In the Midst: Cultivating Citizens/Artists

I am in the midst. I am in the midst of early morning drives in a 15-passenger van full of college students — 23 miles each way. I am in the midst of planning a fieldtrip for 34 11th graders to come to our campus and share a day with us learning about Theater, checking out our campus, and seeing what university life is like. I am in the midst of planning catered box lunches, setting final performance dates, managing grants, designing t-shirts, devising lesson plans, updating weekly blogs and collecting permission slips. In truth, I enjoy all of it (I’m a detail-ish kind of person) but at times I must remind myself that I cannot let those details take over. Along with all of the day-to-day organizing, I must remind myself that I am also in the midst of a new project where all of my passions and interests are colliding in the most exciting ways — critical pedagogy, arts-based civic dialogue, service-learning, theater with youth and now, arts integration with civic education — all coming together.

This merging of principles and pedagogies in my new course, “The Citizen Artist,” is truly a thrill but sometimes, when you are “in the midst” it is easy to stop thinking about the big picture, the guiding principles you had set for yourself, the pedagogical reasoning behind them and the purposeful choices you initially had in mind. All of these things could fall to the wayside while dealing with the day-to-day grind if I don’t remain vigilant. I’ve decided to take the time, while I am “in the midst,” to revisit my guiding principles, reexamine my pedagogical practices so I can ask myself: Are we achieving what we set out to do? Are we being good partners and collaborators, remaining conscious of maintaining an equitable workspace? Are my students and I taking time to reflect and develop our critical consciousness right along with our partners? I have chosen to focus on three of the guiding principles behind the project and the pedagogical practices through which those principles are realized. These principles are: fostering a reciprocal relationship and establishing a democratic learning space, providing an opportunity for student artists to try on the role of the justice-oriented citizen, and finding a balance between listening and speaking out in our investigations and artmaking processes.

While this paper focuses mainly on these three guiding principles, and less so on the specifics of the project, it is important to have a bit of background. Much of the idea behind this project stems from my fascination with the concept of citizenship. For the last few semesters I have been talking to my students about an idea that longtime community arts writer and practitioner Bill Cleveland once offered in an article on the Connecting Californians project that “story can be used as a tool or a weapon” (Burnham, Connecting 1). It seems to me, that citizenship in this country is used much the same way. On a daily basis, we see citizenship used as a weapon to remind “others” they are not one of “us” but rather one of “them” and should therefore not be entitled to the same privileges. It pains me to see the ways in which this is played out each day in the news but I am also encouraged to see the ways in which many others have taken to using citizenship as a tool. Citizen artists in particular, use their work to connect with community, to create spaces for civic dialogue, to listen deeply and respond, to remember our past and imagine our future. These artists continually remind themselves and others of not only the rights but also the responsibilities that come with citizenship. Especially proud to see more and more artists filling these ranks, I have been consumed with creating awareness of this tremendous opportunity for young artists at the university where I teach.

Quite naturally, this idea of citizenship has worked its way into being the focus of the new Citizen Artist service-learning course. Aptly named, this six-credit offering by the Department of Theatre and Film at Bowling Green State University (BGSU is designed to provide students an intensive opportunity to explore the significant ways in which art enriches civic life in America. The first five-week segment focused on classroom work for the BGSU students as well as some initial planning and relationship-building visits with our partnering organization, Libbey High School. During this important phase BGSU students explored theories and practices in relation to arts-based civic engagement and service-learning, while also developing their collaboration and artmaking skills. The second segment (11 weeks) of which we are now in the midst, involves an intensive residency at Libbey High School in Toledo where BGSU students work alongside 11th-grade Social Studies students toward the creation of a documentary theater project. For this, both college and high-school students have the opportunity to explore their roles as citizens/artists and recognize that “Art is vital to society; civic dialogue is vital to democracy; and both create unique opportunities for understanding and exchange” (Korza 4) by using their artmaking processes to investigate a pressing controversial public issue. Workshops with the high-school students involve meeting with community members invested in our topic, story circles, developing theater skills, research and discussion, crafting questions and shaping the performance.

Fostering Reciprocal Relationships and Establishing a Democratic Learning Space

On the BGSU side of the partnership there are six undergraduate and two graduate students who come from a variety of academic backgrounds including theater, broadcast journalism, American cultural studies and interpersonal communications. Our partners include 34 American Government and Economics students in their junior year at Libbey High School along with their teacher, Ms. Hudson, and their principal, Ms. Lewinski. Libbey is a Toledo Public School with whom BGSU has had an ongoing relationship over the last several years. A grand-looking “castle” school whose hallways were once filled with over 3,000 students, Libbey has transitioned into three small schools (we work with Libbey Humanities Academy, which focuses on the arts) sharing the one building and now totaling less than 800 students. The student body is mainly composed of low-income African-American, Latino and white students from South Toledo, about 23 miles north of Bowling Green. Graduation rates are low at Libbey, as is the number of students proceeding to college.

Given this initial information about our partnering school it would be easy for the college students to arrive at the high school thinking of this as an opportunity to make “them” more like “us.” Or that, upon arriving in the older south end of Toledo, the college students would see only the deficits of that community, ignore the many assets and view themselves as coming to “teach the kids,” or worse, “save them.” Armed with a plethora of readings from the Animating Democracy Initiative as well as their “Learning Through Serving” text, the college students read article after article from various scholars and artists very early-on in the course to the point where they brought up these concerns all on their own. The influences of liberatory educator Paolo Freire were highly present in many of these readings, so I was very pleased at how insightful the new students were in the recognition of their own power and privilege. However, being able to intellectualize the principles of exchange and reciprocity is not necessarily the same as practicing them.

In the crafting of this course, I took inspiration from the youthLEAD model promoted by the Ohio Campus Compact (from which I received a Learn and Serve grant to fund this project) in shaping my own as well as my students’ thinking about the value of establishing equal partnerships and the benefits available to all who participate.

This model contributed much to my overall design for this course, where both the high-school students and the college students (and I) will work together as equal partners all gaining from, as much as contributing to, our investigation of citizenship. After all, it would be a great assumption that the college students, only a few years older than the partnering high-school students (although sometimes living lives that are worlds apart), have vastly more knowledge about what it is to be a citizen. On the contrary, while the college students may have more of an intellectual understanding of it, in practice, they are often no different from their younger peers. This concept is made real for me with a quote by Muriel Rukeyser: “Because you have imagined love, you have not loved; merely because you have imagined brotherhood, you have not made brotherhood” (Cohen-Cruz, Town 55). This partnership will be a critical opportunity for the university students to put their intellectual understandings of citizenship and reciprocity into practice right alongside the high-school students. Together, we will all be co-creators of knowledge.

From Jan Cohen-Cruz, I gain further insights on the role of reciprocity and what both parties in this project have to gain as artists.

As a theater educator who often works with nonmajors and community members who do not necessarily identify as artists, I have great hopes that this can be a powerful opportunity for all participants to recognize their creative capacity as well as “to reveal art as part of the civic solution” (Burnham, Listen Up 1), thereby allowing individuals to recognize their own power to contribute to change using the arts as their vehicle.

From the very beginning of our visits to Libbey I actively sought out opportunities to cultivate a “space of reciprocity,” a democratic learning space where everyone was the expert of his/her own knowledge, and I initiated this process by incorporating storytelling into our introductions. Storytelling after all, is “the signature methodology of community-based performance … expressing what people in different walks of life know from the authority of experience” (Cohen-Cruz, Local Acts 129). On our two initial introduction days, (since we are working with two different classes) I devised and led the high-school and college students through a visualization exercise where they were to picture in their mind a significant place in their community that for them holds a sense of pride or memory and then with a crayon they were to draw that space on a piece of paper. I assured them the place would not necessarily be the prettiest place and it didn’t have to be of great significance to anyone else but simply a place that they know well and is steeped in memory — for them. The next task was to flip the paper over and write down the story that went with that place, and from there the college and high-school students mixed together in small groups to share their drawings and their stories. This simple exercise had a powerful impact on setting the tone for our work together, for “Personal stories position even the least powerful individual in the subject position, the I, since everyone is expert on his or her own life. Experience ‘affords a privileged critical location from which to speak’ without denying others the same…” (Cohen-Cruz, Local Acts 129). In recognizing that they all came from places that had rich stories behind them, students were able to get to know one another on a deeper level while at the same time putting each student in the power position of expert. I was already aware of the great power that sharing personal stories can have in building a sense of community, fostering reciprocity and establishing a democratic learning space but the exchanges between the students on those two days served as an important reminder to me nonetheless.

Social Studies curriculum in the state of Ohio has a category specifically dedicated to the “rights and responsibilities of citizenship,” and 11th grade curriculum includes within its learning objectives “partaking in civil discourse” and “being informed on public issues,” so working with 11th-grade American Government and Economics students at Libbey seemed highly fitting. After all, our young partners would soon have their full citizenship thrust upon them when they turned 18 and were expected to vote and register for the armed services. Citizenship is of course, a massive topic inclusive of a great many things beyond voting and joining the military, so our challenge became: On what do we specifically focus, and how do we generate interest and excitement around this topic? As a community-based artist, arts integration and finding ways to make meaningful connections with community are my answers to the second part of that question, but first we needed a topic.

Inspiring interest in the value of civil discourse will likely be one of the bigger ongoing challenges of this project, so choosing the right topic was critical. After some deliberation, I decided our inroad could be found with Controversial Public Issues (CPIs). My colleague in Social Studies education assured me that CPIs were significant learning opportunities where students explore and discuss “unresolved questions of public policy that spark significant disagreement” (Hess, 2) that always lead to lively discussions with students. This approach would also allow us to “integrate citizenship education as content with citizenship education as pedagogy. Students learn the skills of democracy — critical thinking, public deliberation, community building and collective action — by practicing them” (Mendel-Reyes 36).

Identifying possible CPIs to explore became one of the college students’ very first tasks. Ideal best practice in this instance would have been for the high-school students to go through the process of identifying their own topic of focus, but with our extremely limited schedule best practice had to be compromised and the pedagogy amended to the real situation. Time is extremely limited for this 11-week residency at the high school so we needed to get ahead by doing some research on our own and providing the high-school students with what we judged to be the best (albeit limited) options we could. After much research and discussion, we collectively came up with four central questions to present to the high-school students: 1. Should voting be mandatory in the United States? 2. What is the relationship between uniforms in public schools and the freedom of expression guaranteed by the First Amendment? 3. Should bullying be a hate crime? 4. Should there be stronger monitoring of tactics used by the military to recruit in high schools?

Once we had our four questions, on which the Libbey students would have the opportunity to vote in order to insure a sense of ownership on the direction of our work together, it then became our task to breathe life into them using theater. “Starting with the art,” community artist Marty Pottenger once stated, “opens up everyone’s sense of possibility, imagination, intelligence and fun” (Korza 162). Integrating the arts into the social-studies curriculum has been an area of interest of mine for a while now and I knew that starting out by personifying these complex issues through theater would make them much more compelling and meaningful to our young partners. We wanted to inspire our new partners from the very beginning and give them a chance to see for themselves the power the arts can have as a catalyst for dialogue and social change. With that in mind, the eight college students worked in pairs to devise ideas for four three-to-five-minute performances that reveal the complexity of each of their assigned topics and then we all worked collaboratively to put each piece on its feet. Hoping to avoid creating four didactic “after-school specials,” I challenged the students to focus more on the asking of questions than offering answers.

On performance day, putting live faces and voices behind the multiple perspectives that come with each of these complex issues seemed to make all the difference. Our students in the audience were as intent with their listening and eye contact during each scene as they were generous with their applause and cheers with the conclusion of each piece. The energy in the room was electric. We could not have asked for a more welcoming response, and when given a chance to vote on the four different choices we presented through performance, students took the opportunity very seriously. Every single topic received votes but, ultimately, the students chose the question of whether bullying should become a hate crime. Finally, we had our topic.

In his article “What Kind of Citizen? The Politics of Education for Democracy” civic-education scholar Joel Westheimer suggests that there are three different types of citizens.

These distinctions provide an important sense of focus to our work as this project is most definitely about taking on the role of the justice-oriented citizen who thinks critically, seeks out different perspectives, asks good questions and looks and listens deeply for the root of the problem before taking action. Only when in the midst of the project did I fully realize how vital this approach would also be in getting buy-in from the high-school students on our topic.

After our glorious first day of presentations we told the students the ballot count determined that bullying as a hate crime was our winning topic. This was met with disappointment. One vocal student didn’t think bullying was an issue at Libbey. My students and I were disheartened. However, we began to realize that a number of the students simply perceived the term “bullying” as childish -— something that happens in elementary and junior high schools. When this perspective came up again I took the opportunity to talk a bit about the high-school and college shootings that have happened recently in the U.S. and highlighted how many of the shooters were victims themselves -— of bullying. This caught a few of the students’ attention and so from there we talked about the many different forms of bullying as well as some of the other devastating outcomes, such as teen suicide, and soon more and more of the students had something to say.

I assured the Libbey students that we were not looking for this to be a project about us university folks coming in to tell them “bullying is bad” or “say no to bullies,” but rather about us all working together and taking on the role of justice-oriented citizens. We had just as much to learn on this subject as they did. Together we will conduct our own research and we will bring in community members invested in these topics to ask further questions of to help us really look at the root causes of bullying and ask what we are doing as a society to stop it. Is legislation for stricter punishments a good option? Is hate crime status the answer? What about grassroots prevention? What are the questions we need to be asking to truly understand the gravity and the complexity of this issue? Our end goal, I assured the students, is not the creation of an issue play about how terrible bullying is, but rather a theatrical performance that documents young citizens’ investigation of the complexities of a serious public concern and acknowledges the diverse perspectives of many with the intent of fostering further dialogue with their peers and the surrounding community. At the mention of this, the students seemed genuinely excited. After all, this is a problem that will require the awareness and commitment of many if we really hope to see change, and now the high-school students will be valuable contributors.

In providing this opportunity to examine the role of the justice-oriented citizen, I do not intend to minimize the valuable contributions made by those who are personally responsible or participatory citizens (whose contributions are most necessary), but in learning how to be a justice-oriented citizen I believe both the college and high-school students will have an opportunity to truly understand the great power held by each and every citizen who chooses to commit to this role. In this pursuit, I take inspiration from education scholars Robby Cohen and Pedro Noguera, “... as educators, we have a special responsibility to encourage critical thinking among our students. Indeed, citizens who think critically are essential for the functioning of our democracy” (Westheimer, Pledging 26).

Hand-in-hand with creating a democratic space for learning comes the value of listening deeply. Inspiration for this particular focus of the project is drawn, in part, from the Animating Democracy Initiative, for which the published findings have a chapter titled “Youth, Art and Civic Dialogue.” Speaking out and being heard is often the focus of much youth-based programming, but, it is also acknowledged that speaking out and being heard,

Critical pedagogues have suggested in their writings that we can simultaneously cultivate both individual beliefs and openness to the diversity of the contemporary society. In bell hooks’ book, “Teaching Community,” she quotes Judith Simmer Brown explaining that,

The curriculum of this course is designed in such a way as to guide both college and high-school students toward making these discoveries as they work collaboratively across race, class and age as well as numerous other differences. Together, through this service-learning pedagogy, students will indeed have an opportunity to “commit to engage,” by “problem-posing; gathering evidence and analyzing it; and formulating, carrying out, and evaluating plans of action. In order to become critical thinkers,” service-learning scholar Meta Mendel-Reyes explains, “students must learn how to ‘question the answers!’” (37). Furthermore, by crafting a theatrical performance with their findings, the students (both high-school and college) can indeed take action by creating further space for civic dialogue with their community. Embodying the words of others, (whether we agree with them or not), for a theatrical performance will provide an important opportunity for all of us to develop our empathy skills and allow us to further appreciate the democratic ideals of a pluralistic society, putting into practice the belief that all voices have the right to be heard.

Many community artists approach their work with the goal of listening to and including as many voices of differing perspectives as possible in their artistic works, for it creates “a more thought-provoking work of art — one that invite(s) audiences to contemplate perspectives other than their own” (Korza 164). In fact, companies like Sojourn seek out as many differing voices as possible as part of their artistic mission in order to combat the “polarization and ideological stalemate” that have become “central to our nation’s inability to move forward on important social-justice and economic-justice and human-rights issues” (Burnham, Listen Up 3).

The Citizen Artist project embraces all of these ideals for this effort is very much focused on dialogue that moves all of us, high-school and college students and audience members as well as myself away from the black-and-white, either-or dichotomies that so often hold up progress in this nation and recognize the many shades of grey that come with any given issue. Again, we will do this by committing to engage in this pluralistic society and honing our…

We will seek this balance between listening and speaking out not only in our initial dialogue and research phase amongst each other and our community guests but also during our artmaking processes and in the final presentation of our work, where we will give credence to perspectives different than our own while also having an opportunity to share what we ourselves have come to believe. The arts in this instance will play a crucial role in providing a “welcoming point of entry to those (young people) who have not felt access to the civic realm before” (Korza 7).

One of the important lessons I carry with me is the value of the acting-school expression “being in the moment” (once again, placing importance on listening) and staying open to what is presented to me. Right now, one of the most important things that I must remain open to in order not to deny the rich layers that are revealing themselves — is that I am not the only one “in the midst” on this project. The students at Libbey are in the midst of their own discoveries as they are, one by one, ushered into the world of “full” citizenship as they turn 18 and are expected to vote (an opportunity from which they were previously excluded) and contribute to a society that is rife with complexity — and often hypocrisy. The university students, not that much older than the high-school students, are in the midst of discovering themselves as citizens as well as citizen artists. As they become aware of the fulfilling and challenging artistic opportunities that are out there for them to grasp hold of, they are also recognizing that this work comes with a new (and often daunting) language with words such as power, privilege and reciprocity. And I am an artist, educator and activist early in my career and in the midst of realizing that as much as I prefer to have a detailed plan for how each day will go, adhering to the guiding principles I set for myself must be my first priority. In the case of the Citizen Artist, the day-to-day steps in what we do to get to our final public performance may change but the guiding principles behind how we get there will remain priorities: fostering a reciprocal relationship and establishing a democratic learning space, providing an opportunity for student artists to try on the role of the justice-oriented citizen, and finding a balance between listening and speaking out. In this partnership, whether we are from Bowling Green State University or Libbey High School, we are all in the midst, and with these guiding principles in place, we all will have endless opportunities to commit to engage as artists and citizens.

This essay is part of the Community Arts Convening & Research Project, 2008, funded by a Nathan Cummings Foundation grant to the Maryland Institute College of Art. The essay was reviewed and selected by the project's Editorial Board: Ron Bechet, Xavier University of Louisiana; Lori Hager, University of Oregon; Marina Gutierrez, Cooper Union; Ken Krafchek, Maryland Institute College of Art; Sonia Mañjon, California College of the Arts; Amalia Mesa-Bains, California State University Monterey Bay; Paul Teruel, Columbia College Chicago; and Stephani Woodson, Arizona State University.

Kate Collins is a joint faculty member in the Department of Theatre and Film and the Chapman Learning Community at Bowling Green State University. Collins is a 2002 graduate of the M.F.A. Theatre for Youth program at Arizona State University, where she directed a number of community-engaged theatrical projects, including “To Be American,” “Sharing the Spotlight” and “Finding Phoenix.” She continues to teach and develop courses focused primarily on theater with youth and community. Currently, Collins is focused on the Citizen Artist service-learning course supported with funding by a Learn and Serve grant from Ohio Campus Compact.

Cohen Cruz, Jan. “When the Gown Goes to Town: The Reciprocal Awards of Fieldwork for Artists.” Theatre Topics 11 (2001): 55–62.

—. Local Acts: Community-based Performance in the United States. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers UP, 2005.

Hess, Diana. “Teaching Students to Discuss Controversial Public Issues.” Clearinghouse for Social Studies/Social Science Education. (2001) ERIC. 28 Dec. 2007 http://www.eric.ed.gov.

hooks, bell. Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope, New York and London: Routledge, 2003.

Korza, Pam, Barbara Schaffer Bacon & Andrea Assaf. Civic Dialogue, Arts & Culture: Findings from Animating Democracy. Washington D.C.: Americans for the Arts, 2005.

Mendel-Reyes, Meta. “A Pedagogy for Citizenship: Service Learning and Democratic Education.” New Directions for Teaching and Learning 73 (1998): 31–38.

Westheimer, Joel. Pledging Allegiance: The Politics of Patriotism in American Schools, New
York: Teachers College Press, 2007.

—. “What Kind of Citizen? The Politics of Education for Democracy” American Educational Research Journal 41.2 (2004): 237-269.

Home

About CAN

APInews

Reading Room

Resources

Forums

Site Map

What's New

Search Site

In the Midst: Cultivating Citizens/Artists

Comments