Arts and Community Development

This course utilizes the principles of academic Service-Learning to introduce students to the theory and practice of the arts as a vehicle for community-cultural development. As part of the course, the students will undertake fieldwork and research in an arts-based community project through direct contact and collaboration with established community based organizations (CBOs) that have within each of their missions explicit goals of community-cultural development.

The instructors have identified and established partnerships with five CBO’s in Chicago, each of which has expressed a felt-need for increased research into the work they conduct to enhance tbe impact their efforts have on their constituents and communities. Students will be introduced to these organizations and the people who lead them, and will conduct site-visits and onsite research to achieve mutual goals of academic learning and advancement of the individual and collecti ve work of the organizations. The research projects that are developed in this class will be presented to the CBO’s throughout the process and at the end of the semester, and will be shaped by the feedback provided by the instructors and the leaders of these organizations.

Readings and class discussions in community psychology, the role of the arts in community and cultural development, methods of community research, creating arts and cultural policy will support the fieldwork. Students will complete a collaborative research project and create personal narratives in their chosen medium reflecting their fieldwork experience.