadership is real, and urgently important for the continued development of the field as the baby-boom generation of youth-arts organizational founders begins to retire. As AEMM faculty member Phyllis Johnson put it:

Arts organizations are often put together by brilliant artists who have an uncanny connection to young people and run the organizations in a very intuitive way. When the founders move on, the organization may find they have not collected the skills necessary to pass the organization forward, and there is a void in the community. This program is designed to help people interested in this work put all the parts together: They will gain the practical and philosophical skills to develop themselves as artists, as members of their communities, and to help their organizations grow.

AYCD: How It Works

The two-year AYCD master's program is a blend of academics and practical experience in the field. It focuses on three areas of professional development:

• the nuts-and-bolts skills necessary for operating an organization
• theory and philosophy of youth development (like courses in community-based arts, ethics, cultural literacy, working with diverse populations, community dynamics), and
• an understanding of the role of the arts in the lives of young people and the way they relate to society at large.

Candidates are required to have a B.A. and come with a background as an artist or arts worker in a community or government youth organization, teaching arts in schools, or "life as a practicing artist." They will do ten hours a week of coursework, participate in a weekly symposium and produce a master's thesis.

Students are steeped in courses like accounting, marketing, data analysis and arts-and-media law. According to Phyllis Johnson,

As businesses become more complex, it's become more and more important and difficult to gain the skills you need. It used to be that artists would start companies, but you really have to figure out some measure of getting income in, earned or unearned. The world is fairly punitive. In our department we like to say we don't believe in starving artists. In graduate arts-management programs that's the usual approach, but I don't think in arts schools there's enough attention paid to it. For undergrads who aren't in management here, we offer a couple classes — a self-management class, a business-fundamentals class — so artists can manage their own affairs. And in the undergraduate management programs, we want to know about their art background, and make sure they have an opportunity to have an experience in making art.

When I asked her what the AYCD students are expecting, Johnson said:

Some are expecting us to sharpen them, or give them the facility to accommodate change as it happens to them. For some this is a field you transition into, not one you think you can make a living at. Some students come with a business degree as their first degree. Our job is to hone it down from the Fortune 100, which is where most business programs focus, to a small-business setting, which is where most arts organizations focus and all community-based organizations focus. The needs of most creative-endeavor-type businesses, whether they think of themselves as an arts business or not, is not that different, because at the core of it is the artwork, that endeavor. We have to teach students the big-picture management level so that if they go from being a $100,000 business to a $1 million business they are able to make that transition.

"At the same time," laughed Johnson, "it's our job to make sure students understand that in small businesses you may be the president and founder, but you have to be willing to sweep the floor and take out the trash if need be."

The Real World: Practicum Sites

Most interesting, the AYCD master's candidates are required to work 20 hours each week in a community-based youth-arts organization throughout the program. Here they will apply what they are learning in their classes. In exchange, they each earn a stipend paid by OCAP.

" We're excited that ten really awesome community-based youth-arts organizations have entered into a partnership with Columbia College to become two-year 'laboratories' for students in the program," said Nicole Garneau.

The ten Chicago sites available to the Columbia students for these practicums are:

• About Face Youth Theatre, a theater for gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgendered youth and their allies 
• Chicago Children's Choir, an educational group with school, neighborhood and concert choirs
• Chicago Public Art Group, creators of public art works
• Free Street Programs, youth programs in theater and writing
• Little Black Pearl Workshop, a workshop program teaching children the profitable connection between art, education and business.
• Pathways to Development, learning opportunities for children in foster care
• People's Music School, free community music school
• Redmoon Theater, large, outdoor public spectacles
• Street-Level Youth Media, training for inner-city youth in media arts and emerging technologies
• Video Machete, intensive and affordable training in video post-production
• Yollocalli Youth Museum, arts-education and career-training program of the Mexican Fine Arts Center Museum
• Young Chicago Authors, free creative writing courses and performance forums

When I got there, some students had already chosen their practicum sites. Faith Humphrey Hill, a painter who received a BFA from the School of the Art Institute, chose Pathways to Development, an organization that provides free arts programs to children in foster care throughout Cook County, because she came to Columbia already employed at Pathways and OCAP was able to arrange a fruitful collaboration.

Similarly, Chicagoan Muneerah Maalik is serving her practicum through her existing job as OCAP's site coordinator for its program with Crown Academy, a community school on the West Side. Her past job at the Boys & Girls Clubs of Chicago sparked her interest in working with children and it was there, she says, that she first watched arts programs engage kids and bring out their best.

Na-Tae' Thompson received a B.A. in arts management from Columbia College and has a background in music management, specifically in the hip-hop arena. She'll be serving her practicum with the Chicago Park District, running after-school programs that include hip-hop dance, writing and music.

That left Angela Dedenbach, Iaroslava Babenchuk, Sarah Meyer, Erin Patinkin and Walter Ornelas to make the odyssey through the remaining opportunities. Ornelas, a native of Mexico who is making a name for himself as a painter in the Chicago art scene, went along for the ride. Ornelas already had a prominent position as the director of the Yollocalli Youth Museum, a division of the city's Mexican Fine Arts Center Museum.

Blessed with perfect autumn weather, we climbed aboard public transportation and spent four days going from one community arts powerhouse to another.

On the Street: Street-Level Youth Media

From Street Wise, a community Web site by West Side Chicago kids with Street-Level Youth Media help

Our first stop was at Street-Level Youth Media in the booming West Town neighborhood. Street-Level (SLYM) is an artist-run organization that teaches people ages 8-22 how to get online, use digital cameras, edit their videos on a computer, script and storyboard their own screenplays, produce their own music CDs, use an animation toolbox, make their own claymations and create their own Web pages. They do this in both in-school and after-school programs and in special collaborative projects that provide the young people with artist fees and allow them control over the content being created.

Founding Co-director Paul Teruel met us in a Street-Level storefront drop-in lab teeming with electronic tools, and told us how the organization was founded in 1993 by a group of artists and teachers who wanted to "bring media to kids with no access" in the then largely Latino westside neighborhood. They wanted not only to make it possible for kids to use the media arts as a tool for self-expression and to encourage them to tell their own stories, but to get a young perspective on issues crucial to the neighborhood and the day. What if young people in our westside neighborhood had video cameras to document the world as they saw it, the founders asked. What stories would they tell? What could they teach us?

In Street-Level's first summer, local high-schoolers made 40 videos about their gentrifying neighborhood and showed them outdoors at a summer community block party, installing the videos on 70 monitors up and down the street with extension cords trailing into their neighbors' houses. That was Street-Level's first Block Party and it drew national attention. The annual event is now legendary. (A recent party was broadcast over satellite to 10 million viewers.)

Since then, SLYM has organized after-school programs in a network of multimedia labs in the West Town and Uptown/Edgewater neighborhoods. Kids drop in to use the labs for homework assignments, résumé creation, research, games and digital publishing. Street-Level also brings mobile programs to the Chicago Public Schools, where students and teachers develop curriculum that integrates media arts with existing coursework.

Street-Level founding Co-director Paul Tereul

Special Projects have included "Neutral Ground," a series of video letters between rival gangs who had never spoken. For the "Peace Signs" project, six young artists paired up with six professionals to design billboards that addressed gun violence; the billboards were placed throughout Chicago. For "Cabrini Changes: A Bird's Eye View," grammar-school children exhibited photos focusing on their response to the gentrification of Cabrini Green, the city's infamous housing-project initiative. For "Through Our Eyes," a photo gallery was created by five Street-Level kids and five Columbia College photography students to "reveal the unseen nature of urban youth culture." They worked with Palestinian photographer Rula Halawani. Many of these collaborative works of media art are on the SLYM Web site.

Street-Level, said Teruel, sees itself as an arts organization using technology. They serve a diverse population of about 1,200 young people a year. An independent nonprofit organization, they survive on foundation funding, private donations and earned income, and they partner with many other organizations, including larger ones like the Chicago Historical Society.

"These are hard times for nonprofit arts organizations," Teruel told us. "SLYM has shrunk from 14 full-time staff to eight. We had five co-directors, and now have only two." Their annual budget has shrunk from almost a million dollars a year to $700,000.

Media Instructor Jaime Perez ran us through a sample workshop, one that shows kids how to use the Adobe PhotoShop program to manipulate images. Drop-In Coordinator Rivka Sadarangani showed us a demo of "Tales of Ten Teens," a project done with Columbia's TV Department and Chicago's Gallery 37, in which first-generation teenagers from South Asia talked about negotiating life in the U.S. Issues included hatred and racism.

In closing, Teruel told the students that SLYM shares OCAP's interest in leadership development through youth arts. They want more kids teaching kids.

The Big Time: Chicago Children's Choir

Chicago Children's Choir members sing to the grad students

Our next stop was on another planet: the Chicago Children's Choir headquarters downtown in the Chicago Cultural Center. The Chicago Children's Choir is not one choir, but nearly 80. Founded as a small church choir in 1956 by Unitarian Minister Christopher Moore, the organization is the largest youth choral education program in the U.S., with 3,000 members between the ages of eight and 18. It has a $4 million annual budget and a huge staff.

The mission of the Choir goes far beyond excellence in music; they set their sights on "changing lives" and "shaping the future." They have 75 choirs in 53 public and parochial schools, many in Chicago's most distressed communities. Their after-school community-based choirs have trained more than 300 kids in advanced voice and performance, and those choirs toured all over Chicago and as far away as Wisconsin and Florida. The 120-person Concert Choir gives more than 100 performances a year, recently including Handel's "Messiah" with the Chicago Youth Symphony Orchestra and a world premiere at Carnegie Hall in New York. In 2003, the Choir's special project was "Sita Ram," borrowed from the Hindu epic the Ramayana, supported by an Indian symphony orchestra and a panoply of professional composers, directors and choreographers.

But that's not all. The choir in 2001 opened its own charter school, the Choir Academy, temporarily located in McKinley Park, with plans to relocate downtown. Inspired by the Boys Choir of Harlem and based in the scientifically proven connection between music education and academic achievement, the Academy combines arts and liberal-arts training for grades 4-8, eventually grades 4-12. In addition, fired by a spirit of "social enterprise," the Choir has opened a Ben and Jerry's ice-cream franchise down the street. It employs at-risk youth, training "singing scoopers" in good employment practices and marketing. There's more: a partnership with local Lookingglass Theatre, a summer camp and neighborhood festivals. Plans include a singing-telegram service, a lending library and an endowment campaign

The atmosphere at this student meeting took my breath away with its fierce determination, professionalism and idealism. Judy Hanson, director of choral programs, opened the meeting by leading eight members of the concert choir in "Celebrate: We Are Free." The teens stood around us in a circle, literally shaking the walls with their vocal force. When they had finished, Hanson aggressively put us through some classic workshop paces, asking us how we felt during the song, what kind of song it was, what pitch, rhythm, key — all elements of music that are used together to "create feeling," she said.

The Choir was founded, said Hanson, to promote unity among all races and religions. "We can all feel the elements of music even though we look different on the outside." During this routine, the singers showed interest, excitement, purpose and literal joy on their faces. I began to wonder if I was witnessing an evangelical Christian revival. They were asked to say something about their experience with the Choir, and each one offered life-change stories like the ones in the Choir's brochure. ("I never knew what I wanted to be when I grew up. Then I joined Choir. I was touched by the beautiful music. Now I know what I must do. I will change the world with music. Choir changed my life. It gave me something to look forward to every day. Choir is what makes me what I am." —Katie Gansel, age 13.)

Chicago Children's Choir in rehearsal

Nancy Karsten, CEO and executive director, filled us in on the history and challenges of the Choir, with an emphasis on social entrepreneurship (her specialty) and "pushing kids to be their best." She described it as a "life-skills program." Karsten indicated that the Columbia grad student who chooses the Choir for a practicum could be involved in in-school and after-school programs, a special performance project, marketing, corporate-sponsorship development and booking.

Program Director Christina Deaton described the neighborhood program, with choirs currently in six neighborhoods, each one reflecting the local character. They sing gospel, folk, pop and world music. Children's Choir members teach in the neighborhoods they come from, creating a connection, a legacy, said Deaton. "They are soul mates. It's important: Kids want to be part of something."

We adjourned to the rehearsal hall where we saw Artistic Director Josephine Lee rule several hundred singers with an iron hand. There is no denying it was impressive. I took home a video about the choir, just as deeply inspiring as was our visit.

As I walked toward the train with two of the Columbia students, I asked them if the experience wasn't a little scary. There was something aggressively disciplinary about the approach, and a fairly regimental response from the teenagers. They both laughed long and loud and told me they had both been in choirs as teens, and the atmosphere was familiar to them. Their directors has been like drill sergeants, extremely dictatorial and accustomed to using shame-based discipline. They both said they had benefited from the training, but felt it was harsh. Yet, they said, kids are tough. Some need and want that kind of challenge.

Of, By and for the People: The People's Music School

Mary Ellen McGarry, director of the People's Music School

The next day we landed on yet another planet. The People's Music School is unlike either gritty, activist Street-Level Youth Media or the corporate and angelic Chicago Children's Choir. The People's Music School is a living example of grassroots cultural development in action. "It works because the people make it work," said cheerful Director Mary Ellen McGarry, when she started us on our tour of the school in the ethnically rich Uptown neighborhood.

The school is free (but for a tiny registration fee) and supported by volunteers. It was founded in 1976 by Rita Simó, a native of Santo Domingo, with a vision of tuition-free classical-music education available to everyone. The Juilliard-educated concert pianist tried everything to make her dream come true, even becoming a nun in hopes of support from the Catholic Church. Eventually she left the convent, married and opened a storefront, offering free music lessons in return for painting help. Forty people showed up the first day.

The school operated in various makeshift quarters for 19 years until 1995 when it got a boost from the mayor's wife. She and actress Jane Alexander wrangled a new, specially designed free building for the school in exchange for the promise that it would continue to be free.

Practice Room at People's Music School

The school now has 250 students of every possible background, including the homeless. They range in age from five to senior citizens, half children and half adults. Each student pays $15 registration, and everyone promises to attend regularly, participate in fundraisers (to help support the $500,000 annual budget) and volunteer two hours a month; parents volunteer in place of the children, who come after school. Twenty-seven professional teachers give individual and ensemble lessons and teach theory, which each student (even the five-year-olds) must take for one hour a week. After four theory classes and a test, they may be assigned instrument (piano, strings, woodwinds, brass, percussion and guitar) or voice lessons.

The sunny building has ten lesson rooms, each with a window, a group piano lab, an acoustically correct performance hall, a rooftop recital area and a listening library. Everything in the building is donated. It's a true community school, generating a real sense of family. Students refer to it as "my school," and the 15-member board says it trusts "that students will do anything within their power to further this community-building effort. They experience the satisfaction of knowing that their commitment and hard work have made a difference in the school's ongoing success."

McGarry made it sound like so much wholesome fun that I left wishing I could do a practicum there. She made starting a free community music school sound easy, as if music is something fundamental that everybody wants in their lives enough to work for it. I guess the People's Music School is living proof. Turning the corner in the residential neighborhood, I noticed that the street is named after Rita Simó.

Getting New Insights: Insight Arts

Insight Arts director Craig Harshaw leads tour of United Church of Rogers Park

That afternoon we got a bath in political theory at Insight Arts, an organization in Rogers Park with which Nicole Garneau is associated. Insight is a coalition of artists, community activists and "liberatory educators" whose mission is to "increase access to cultural work that promotes social justice and defends human rights." Their activities include things like the "Creative Movement Festival" in spring 2003, exploring work and social change. It included performances, exhibitions, workshops, panels and community dialogues, plus awards honoring individuals, collectives and organizations whose cultural and intellectual work have contributed to the development of dialogue on social justice and human-rights issues. (Example: Youth Activist recipient Octavia Lewis, an 18-year-old playwright who is student-council president of Amundsen High School.)

Since Insight Arts is not a practicum site, it was not immediately clear why we were visiting there. Before long it became obvious that Garneau and OCAP wanted to make sure the students were exposed early to some principles guiding many of the artists who are working for social change in Chicago.

Insight Director Craig Harshaw and Tamika Robinson from the video arts collective Video Machete had one afternoon to teach some basic lessons about what is going on in the world and what they think artists can do about it. First we were handed a reading list citing "Twenty Major Inspirations for the Praxis of Insight Arts," which offered some clues: Arendt, Brecht, Cabral, DuBois, Freire, Gramsci, Marx, Walter Rodney, Rosa Luxemburg and Virginia Woolf.

We were introduced at blinding speed (with handouts) to several partner organizations that provide Insight with insight, including POWER (People Organizing to Win Employment Rights) of Berkeley, Calif., an organization of low- and no-wage workers, largely women and people of color united to "fight against the people who defend the economic and social systems that are keeping us down."

We got a microwave version of six educational-theory principles of Paolo Freire, which — what the heck — according to Insight are:

• Education is not neutral; it is designed to either maintain the status quo or to liberate people.
• Educational content comes from the participants; it starts by identifying the issues people are excited about.
• Dialogue: Education is a mutual learning process; everyone has to be both teacher and learner.
• The teacher/facilitator teaches by posing questions or problems.
• Reflection/action, theory/praxis: Continuous learning from mistakes enables the transformation of life.
• Transformation: Education should transform the quality of a person's life, environment, community and society.

We then received a "linked and integrated analysis of oppressions," theorizing that the important issues in power analysis are not racism, classism, sexism and homophobia, but capitalist imperialism, white supremacy, patriarchy and heterosexism. This analysis problematizes the people who are in power, said Harshaw, and implies that their systems can be dismantled. And they must be linked: If you focus on only one root cause of oppression, it obscures the fact that you may be contributing to the others.

Young Insight actors Christina Waters, David Singleton

We got a tour of the building where Insight resides, the United Church of Rogers Park. The Church has a Methodist base but multiple congregations, sharing its space with a "Haitian Seventh-Day Adventist-like" group, a mosque, some Christian progressives, some African-American men "post-incarceration," some Mennonites and a Jewish congregation who came to United after their temple burned down. We saw a mural by 10-12-year-olds about the issues in their lives, heard about the new school down the block that was built through discussions at Insight among kids and their parents, and visited the church sanctuary, now a space in-the-round following an inspiring performance-art series.

We were then hustled into a viewing room to watch a bilingual documentary called "Refugees from Globalization." But first we got a teach-in on the topic from Tamika Robinson, with a history of Neo-liberalism and a capsule description of the "common elements of structural adjustment" — i.e., the strings attached to development loans from the World Bank and the IMF. These two organizations were created after WWII, said Robinson, to rebuild and stabilize the world economy. They are controlled by the richest countries and they supply developing countries with loans for infrastructure projects and technical assistance for restructuring. In return for these loans, the borrowers must impose austerity measures like reducing social spending, cutting wages and opening the economy for investment by transnational corporations.

"Refugees from Globalization" claimed that these trade policies favor corporations and have created a new migration around the world, with 150 million people forced out of their own countries to seek survival elsewhere. We heard several individuals tell their own stories: for example, Maricel, one of thousands leaving the Philippines because their wages are not enough to live on. A college grad, she wound up as a domestic in the U.S., working on a tourist visa for $2.60 an hour and being abused. She began organizing for a minimum wage. Luckner, a Haitian, emphasized the damage done by policies favoring large corporations instead of workers and immigrants. He told of working for a U.S.-owned factory in Duvalier's Haiti that was summarily moved to China. He escaped on a small boat to the U.S., wound up in detention there, then picked oranges for Minute Maid (Coca-Cola) under impossible working conditions. He started organizing with the Farmworkers Association of Florida.

Following this we moved into a multipurpose space for a performance by Christina Walters and David Singleton, both 15, African-American students from Sutherland High who have been studying globalization with Insight. They did a summer 2003 workshop on U.S. military hegemony and out of it they created a complex and challenging play to tour to different settings for kids their age and their parents. It was inspired by the writings of Noam Chomsky and documentary footage about drug trafficking. It dealt with ethical and societal pressures around making choices about drugs, work and military service. Afterwards we gave our impressions, shook hands all around and staggered out to the sidewalk, our heads swimming.

I have gone into detail here because I felt I learned a lot more about what some artists have in mind when they say they are working for social change. It is energizing to know that this kind of ambitious popular education — however abbreviated and whatever its politics — can flourish in the community, outside of colleges and universities, and is being provided by working artists,.

Spectacular Spectacular: Redmoon Theater

Redmoon's Dramagirls in performance. Photo by Steve Ewert

By the time we got to Redmoon Theater in Logan Square the next day, I got the feeling I wouldn't be back on Planet Earth any time soon. Tramping through Redmoon Central, the company's new warehouse studio, we found ourselves watched from the rafters by brightly colored puppets and masks of all shapes and sizes. Redmoon is an infamously spectacular theater ensemble working in Chicago since 1989. With a surreal combination of stick puppets, giant masks, Italian street theater, magical mechanical objects and stilt comedy, their shows have drawn tens of thousands of people as they ushered in the seasons with their Winter Pageant, the summer outdoor spectacle, and the recently defunct All Hallow's Eve Ritual Celebration. Every spring they produce a new mainstage work, usually an adaptation of a classic, with another prestigious Chicago organization. In May-June 2004, the production will be "Cyrano" with the Court Theatre at the Museum of Contemporary Art.

Associate Artistic Director Frank Maugeri met us in a break room to talk about Redmoon's community programs, which he coordinates. Dramagirls is an eight-year-old program with 4th- to 8th-grade girls from around Logan Square. Maugeri described it as "an empowerment program" that is "power-based, big." The girls develop theater techniques and performance pieces that are spectacle-oriented, with plenty of drumming and noise, which, says Maugeri, promotes a strong sense of self-worth. They create and perform in Redmoon's large spectacle events.

Photo on wall in Redmoon Central

Community participation figures large in the annual Winter Pageant, which now incorporates some of the intimate concepts of the erstwhile Halloween ritual. Community groups come into the studio five weeks ahead of the pageant and create a major component of the space that the audience will pass through during the pageant. One tradition of community participation is the creation of shrines for friends who have passed away. As many as 1,000 people participate. For the 2004 Winter Pageant, Redmoon invited such groups as The Children's Museum, Brentano Elementary Math & Science Academy, the Logan Square Neighborhood Association and the Teen Living Program. "My intention is massive community involvement in what we do," said Maugeri.

Redmoon conducts strong post-event dialogues with community members to get their take on the experience. "We're good at critical information, at taking punches" Maugeri told us. "Redmoon is a theater of personalities. We like people. We keep our eyes on the prize, which is relationship." With an artistic staff of five, an administrative staff of nine and a $1 million annual budget, Redmoon clearly knows how to take care of business and still have a ball. Several of the Columbia students were keenly interested in signing up.

Youth Art That Means Business: Little Black Pearl Workshop

Little Black Pearl Workshop students write about their work

That afternoon we made our way to another region in the Chicago universe, the South Side. Our visit to Little Black Pearl Workshop in the Bronzeville neighborhood was yet another eye-opener. With the mission of "teaching the profitable connection between art, education and business, as well as contributing to the communities' need for economic self-sufficiency," Little Black Pearl Workshop is upfront about teaching African-American kids how to make a living in the arts.

The big old greystone on Drexel Avenue is Founding Director Monica Haslip's house. Here she and her staff teach 700 kids how to paint, sculpt, tile, write, weld, quilt and photograph — and the marketing skills to sell their artworks. But that space isn't big enough; Haslip has to turn children away. So Little Black Pearl is on the rise. With help from the city and generous donors, the organization will soon leave the 4,000-square-foot building to move to its "Cultural Corner," a new $7 million, 40,000-square-foot custom-built facility at 47th Street and Greenwood. It will have room for studios in glass-blowing, woodworking, computer graphics and other art forms, plus a gallery and commercial space for a restaurant and store. It's part of an Empowerment Zone project that will transform the intersection, formerly home to two grungy liquor stores, into a what everybody thinks will be a cultural mecca, including a new home for Muntu Dance Theatre.

Now nine years old, Little Black Pearl Workshop is named after a unique gemstone. Haslip sees her students as gems, too. As she told Rolling Out magazine:

A lot of the children we serve are at a critical stage in their lives. And some of the choices they make may not necessarily be the ones they want to make, but they do so because of the circumstances they're in. Instead of them dealing drugs or gang banging or any of that, they can come here and be exposed to something positive.

Little Black Pearl Founding Director Monica Haslip in Essence magazine

In LBPW's Arts = Smarts After School Program, kids take a seven-week course in arts and business, preparing them for the KidBiz Expo, a professional citywide event that allows them to set up their own retail businesses. At the Expo, students act as vendors selling their projects to family members, friends and other guests. Each seller receives a portion of the Expo profits.

After completing the Arts = Smarts program, students may join the Black Pearl Club, getting more intensive instruction from professional artists and participating in commissioned projects and self-directed learning. A free summer program for 40 students, ages 10-18, centers on an artistic theme, like "Art Celebrating Life." Students complete projects like painted furniture and tiled artifacts. Special workshops might include large-scale mural painting, hand-painted guitars and photography. LBPW also participates, with the Chicago Public School Alternative School Network in a series of in-school workshops at six alternative schools around the city.

Community activities include the annual Pearl Fest, celebrating the Kenwood/Bronzeville neighborhood, which is beginning to gentrify. LBPW also serves as the host site for the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs Bronzeville Neighborhood Tour.

This program sounds like it's all business, but there's theory offered, too. At our meeting, after we toured the building full of beautiful painted and tiled objects, we went down to the basement classroom, where students were learning to write and talk about their art work from a personal and aesthetic point of view. As they answered questions posed by their instructor and wrote their assignments, they seemed like happy kids, getting down to serious business.

Releasing Your Inner Lunatic: Young Chicago Authors

Perusing photos in hallway at Young Chicago Authors

The last stop of my visit was the most fun of all. At Young Chicago Authors, we got to participate in writing exercises, and by this time we were all ready to make a little art.

Of all the organizations we interviewed, I think I was most impressed with Young Chicago Authors. Founded in 1991 by writer/educator Robert S. Boone and colleagues, YCA set out to provide young people with more exposure to creative writing. It now serves 850 students a year with a bare-bones staff and abundant good will. Located on the second floor of an old brick building in Wicker Park, YCA teaches, presents events, publishes books, magazines and CDs and manages rich partnerships with schools, hospitals, detention centers and entities of all kinds.

"People call for our help all the time," said staffer Anna West, as she showed us down the hallway lined with pictures of teenagers writing, laughing or passionately performing their own texts. YCA is about to go through a major change of leadership. Founder Boone, who never took a salary, is retiring and West will replace him in about two years. "We're at a moment of creating ourselves after the departure of a great leader," said West, who is the only full-time employee. There are 15-20 teaching artists who receive a fee for their services; some have administrative roles. The organization has an annual budget of $500,000 and they make it stretch.

All YCA creative writing courses are free to kids 13-19. The keystone, West told us, is YCA Scholars, a rigorous three-year program for high-schoolers in their sophomore through senior years. Selected students take weekly Saturday writing workshops in poetry, fiction writing, nonfiction forms, playwriting and performance writing. Participants become eligible for $8,000 college scholarships.

Other in-house programs are

• WordWide, a Tuesday-evening drop-in-writing workshop taught by a local writer
• Word Play, a weekly performance night with local writers and performance artists, preceded by an open mic and followed by talk-back sessions
• Girlspeak, a weekly all-girls writing workshop, including two yearly open mics, a tour of area high schools and a published anthology
• Photography, instruction from professionals, with use of a full darkroom and free cameras
• Performance Group: "Learn the ancient technique of freaking people out with guerrilla performance art. Sabotage El passengers with nonsense poetry, explore mask personas and release your inner lunatic!"

A major annual event is the three-day citywide "Louder than a Bomb: The Chicago Teen Poetry Slam" for teams of four poets, with the winning team sent, expenses paid, to represent Chicago at the National Youth Poetry Slam.

YCA teaching poets Gary Lilley and Nikki Patin

YCA offers the community a variety of programs and services for educators and artists. A roster of 20 working poets, playwrights, fiction writers, storytellers, spoken-word artists, slam champions, Spanish-speaking writers and multimedia artists is available to do school assembly readings, small-group workshops and writers' residencies, or even help jump-start a spoken-word club, a school literary magazine, a book club or a poetry slam team.

YCA also offers help with setting up open-mic events, reading series, slams and essay contests; professional development for writing teachers; and writing-integrated school curriculum. There's even a Writer Teachers' Collective for writers who teach and teachers who write, providing a network of resources, job opportunities and seminars on arts-education topics.

The Web site has a Bazaar where you can buy YCA publications like Say What magazine, written by and for Chicago's youth, with new writing, tips and exercises, interviews and news. The Web site is also a fun place to explore the YCA teaching style through writing prompts and games, plus links and info about writing awards.

After leafing through a bunch of YCA publications, we got down to work with teaching poets Gary Lilley and Nikki Patin (the "business Nazi"; she coordinates the YCA Reading Series). It was here we learned that we are all interested in writing, and that language plays a part in everything creative we all do every day.

Patin and Lilley softened us up with friendly talk and then ran us through some brief lessons in literal versus figurative language, simile and metaphor. We were given handouts, including Ron Padgett's "Handbook of New Forms," and they explained how they use "prompts" to get kids to write. For example, the prompt "If I were an animal — " produced something beautiful: "If I were an animal, I would be a dark valley's lonely bird," wrote Kitty Ho Yan Wong, 16, of Newcomer High School. We got busy writing about what we would be if we were animals, colors, sounds, seasons, time of day, cities, hopes.

Then we each wrote a first-person "persona poem" from the perspective of someone other than ourselves. This technique removes the student from fear of judgment, they told us. They passed a hat full of personas and we each took one; I received "a slave on a slave-ship." It had been years since my grad-school days in MFA writing workshop at UC Irvine, but I felt the old surge in my blood as I tried to let someone else speak through me. I have been reading slave diaries lately, so I had some good primary research stored up in my memory. With your indulgence, what the heck, here's my poem:

Caught & Packed

I lie here in the dark
so close to all the others
I can smell their cold iron fear.
Stacked like logs we are raw wood
for something we cannot imagine.
Who are these beasts on deck above us
who could rip us from our mothers' breasts
and cram us into something that is
just like death?
But longer.

Gary Lilley asked me about myself as a writer, and I told him that I had known I was a writer since I was 13 because my teachers told me so. I had answered a test essay question in rhymed couplets and the Irish nuns who taught me in eighth grade went wild, parading me around as "a writer." I said it means a lot to know that young who and what you are. It gives you a real head start, and this is the gift YCA is giving to hundreds of Chicago teenagers every year.

In return for my rusty, Herculean effort, I was berated by Gary Lilley for wasting all my time on journalism.

Choosing a Path

There was so much to talk about on the way home from this odyssey. Garneau and Babenchuk chattered excitedly to each other in Russian, which, completely coincidentally, they both happen to speak. Actress Angela Dedenbach said she was torn between Redmoon and Young Chicago Authors. Her eyes sparkled as she told me it had long been a secret dream of hers to work for Redmoon, but she had put in a lot of time on a girls' writing project called LadySpeak and was still interested in developing in that direction, so maybe Young Chicago Authors. But Sarah Meyer identifies as a writer, and I could see YCA written all over her.

I had to leave the next day, so I was unable to accompany them to the remaining possible practicum sites — About Face, Chicago Public Art Group, Free Street Programs and Video Machete — but was glad I had some familiarity with most of them already.

I went home to North Carolina full of hope for the world, having spent so much time with these eight young people. Last I heard, they were hard at work: Angela Dedenbach at Free Street Theatre, Iaroslava Babenchuk at Chicago Children's Choir, Erin Patinkin at Redmoon Theater and sure enough, Sarah Meyer at Young Chicago Authors. Walter Ornelas has left his job at the Yollocalli Youth Museum and has decided for personal reasons to enroll in another program in the AEMM department.

As we went to the Web with this story, I learned that Julie Simpson, who set this little universe in motion, is leaving Columbia in March 2004 to become the executive director of the Cricket Island Foundation in New York, a family foundation dedicated to supporting youth leadership development through youth arts, youth organizing and civic engagement, and entrepreneurship.

By e-mail, I asked Simpson for her favorite thing about the way the degree program is turning out. She wrote back:

I think the level of expertise each student is gaining about the actual community, the culture and the soul of each of the practicum sites in which they're housed is staggering. In most cases, the students in this program have gained an understanding of their practicum site unlike that held by many of the existing staff at these sites. The level of inquiry has been so enormous that it has brought about a wealth of knowledge that prior to this time had not been congealed. The staff at most of these sites is so grateful to be a part of this learning as well. The work of the site has been contextualized through the exercises the students were asked to accomplish. The amount of deep learning that is occurring is remarkable. In addition, it has been unbelievable to watch the camaraderie that has formed amongst the first cohort of students. They are truly bonded and have become a cohesive unit that is committed to getting through this very strenuous agenda. They are true pioneers and I really respect their courage.

When I asked Simpson if she could go back and change anything about the program's design, what it would be, she told me:

This is a tough one. We are struggling with the ethics and the practicality of having the students (in some cases) be full-time employees of their practicum sites. This poses some difficult issues around the student's true ability to question some of the ways the organization does business without jeopardizing their ability to keep their full-time jobs. It is essential for the student to be able to honestly and ruthlessly be able to really ask those hard questions of his/her colleagues and superiors in order for them all to grow and for the organization to do a better job at what it does. I think we need to do a much better job of orienting the practicum-site staff before expecting them to really understand the goals of our program, and to really make it possible for the student to fully thrive in the program. A student must not feel that his/her job might be on the line if a search for learning is really guiding the way in which they conduct themselves. We are also struggling with our expectations of these students. An enormous amount is expected of them and we are trying to be able to accurately lay those expectations on the table before a student enters the program.

I highly recommend that anyone interested in community arts take a trip like mine, or at least spend some time volunteering in a youth-arts organization. There's nothing like the real thing.

And to the gang of eight: Everybody, bon voyage.

Linda Frye Burnham is a co-director of Art in the Public Interest and the Community Arts Network.

See a companion article by grad student Erin Patinkin.

More information about the Arts in Youth and Community Development degree at Columbia college Chicago is available on the Web (http://aemmp.colum.edu/graduate/aycd.htm). For information about Columbia's Office of Community Arts Partnerships, see its Web site (http://www.colum.edu/ocap/).

Original CAN/API publication: February 2004