The Curriculum Project Dialogues

Some 30 faculty members, community partners, staff and a few students are discussing curriculum for courses that rely on campus–community partnerships. The chair of a theater department states: “My dean wants me to develop community arts courses and I hardly know where to start. None of my faculty is trained in such techniques; it’s unclear if these courses will count in tenure dossiers, and I don’t want to have to worry about community partners; my responsibility is to my students. What’s anyone’s advice?”

You can practically see the red lights and hear the shrill whistles go off.

“Excuse me,” says a community partner. “But unless you care equally about the community partner you have no business doing this work.”

The department chair looks skeptical. Faculty members chime in, expressing the notion that this is not an either/or. By fully collaborating with community partners, you have a situation in which everyone flourishes. That’s the beauty of it, when it works well.

As director of Imagining America (IA): Artists and Scholars in Public Life,[1] I’ve been meeting with representatives of member schools and some of their community partners to consider the findings of The Curriculum Project: Culture and Community Development in Higher Education.[2] The Project was established in the fall of 2007, independent of IA, to research how higher education across the United States teaches the theory and practice of community cultural development (CCD), often called community-based art. In contrast to models of service, CCD attempts to understand root causes of the challenges facing our world and respond in meaningful ways, engaging with off-campus partners toward aesthetically meaningful and socially useful ends. Thanks to funding from the Nathan Cummings Foundation, cultural consultant Arlene Goldbard, Appalachia-based theater director Dudley Cocke and I conducted 28 interviews, analyzed the 231 responses to our survey, and examined several dozen syllabi and descriptions of university and community-based programs.[3]

Funding from the Community Arts Convening and Research Project helped support three dialogues emerging from our research, at NYU, University of Pennsylvania and Macalester. Here are some of the themes that emerged.

Equitable Partnerships

While it’s unimaginable that two faculty members would team-teach a course without a series of meetings to hammer out a joint syllabus, it is not unusual to encounter courses with required community components whose syllabi the community liaison never sees. For example Dana Edell, who has directed viBe Theater Experience for the past seven years, often has higher-ed students placed in her various projects as a substantial component of course learning. Speaking on a panel at our dialogue meeting at NYU, Edell urged faculty members teaching such courses to see the community project director as a genuine co-teacher. This means at the very least sharing the syllabus; even better, invite the partner’s input to the syllabus before the course begins. When possible, share student writing. Ask the community partner to do student evaluations.

Edell called for greater attention and more sensitivity to both the logistics and content of such courses. She questioned how students are matched with organizations. While it’s helpful to choose a site according to students’ strengths, it’s also valuable to push them to explore what they haven’t done yet. Then they are more like co-investigators with the community participants, all joined in an inquiry. Edell also recommended allowing the higher-ed students to participate in projects that coincide with their personal interests, not only their skills. For example, a student struggling with money worked on a viBe project about money management. She developed a more collegial relationship with the other participants than is typically the case because she was learning about something she needed as much as the viBe girls did.

Community partners, avowed Edell, would benefit from the opportunity to meet with other community partners also integrating students from the same course or project. Edell acknowledged that while community partners won’t always have time to take advantage of the above suggestions – to get to the syllabus, either when it’s evolving or when it’s done, or be able to read student papers, or go to a gathering with other community partners – the invitation ought to be extended because it’s to everyone’s benefit when it can.

Quba high-school students show Penn freshmen how to write their names in Arabic, Freshman Writing Seminar, University of Pennsylvania October 2007. Photo by Carol Muller Click here to enlarge

Edell’s remarks suggest that many of us who teach such courses from the higher-education side seem to have internalized the very prejudices we rail against in the academy. How can we not treat community partners as co-teachers when we struggle so to get permission to incorporate community-based learning into our courses, arguing that the people at such sites are sources of significant knowledge? How can we not look to community partners for syllabus input? A recurring refrain at the three dialogue sessions is that we faculty members have to decolonize ourselves; that we have internalized the two-class system by which faculty are keepers of the course design, and community liaisons are site chiefs, not integrated into the entire course in ways that would require closer exchange with the professor. While simply participating at a site is sometimes sufficient, much community-based learning is more iterative and likely to affect the overall learning experience to such an extent that more dialogue between faculty and community teacher would be advantageous for all.

Intersection of Research and Course Work

The dialogue at the University of Pennsylvania featured a case study of a multi-year partnership between UPenn music professor Carol Muller and her students with Sister Saida and her students at the Quba Institute of Arabic and Islamic Studies, a Muslim K-12 school in West Philadelphia.[4] Muller had been looking to incorporate hands-on work into her course on field methods in ethnomusicology without succumbing to the "extracting cultural knowledge" mode, using a partner organization as a “research site” to be mined and abandoned. Choosing a more reciprocal approach was challenging. Work planned collaboratively and that aims to be sustainable takes more time. As Muller explained, students accustomed to “the secular and scientific environment of a research university” need guidance to recognize and respect knowledge from members of a faith-based institution and to embrace fieldwork as an appropriate means for such learning. Approaching the Muslim community, Muller encountered a frank unwillingness to be used as research Muller’s commitment to a multi-year commitment was the basis for building rich relationships.

One of the challenges to conjoining a research agenda to coursework is that the local tends to be downplayed as a site of scholarly importance. For tenure and promotion, candidates are assessed for the national and even international reach of their work. As we tighten the link between research and pedagogy in courses such as Muller’s, using the class experience as a site of research, we may enforce the value of the local and its connection to large ideas. In academia, it’s almost as if familiarity breeds contempt.

Another challenge to such efforts is that most academics are nomads. A scholar who spends the time building a community partnership may expect to find herself on the move sooner rather than later, as the only way to advance her career, thus having to begin that slow process of community relationship building all over again at a new institution. This problem begins early on in a faculty career. It is generally considered suspect for universities to hire their own graduates. So, graduate students aspiring to public scholarship and practice are almost assured of having to begin new projects when they get their first faculty positions. Contrast this with Roadside Theater, which, for the past quarter of a century, has been in a partnership with Idiwanan An Chawe, a Native American theater in the Zuni Pueblo, New Mexico, which creates and performs Zuni language plays. Idiwanan An Chawe grew out of cultural exchange between Roadside and traditional Native American artists of Zuni. The two groups have co-created and toured numerous productions, among them “Corn Mountain/Pine Mountain,” a bilingual play with music and dance that explores the differences and common ground of Zuni and Appalachian culture.[5] It would be inconceivable to move Roadside outside of Appalachia, or Idiwanan away from the Zuni Pueblo. No wonder community partners are often savvier about work grounded in long-term commitments to particular places than their faculty counterparts.

But back to Philadelphia. The course component of Sister Saida and Professor Muller’s collaboration consisted of Penn graduate students working with Quba high-school students to create documentary films on oral and written traditions within their community. In exchange for the community’s generosity, the Penn students mentor the Quba youth in ethnographic methods and media. Working alongside the Penn students, the Quba students document their own community’s traditions. They come to the UPenn campus to participate in editing the videos. Each graduate student uses the same flexible syllabus to build a project through consultation and agreement with the Quba students, rather than the Penn students coming up with their own ideas solo. This process of consultation, while often time-consuming and even frustrating, is an important part of sharing information and skills development for all involved. In addition to the technical and artistic skills acquired, students from Penn and Quba learn a lot about the process of organizing a project.

This project evidences some of the methods specific to community-based research courses. On our panel, Muller, Sister Saida and a student participant noted the following alternative pedagogies in their collaboration:

1. Syllabi often change midway through the semester. While this may be disorienting given the norm in higher education whereby the professor knows ahead of time what the students will learn, it is not the norm in community-based projects, which, in optimal circumstances, evolve in surprising ways. Such courses call for an iterative process, whereby hands-on experiences lead to the quest for particular knowledge. Indeed, different students will be drawn to pursue different knowledge.

There are many ramifications to project participants discovering what they need as they go. During The Curriculum Project research phase, a higher-ed-based practitioner pointed out that social justice doesn’t have to be the starting point in order to evolve organically later. He gave the example of a theater group founded to work with teenagers:

They have engaged a wide-range of social justice issues on a consistent basis because they have committed to the rigor of an artistic process that evolves with generally engaging the world around them. ... The great thing about this work is that people are discovering new truths every day in it. It can be such an exciting experience for students to be learning the field and building it at the same time.

2. Teamwork proved more useful than individual projects. This challenges traditional methods of assessing students.

3. Substantial time is necessary to make a meaningful partnership; the Quba Institute set four years as a minimum. As Sister Saida said, “We won’t allow you in through the door without the establishment of a trusting relationship first.” For Muller, “There is no project without engaging with the community,” so she was ready to do what it took.

4. Some of the objectives set by Quba were not educational in the conventional sense of the word. Quba already had a 98 percent rate for students graduating going on to college. But they wanted their students and their families to have a good experience of difference, to be open to and accepting of diverse opinions, ideas and presentations of person. The Penn students became a part of the Quba community on their own terms – so, for example, the Penn women were not required to cover themselves even though the Quba females were. Saida said she and her Quba colleagues had a change in perception about music: “We learnt through Carol [Muller] that music has a place in Islam – students found a voice to express the import of music.”

The partnership benefited the Quba Institute in a number of conventional ways as well. Some of the students went on to attend universities elsewhere – something not imagined before the collaboration.

As Muller explained,

The objective for the Penn grad students was to have a compressed dissertation experience. The class was time-intensive with students required to keep journals, create media — documentary films — and read theoretical tracts. The curriculum was continuously modified in relation to the experiences of the class. The community was given feedback at the end of each semester through presentations and discussion sessions held at Quba. A Web site was set up to showcase a number of films from Quba and other projects in West Philadelphia. Due to the four-year time frame, the faculty had to be imaginative in keeping it going, so not only graduate students, but also undergraduate world music classes and freshman seminars got involved. The class proved popular, not least because of the desire amongst students to learn about Islam, even when this was not always a priority for the class.

Sister Saida explained what drew Quba to the collaboration:

We are a religious institution that educates. We are located in West Philly, which has an extremely high violence rate, and something like 50 percent drop out of high school. How will these people function in our society? This is a portion of society that is usually ignored, on the periphery. We will not survive as a country if across the board that few young people finish high school.

The Quba/Penn collaboration exposed all the students to a different side of life. Sister Saida says that by experiencing other people, such as the Penn students, the students transcend the fear people have of what they don’t know. They find ways to understand other people rather than dislike them. “One student, Ibrahim, is a good example. He changed his whole way of speaking about people – he no longer has his ideas fixed in cement. When Ibrahim first arrived at the school at the age of seven, he said that if he saw another Christmas tree he would burn it down. Sister Saida explains:

He would be shocked to hear those sentiments now. His growth is attributable to exposure and leadership in a diverse educational environment with opportunities to engage in democratic learning and thinking both religiously and academically. People retreat to what they know. We must break down the barriers so they come to know that others are ok. Money can’t buy this kind of knowledge.

Saida believes that this all started with the Institute’s collaboration with Penn. Many of their students were fundamentally changed by the experience.

Quba high-school students teach University of Pennsylvania freshman about Islam in the United States, Freshman Writing Seminar, University of Pennsylvania, October 2007. Photo by Carol Muller Click here to enlarge

Exposure for Penn students who tend to come from privileged backgrounds was important for both parties. By the time they leave Quba, Penn students have also been affected by profound experiences – one student taught a child to speak English, another got a family interested in being educated. These students’ values have changed. They became more active scholars, doing primary source research. The grad students learn how to teach and mentor. “The hallmark of the Penn approach is collaborative problem-solving in the community.” For Saida it was beneficial to have people from Penn feeling something for her community.

Minnesota: The Complementarity of Knowledge

The regional meeting held at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota, also began with a panel featuring community partners and faculty engaged in campus-community partnerships. This conversation was characterized by a high level of respect between people grounded in the two contexts.

Marlina Gonzalez, independent programs consultant at Intermedia Arts, sees many reciprocal opportunities in the relationship such courses build. She noted that sometimes academic faculty members are in a position to appreciate community arts more than critics. She encouraged more of us to “go public” about it and also contribute reviews and in-depth pieces in local media outlets to share our insights with the public. Gonzalez also spoke compellingly about the importance of love in The Curriculum Project model – at the center of the triangle of scholarship, training and community engagement, Goldbard articulates “a social order of justice permeated by love.” This is a topic that makes some academics uncomfortable.

Sonja Kuftinec, an arts professor at University of Minnesota, practices interpersonal relationships in the classroom before embarking on community-based projects. As one of her students, Beth Ellsworth, describes,

We had to start with ourselves. This wasn’t just a “rehearsal for the revolution” but its own “real” space to practice deep listening and to figure out how to be altered by each others’ opinions, stories and experiences. If we couldn’t do this with each other — when we shared a lot of similar ideas and values as students of relative privilege — how could we possibly hope to do it with others?”[6]

This resonated with something we’d heard again and again in the research — how careful we must be about sending students out, making sure they are really ready. An artist who often does residencies in higher ed described spending the first semester giving students the tools that she’s spent thirty years developing. Then, in the second semester, the students apply them to subject matter that they’re already doing on campus. They can pick any one of their courses and spend the whole semester learning how to apply these things to it. “And then,” she says, “maybe I’ll trust them in community.”

Kuftinec was deeply enthusiastic about her community partners. In her Art and Social Change course, the students having listened to each other as described above, Kuftinec brings in people with what she calls “continuous” knowledge, such as Ojibwe and Dakota story tellers. She emphasized the importance of developing respect for community knowledge through long-term relationships:

I have learned an enormous amount from indigenous peoples in Minnesota, building long-term relationships as a white ally. Learning to listen. Teaching my students different notions of time, attachments to place, and building the capacity to attend to multiple histories and negotiate relationships of power that determine dominant and counter-narratives. “Knowledge and research” are often built upon a system of colonization. We must decolonize all of our minds to move from a neoliberal model of individualized knowledge production that is often alienating and isolating towards a more collaborative, dialogic model.

CCD foregrounds concern for one’s community rather than only for oneself. One interviewee during The Curriculum Project’s research phase distinguished between mainstream U.S. higher-education’s emphasis on individualism, and culturally specific – tribal, historically black, etc. — colleges’ commitment to family-oriented curriculum:

It’s something educational systems have a very difficult time doing, because they want to deal with the individual…we have a different culture; we have a different language basis; we have some different viewpoints about art, and we don’t segregate things. [We are interested in] erasing this boundary line between college age students and working with whole families.… When you penetrate into the K-12 system or some other context the education is going to be a lot better.

The Minnesota panelists also addressed differences in how various kinds of knowledge and aesthetics are valued. Gonzalez told a story about the bad reception of some early Japanese films in the U.S. until some theorists provided a frame, other than conventional western models, within which to appreciate it. This, too, was part of the recurring notion of how colonized we are to seeing in a particular way and how intellectual training can benefit community broadly conceived.

Sandy Spieler talked about her years as artistic director of In the Heart of the Beast Mask and Puppet Theater. Not until people started coming and studying that theater did she realize she, too, would like to name what she does and take on more formal study. This hunger for the kind of knowledges that both academic and community-based pathways make available was a recurring theme.

The last panelist, Greg Jay of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, described how he institutionalized community-based courses at his school by integrating them into an Alternative General Education program. Students could thus make them part of their curriculum and even earn a “Cultures and Community” certificate in the process. This is an important strategy of institutionalizing community-based learning, which otherwise remains too dependent on specific faculty who may well move on to other colleges and universities.

Local Practices, National Implications

Professor Randy Martin of New York University proposes a new, national University without Walls as a means to express the value of community partners as co-educators:

Community arts activists, organizations and movements bear tremendous knowledge of cultural traditions, aesthetic forms, leadership in crafting and sustaining an organization, mobilizing constituencies, disseminating and documenting work. Some of this is formalized in business plans, position papers and other documents, some of it remains tacit knowledge. Across the country (and internationally) many people in all manner of settings have a formidable understanding of how this work gets done. The idea of a national University without Walls is to partner universities and community and cultural workers to make this knowledge legible and available to the broadest committed publics.

Martin calls on Imagining America to play a role in “legitimating, documenting, formalizing, and connecting this work in communities — just as it has for campuses.” He makes two concrete proposals: first, accrediting community-based “encounters” of all kinds — “collaborative courses, mentorships, independent study, internships, projects, programs and the like” so students can participate as part of their formal education and community providers could be compensated. And second, he calls for “creating a national archive so that the institutional stories of these vital organizations are disseminated and analyzed.” As Martin imagines it, “projects that emerge from this work would partner students, faculty, and community constituents in collaborative research that would continually contribute to the creation and revitalization of this knowledge base. The University without Walls would therefore combine existing local initiatives into a national network.”

As we move forward, Imagining America will consider Martin’s proposals and other means of strengthening campus-community courses, further legitimating them in the eyes of the academy while more fully meeting community needs. At this juncture, The Curriculum Project has become a stepping stone to Imagining America’s current major research project, Assessing the Practices of Public Scholarship. Please visit our Web site – http://www.imaginingamerica.org – to see it evolve. We are grateful to the Community Arts Convening and Research Project for providing the means to take this research a step further.

Post Script

When I got back from the last of the three regional meetings, the Syracuse University Senate had just finished drafting additional language for the Faculty Handbook concerning tenure and promotion for public scholarship. In anticipation of the vote as to whether or not to institutionalize that language, faculty were invited to comment on a blog. While not exactly surprised, I was somewhat dismayed to see a few virulent attacks on public scholarship on the grounds that it only serves a handful of self-serving and frustrated faculty who don’t do excellent enough work to get tenure as currently articulated, and which does not serve students or departments and disciplines. (Few attacks even mentioned community benefits or lack thereof.) I’m happy to report that the language did pass the school senate and is now a basis for recognizing such work across the university.

What’s next for IA and The Curriculum Project? Given that our constituents come from humanities and design as well as the arts, Gregory Jay from the Center for Culture and Communities at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and Rob Corser, from the School of Architecture at University of Washington-Seattle, developed essays on curriculum for engaged humanities and design respectively, which we also posted on our Web site. Committed to furthering campus-community projects that generate knowledge and contribute to all parties, IA has recently launched the Assessing Practices of Public Scholarship initiative. Grounded in the idea of Engagement Objectives for all constituents rather than Learning Objectives that privilege the value of the work for students, we will continue to emphasize the necessity of equitable campus-community partnerships in the work we support.

This essay is part of the Community Arts Convening & Research Project, 2009-10, funded by a Nathan Cummings Foundation grant to the Maryland Institute College of Art. The project's Editorial Board includes: Stephani Woodson, Arizona State University; Amalia Mesa-Bains, California State University Monterey Bay; Paul Teruel, Columbia College Chicago; Marina Gutierrez, Cooper Union; Jan Cohen-Cruz, Imagining America; Ken Krafchek, Maryland Institute College of Art; Lori Hager, University of Oregon; and Sonia BasSheva Mañjon, Wesleyan University.

Jan Cohen-Cruz, director of Imagining America: Artists and Scholars in Public Life, just completed “Engaging Performance: Theatre as Call and Response,” which will be published by Routledge Press in 2010.

Notes