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Activate the Learning, Support the Field: The Community-based Practicum in Youth ArtsGarneau delivered this presentation on October 7, 2005, at the 31st Annual Social Theory, Politics and the Arts Conference at the University of Oregon in Eugene. See Garneau's report on the conference for CAN. –Ed. I’m going to talk today about an academic program at Columbia College Chicago that was established in the Fall of 2003 to address the professional development needs of future leaders in the field of community-based youth arts. Our program is a Master’s Degree program in the department of Arts, Entertainment and Media Management. Our students are getting a Master’s in Arts Management with a concentration in Arts in Youth and Community Development. (Hereafter you may hear me refer to it as AYCD). This program is a partnership between the department of Arts, Entertainment and Media Management and the Center for Community Arts Partnerships. I’ll spend some time today on the structure of the AYCD program, specifically focusing on the Community Practicum. And then I’ll raise some the “open questions” we have after working on this program for two-and-a-half years. The first students enrolled in Fall of 2003 and the third group just started in September. There are currently15 students in the program. As part of their training, all of the Columbia College students in our program have a five-semester intensive experience working 20 hours a week in a community-based youth arts organization that we call the Practicum. In my role I recruit and screen community-based organizations that may be Practicum sites, take groups of students site visits to these organizations, support the process of interviewing and mutual selection for Practicum placements, arrange payment of both student and organizational stipends, and help each student and his/her mentor at the Practicum site develop relationships that will facilitate students contributing to the work of their Practicum organizations while learning the most they can. I am also adjunct faculty at Columbia College. This is a list of the current Arts in Youth and Community Development Practicum sites. [Slide — See Appendix A, below] When we talk about community-based youth arts we mean organizations that are dedicated to offering very high-quality youth arts programming outside of a school setting. When we speak of these organizations being community-based we often mean serving an actual geographic community area, but they may be working with a community of queer youth or chronically ill children. Our choice to work with these organizations was based in part on the research of Dr. Shirley Brice Heath, which demonstrated the success of out-of-school youth arts programs in strengthening youth and community development. The Arts in Youth and Community Development program also grew out of our understanding that many community-based youth arts organizations were started by artists who were not necessarily managers. Many of the organizations that serve as Practicum sites are between 10 and15 years old and are still being led by their founding artist leaders. In our collective judgment, we believe the next generation of leaders in this field will not have time to learn fiscal management on the job. They will need to be ready to step into leadership roles already knowing how to manage budgets and staffs, but they will also need to be solidly grounded in artistic practice, youth development and theories of community development. The AYCD Practicum Mentor plays an essential role in the student’s educational experience. All Practicum Mentors are people in positions of leadership and authority in their organizations. This person guides the student in the Practicum experience and articulates the needs of the organization. We have tried to model the Practicum with an ethic of reciprocity. That means we want our students to learn, but we also want the partner organizations to gain something significant by their participation. We pay students an annual stipend of $15,000 for their work in their Practicum sites and we pay Practicum organizations an annual stipend of $5,000 to compensate them for time spent mentoring one of our students. Currently, these stipends are funded by grants from the Rockefeller and Cummings foundations. Because the Practicum is five semesters long, Columbia College students can get deep inside a community-based organization and ride out some major transitions. The Practicum is different from an art school internship because although all of our students practice some art form, they are coming to the Practicum Site to learn about organizational life, not necessarily to have an artmaking experience. We believe that given the generally under-supported and isolating context in which CBO mentors sometimes work, bringing them together formally around a table a few times a year can be a very powerful act in itself. We have been really interested in the development of a community of leader/mentors in the field of community-based youth arts that has not previously existed in Chicago. But when this program was first proposed, there was some anxiety among professionals in the field — people felt threatened by the idea that there was a brand new master’s degree program trying to train people to do what they were already doing. So it’s been work to establish relationships of trust with the Practicum site mentors so that they understand how much we value their knowledge and experience in the field. One of the most important things we believe an academic program like ours and the others around the country can do, besides turning out well trained people, is provide space for current practitioners to have a broader dialogue about the field of community-based arts and its relationship to the world around us. We’ve learned a lot in the last three years. As the program continues to grow and develop, we have a lot of questions, and these are two that interest me: What does “community development” mean in our academic program and in the field? In the absence of a really clear economic analysis of what is happening in communities in Chicago, talking about and teaching community development can actually become dangerous. One area of discomfort among some of us working on the program have is that it seems like neither the committee that works to develop the AYCD program (myself included), nor the faculty, nor our colleagues in community-based organizations, have any kind of agreement on what we mean by community development. We have never agreed on a particular model of community development, nor on a definition of our terms. If we are not going to promote a single model, then our work is to ensure that our students gain a rigorous economic analysis. Chicago is transforming so quickly that our students need the tools to critique the forces actively working toward the displacement of poor and working-class people from the communities in which our partners are trying to do youth arts work. We know that the term “community development” is used as a euphemism for tearing down affordable housing and building condos. At Young Chicago Authors, someone actually bricked up a wall of windows — as if young poets shouldn’t even be able to see the $300,000 condos going up next door. But will the next generation of leaders have an analysis of artist-led gentrification? Professional development for a transforming field Let’s face it, the last five years have not been easy for a lot of nonprofit organizations, much less grassroots, activist, community-based and youth arts organizations. I have an ongoing dialogue with Craig Harshaw, an AYCD faculty member and executive director of Insight Arts. He recently pointed out to me that “our students have chosen the field they are in because this field is one that explicitly is about at least serving and at best empowering women, people of color, children, the poor and working class, queer people, the elderly and other victims of brutality and marginalization.” And all of the students so far also fit into at least one of these groups. So it should not be surprising that if we recognize these populations as being under attack in the United States, that organizations who work with those populations may also be under threat. The blessing and the curse of the community Practicum is that Columbia College students really do get to know the organizations in which they’re working. After bonding with youth and adult community arts workers, our students also experience the traumas of financial crises, the wrenching staff changes, the cuts in funding. We are offering professional development in a field that we desperately want to see thrive, but which is transforming before our eyes, and sometimes seems to be precariously teetering on the edge. At the same time, their Mentors are people who constantly demonstrate their commitment to young people, to community artmaking practices, to social justice. The students witness staff members who are so deeply engaged in community-based youth arts work that they continue to do it despite great personal sacrifice. It takes genius management and an entrepreneurial spirit to keep some of these organizations running when they are so woefully underfunded, especially in areas of general operating support. The people running these organizations are unbelievably dedicated, hard working and underpaid. On Wednesday we had a Mentor’s meeting, and one of the dozen Mentors at the table announced that her organization was going to start providing health insurance to their six full-time staff. There was a collective, wide-eyed, “wow” around the room. And yet, leaders in the field remain optimistic about its prospects. As it turns out, the ones who witness the transformative power of art and creativity in the lives of young people and their communities stubbornly refuse to give up on the field. Nicole Garneau is assistant director of Community Partnerships in the Center for Community Arts Partnerships at Columbia College Chicago, where she coordinates the Arts in Youth and Community Development concentration of the Master's in Arts Management. For ten years, Garneau has been an active member of Insight Arts, an arts organization dedicated to social justice and human rights. She is also a practicing performance artist based in Chicago. For more information about Columbia's AYCD program, visit its Web site and an article on CAN about the program, "Learnrning at Street Level: Columbia College Chicago's New Youth-Arts Master's Degree" by Linda Frye Burnham APPENDICES For CAN readers who are looking for useful tools in this work, here are the Appendices to Garneau's longer, more formal paper on this subject. They include a list of the current AYCD Practicum sites, an academic plan for a full-fime graduate student in Arts in Youth and Community Development, and a Journey Mapping Evaluation Tool, about which Garneau says:
Appendix A Current AYCD Practicum Sites
Appendix B Suggested Academic Plan for A Full-Time Graduate Student in Arts in Youth and Community Development
§ If student does not register for Summer Session, this course could be taken in Year One, First Semester. Appendix C Journey Mapping Evaluation Tool Explanation: Students and mentors log in to the Journey Mapping Web site and are prompted to answer questions in narrative forms and also to make qualitative evaluations. OUTCOME CHALLENGE STATEMENT FOR STUDENTS Students are gaining a broad base of arts management skills and are being enabled to build and direct a youth arts community-based organization or to pursue careers in other arts fields with a foundation of knowledge in Arts in Youth and Community Development. Student Evaluation Narrative Evaluation Questions - Students
Please rate yourself based on the following learning objectives:
Rating choices:
Which of the following have you accomplished in part or fully?
Which among the following have contributed most to your recent progress:
OUTCOME CHALLENGE STATEMENT FOR MENTORS We intend to implement events which provide an opportunity for mentors to reflect on their observation of the AYCD student and their role in mentoring an emerging leader in youth arts and community development. Narrative Evaluation Questions - Mentors
Who among the following have been most helpful to you in your role as a mentor?
Rate the following four items by clicking the number of bubbles that apply:
Which of these success markers have been achieved in part or fully?
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