In my final reflection, after reading through the blog entries of this past semester, let me start out by saying,

thank God for this blog.

I suspected when I began this course, although I didn’t know for sure, that I was going to encounter material that would start me thinking in ways I hadn’t before. My suspicions proved correct: I’ve been fundamentally changed by what I’ve read and experienced in this course. More often than not, these changes happened outside the classroom, as I worked with my group and partner organization or engaged with CAN and other reading material. Thank God this blog could catch and hold the thoughts and (at the risk of sounding like my 7th grade live-journaling self, back when live journal was the haunt for bored, Good-Charlotte-listening pre-teens) emotions that ran rampant in my head during those times. Because this class involved so much more than classroom work and discussion, and because this coursework and material appealed to me in a very specific way, this blog was a welcome tool for organizing and developing ideas that may not have otherwise seen the light of day.

Not that this always made for good blogging. My blog, I notice at the end of the semester, is severely lacking in some places.

I wish I had written more about The Bridge itself as I came to know it better: there are details about our meetings with Greg (not just logistics, but observations about The Bridge itself, from art pieces that I liked to what was actually in the archives when we finally saw them) that would have been especially relevant and interesting to record. I foolishly took my “free pass” on the week we met with Harold and Gloria– the information and time we spent with them, along with observations and description of the Southwood and Westhaven programs, went straight into our CBR Project, bypassing any personal treatment they could have gotten here. And I spent significantly more time this semester reflecting on seminars and readings than I did on my own personal performance. I rarely discussed my own participation or recorded notes from lecture or discussion: practically, because I record notes in a notebook to keep things accessible, but also, I suppose, because I didn’t always know how to treat that subject. Do I transcribe what I said? Do I analyze how I did or didn’t contribute to the class? In a couple paragraphs, I will address each one of the Blog Contents Topics one last time, and will elaborate on these questions. Overall, I feel more comfortable reflecting on them at the very end of the year than I suppose I did throughout the course.

Finally, as this was my first real-life blog (not counting that livejournal, as I embarrassingly believe I spent most of those entries discussing my shopping habits) it took me awhile to get used to the writing style. I am still not sure I wrote or used the blog format as effectively as I could have. Once I got into the rhythm of sitting down and informally (though coherently; the difference between a blog and a journal) typing out my thoughts, I very much enjoyed it. But a blog like this walks a fine line between colloquial and academic, and I hope that my style was neither too informal nor too dry. If I ever do a course blog again, I would like to make it a greater part of my class experience by linking relevant articles and websites that I find as I research and by updating more regularly, natural rhythms that it was difficult to get into.

But ok! That’s what I didn’t do… what did I do?

Content Reflection:

Readings and Seminar Discussions: This area ended up as my blog focus, primarily because of (as discussed above) my strong intellectual affinity with the readings and coursework. Re-reading this blog is like seeing the laying-out of my thought process as I discovered, more or less, what I will be studying the rest of my time at UVa and most likely “doing with my life.” I took this class because I had recently articulated an interest in the intersection of arts and social change, but had no more than vague notions (most of them involving my background in arts education) about how the two could collaborate. I became completely taken with Community Arts and Community-Based Research. Through reading Goldbard, Strand, and the CAN writers and discussing their ideas in seminar, I began to see how CCD and CBR connected and how the threads of arts, community, social change, and education wove together in their practices and outcomes. The concepts I found in this course and the ideas discussed in this blog eventually provided a basis for my majors proposal. At the beginning of this course I was undeclared. I recently declared a major in Political and Social Thought, and am planning on writing my thesis about the intersection of arts and education in the pursuit of social change.

Group CBR Work: My reflections on our group work were, most often, very straightforward and described our methods and plans. With our project finished and sent to The Bridge (!!) I can say that it was for the most part a  successful partnership (other than the parts of our report that we are still trying to track down). I really, really enjoyed working with the folks at The Bridge. I covered most of my thoughts on our group work in last weeks’ memo, so here I will reiterate how happy I am that our group placed equal importance on collaboration with The Bridge as well as on solid research to supplement our experiential findings. As a group, we were able to keep a steady focus on our project and (relatively) steady communication with The Bridge throughout the semester. We worked along the CBR tenants of collaboration, flexibility, and recognition that knowledge comes from all different places. Because of this I am confident with the work we were able to produce (aside from the contribution that, at press time, is still missing).

Individual Work: As I discussed above, I think this may have been the weakest portion of the blog, as it mostly consisted of practical information about my individual research project work. At the end of the course, as I move into high gear for that  project, I am happy with my progress. I kept up a steady stream of engagement with my IRP throughout the semester (reading articles, interviewing, adding information from our CBR project) and don’t feel swamped with the deadline approaching (the class exercises were immensely helpful with this, especially articulating the question and developing a research plan). This stress level may change over the next few days, but my excitement about my topic will stay constant. I spent the entire day today researching community arts collaborations with public schools and have yet to feel satiated, much less saturated. I am happy to have found a subject I am passionate about and even happier that I can write a paper on it!

As for my class participation, I spoke in one entry about my timidity as a younger member of the class. I tried to push myself to speak up this semester, and hope that I was able to make some positive contributions to the class discussions. When we presented, I tried to keep the class engaged by tying in each of our presentation topics to the course or project as a whole. I was an active listener in class and thoroughly enjoyed hearing about what the other groups were working on in their projects, as well as learning from the outside speakers who we worked with (Barbie Selby, Dee Fink).

Well, I’m 300 words over the suggested reflection length. I’m pinning this one on two things: it’s easy to keep writing on a blog, and I’ve enjoyed expressing my thoughts through and about this medium. I hope that my reflection sheds some light on how I’ve loved engaging with the course this semester. Thanks for reading.

Our group project is on a roll. We met Monday night to debrief last week’s meeting with Greg and get our next steps locked down. We put together a timeline for the upcoming weeks, then discussed our upcoming interviews (more on that in a minute…) and came up with several interview questions and an interview structure. The objectives of our interviews with the directors/key players in the Bridge’s outreach programs are:

1. Get the relevant “core” information on each program (duration, purpose, number of kids, etc)

2. Hopefully get some testimonial “sound bites” for the programs.

In order to meet these objectives, we have decided on the following basic interview structure: begin with introductions and ask the interview subject what programs they were involved with at the Bridge. Proceed to ask the subject for the missing core information for that program (hopefully this will get the subject remembering/thinking about that program in general. “Back in the flow” of the program, as they say). Then ask an open ended question: “Describe your experience in this program.” Hopefully this will generate candid comments about the programming that we can mine for sound bites to include in our information document for the Bridge.

This week in class, we collaborated with Liz & Angela’s group to conduct our interviews, as we are both in contact with Harold and Gloria from Westhaven and Southwood. We’ll be conducting our interviews in conjunction to smooth our processes, and are meeting at Southwood on Monday and with Harold on Wednesday. From there we’ll go over our interview recordings and reduce them to our document presentation to the Bridge!

This is all pretty straightforward protocol but very important for us and, frankly, exciting to write down and work with. I have to add a little personal note here and say that I really, really like our project. It’s simple enough to be doable while still getting at the fundamentals of community programming. More importantly, it feels good to be doing the Bridge a real service with our project. It may seem, like I said, pretty straightforward to gather the data from past programs into an easily readable/accessible document, but it’s something that’s missing at the Bridge now– a demonstrated need. And that’s what CBR is about, at least for me. I’m going to learn as much about the community I’m working in, about community work, and about the needs of non-profits from a straightforward project as from a more complicated project– possibly more, because I’ll be engaging with that community on a concrete level. I certainly feel as if I know Charlottesville lightyears better than I did at the beginning of this semester. Now that I know about the Bridge and Charlottesville non-profits, I seem to find evidence of them everywhere, and am always pleasantly surprised to see collaborations between the university community and The Bridge, whether it’s through the Southwood programs or the Gary Snyder poetry readings that took place at both Newcomb Hall and The Bridge this past week. Additionally, getting a taste of the Cville nonprofit scene has sparked me to get involved on a deeper level in the city. Tonight I went to a creative writing workshop at the HOPE Community Center on 11th St (the workshop is a collaboration between UVa students and the homeless population the shelter works with) and suddenly found myself in the middle of a planning meeting for next semester’s programming. I was happy to be able to contribute not only my enthusiasm for creative writing but some of the programming techniques I’ve learned from our class and through working with The Bridge.

I apologize if this post isn’t as articulate as some from the past… it’s been a long week I’ll have more to write about my individual project after this weekend, when I’m going to buckle down and hopefully get a significant chunk of it done. More then!

Mary, Makeda and I met with Greg at the Bridge this week to check out the Bridge archives and kick off our project. We’ve decided on two culminating “products” that we will produce for the Bridge through our research: a document (word or an equivalent) containing/compiling all relevant information concerning the Bridge’s past outreach programs, and a template of a sign-up sheet for  program participants that will allow the Bridge to continue compiling program statistics in the future. We also confirmed our game plan for compiling this information. The basic statistical information for the program (number of kids, duration of the program, partnering organizations, program focus, basic budget, key participants) is scattered across the Bridge’s portfolio archives, Flickr account, and website. This weekend we will comb those areas to gather as much information as we can into one place. Greg also requested testimonials from program directors (Harold, Gloria, Johnny Fogg) and participants. He gave us a list of directors and students to contact and suggested we arrange with Harold and Gloria to meet with them and a group of students they organize. We plan to email these contacts this weekend. We need to coordinate with the other CBR group working on the Bridge outreach to make sure we are not overlapping testimonials and that we are covering everyone involved and all the information. Greg was fantastic in giving us contacts, information, and outlines of  projects to get us started, and personally I’m excited to be able to help The Bridge out with something as basic as a compilation of program stats for donors. As Greg said, “There’s no such thing as too much information,” so we’ll see how much we can get before the 30th!

This week my personal research project was blown wide open (in a good way) by the article we read for class on Monday entitled “Why Not Football?” By Mat Schwarzman. In the article, Shwarzman both articulated more or less my thesis argument and provided a resource that will prove to be invaluable to my research: The Arts Education Partnership’s “Champions of Change: The Impact of the Arts on Learning,” a compilation of seven studies detailing how arts programming can and should interact with standard education for the benefit of students. This was exactly the sort of study I was looking for and hadn’t yet been able to find– and here Schwarzman and found a compilation of SEVEN and summarized them for an article that corresponded to my own ideas! I’m so excited to build on Schwarzman’s article through my own research and work to make his arguments accessible to other audiences. More research I’ve done this week has illuminated interesting differences between how practitioners like Shwarzman and institutions like The National Endowment of the Arts view arts education goals and practices. More to come: I’m psyched to keep exploring this.

In class time and discussion this week, we focused on CAN articles that formulated a background for the definition of culture and community art through case studies and personal philosophy. As I already alluded to with the discussion of the Shwarzman article, each article provides more information that grows our projects by leaps and bounds. CAN reading room is a fantastic resource.

I am still a bit concerned about having met enough with the folks from The Bridge, however. Greg and I played both email and phone tag this week and have yet to actually set up a time for our group to go over the archives. There’s a lot of individual/group work we can do in the meantime, but only so much. I guess this is what “being flexible” means! This week in class, I thought it was especially helpful for our group to take a look at the Charlottesville statistics, especially those involving the children in Charlottesville. It gave us a good idea of the context surrounding Charlottesville youth outreach and the youth populations the Bridge is working with. Again, this is something our group may have waited to do until our project was nearing its completion. With class prompting, however, we have this resource sooner and when it can be especially relevant. Guidance in the classroom along these lines is extremely helpful.

This week I am solidifying my literature research with the addition of opinion and policy articles and working towards identifying (and articulating) the current platform for Arts Education in mainstream opinion. Instead of focusing on the (wonderful & addictive!) CAN articles, I’m looking at articles from news media and educational policy institutes. I hope that those will give me a much better idea of how to structure my individual research project to the audience I’m aiming for.

I walk in to The Bridge’s central performance space to find a soundstage of large metal-and-plastic contraptions and two sheepish-looking guys (Scott Barton & Steven Kemper) fiddling with their many parts. Siblings of the center-stage ?instruments? are arranged around the room and as I look closer I realize they’re mechanized plexiglass arms strategically positioned over recognizable objects: brass candlesticks, sound bowls, a tambourine.

Playing Expressive Machines isn’t like playing regular instruments. Scott and Steven aren’t physically manipulating the robots and– except for in the finale, when Scott accompanies the robots with his guitar– aren’t doing much besides tuning PAM (guitar-like robot) ‘s strings or (as far as I can tell) adjusting the musical mechanics from a computer. But that doesn’t mean they’re not invested in what they’re doing. You can tell by their body language during the “songs”– crossed arms, bit lips, tightened brows– that Scott and Steven know every note in every “gesture” of every instrument by heart. Or, at least as well as possible– some songs used randomly generated sound. My favorite of the night employed a robot that, as far as I could understand, unleashed sets of marbles at intervals to swirl around a pan. Their sounds were reminiscent of the rain outside.

It was Scott and Steven’s care for the noises they had created, not only the noises themselves, that brought home to me the importance of what happens at The Bridge. Scott and Steven are obviously very, very smart people– they’ve engineered robot musicians!– they obviously care deeply about and love what they do, and they obviously do what they do in the name of art. And that’s valuable. Places like The Bridge need to exist so that people can make good on intelligence, art, and love– so that people can exercise their artistic intelligence by doing what they love.

It never crossed my mind that artistic intelligence + love = robotic music. My mind is officially blown wide open. Thanks for a cool night, The Bridge.

Social Capital: I’m not just saying this because it was the theme of our group’s article, I promise. “Social Capital” as a concept was mentioned in several articles– it’s development in the Bowling Alone review was, I thought, especially important– and provides maybe the best tool for quantifying a qualification of Community Arts that we’ve come across all semester. In a field geared towards personal connection, community creation, group skill development, and relationships across cultural & economic lines, having a term and method of quantifying the above is essential (especially when attempting to engage a donor base). This is why I found the Bowling Alone review so helpful and interesting: Putnam was actually able to find ways to statistically quantify social capital, making it a household word, and giving us tools to describe the types of Social Capital Community Arts creates (“Bonding” and “Bridging”). Social Capital is the commodity of Community Arts, it turns out.

New Media/Social Media: “Social Change and the Connected Age” brilliantly described the role New Media plays in the Community Arts/Social Justice world: it creates new conceptions of power. “In a connected world, power is defined entirely differently. It comes directly from an organization’s supporters; the more numerous and more diffuse they are, the more power they generate. And these supporters, when they are invited to participate in all facets of an organization’s work in meaningful ways, can become a loyal network of donors as well. ” We saw this phenomenon in play last election cycle, we see it every day in the music world, why can’t we harness it to provide for Community Arts organizations as well? I applaud Julia’s group for promoting these practices for Community Arts orgs and think that the list that concluded “Social Change and the Connected Age” will be especially helpful for their organizations.

Partnerships: How many times have we heard this word this semester? “Campus-Community Partnerships: Supporting or Destroying the Field of Community Arts” drove it home one more time. “Building partnerships is easier than sustaining them,” was one piece of wisdom from the article, and all too true. One semester is going by pretty fast for the cultivation of a sustained student/organization relationship, but we’re doing the best we can (I have to say, though, the article’s message on social change, arts, and education got me pretty pumped…).

Now for the “Group Check-In” part of this posting. First of all, I was really happy with how our group worked together for our lit review. I thought we all collaborated effectively and I was happy to see that our article seemed, from discussion, to help the class in some way. I hope we can (I know we can!) keep up the same level of efficiency, involvement, and collaboration as we move into the execution of our project.

– Just checked my email to see that Greg & Carey sent over the program archives!! Yay!! Can’t wait to get started on those!! 

Also pumped for the AudioMarch event this Sunday. Should be very, very cool.

And, a quick note on personal participation: This week I wasn’t able to make class on Wednesday but kept up with the lit review articles and notes. I definitely need to make some more headway on my personal research project (my timeline: heavy-duty research this weekend, work on feasible outreach & meetings next week). I’m happy with my class participation thus far… I suppose. I’m sure I could be more active in class, but truth be told, sometimes (shh! don’t tell) I get a little intimidated by all the super-smart 4th year SOC majors. I’m working on holding my own, though.

Which brings me to the next “messy” part of this week’s classes. We attended a great presentation by Dee Fink on “Messy Local Projects for Significant Learning” on Wednesday. Aside from demonstrating the wonderful CBR work being done in other parts of UVa, the presention further underlined a point Strand and Carey have stressed to us time and again: the need to BE FLEXIBLE in CBR. With the midterm behind us, I’m starting to realize the importance of this fact. Our group met with Greg for the first time right before break (a fantastic meeting that I will return to in a paragraph or so) and set up a pretty straightforward project, but I think we’re all still a little nervous we won’t be able to get all we want to do done in the next month and a half. Flexibility is going to be key in putting together the project from now on, meeting with Greg and working with the information we can get from the Bridge, and working around our own schedules.

That being said, I’m very excited and optimistic about where our group (and Liz etc’s group) is taking this partnership. We met with Greg before break all together and listened to what he had to say about the Bridge’s outreach programs and what they needed to a) become better organized and b) better reach out to donors. As a result, we’ve come up with a two-group, two-part project to put together an outreach programming portfolio. Speaking of flexibility, this project is pretty much what our group had been thinking about in the beginning of the semester, but our idea had changed significantly between it’s inception and our meeting with Greg. The meeting with Greg changed our course, but it changed our course back to it’s original design. We’re going to be working with the Bridge’s records/hard data on their outreach programming to put together a better organizational template for the programs and provide more organized data to potential donors. The next step is to get the records and begin to work with them! So a meeting at the Bridge with Greg will be essential in the very near future.

As for my individual research project, I’m working off of Carey’s comments on my proposal to gather more pertinent literature involving current arguments for involving arts education in standard curriculum and to start meeting with those in our class and at the Bridge who would have information and experience relevant to my project. On a more general note, I’m really happy with my individual paper topic because it’s something I’m passionate about and motivated to learn about in national and, primarily, local contexts.

This week, our group began planning our research methods with an eye to what Strand calls “making sure that the process of designing, implementing, and presenting the research mobilizes and empowers the community.” (p 101) Our community is The Bridge as well as greater Charlottesville, so we definitely need to meet with Greg before moving too far forward with our methods, in case his needs or thoughts are different from ours. We put together a list of topics to discuss with him  that will help us move forward on our project. In the meantime, we focused on establishing methods that will empower the greater Charlottesville community. We want to generate new data that can help the Bridge plan programming that unifies Charlottesville. We will gather feedback from different Charlottesville demographics through a survey that asks residents questions about what they want to see in Charlottesville Arts Programming (effective methods for such research are described on page 101, 106, 107). We met twice this week to discuss our methods and, in the meantime as we set up a time to meet with Greg, we are working on gathering articles for our lit review that describe effective research for projects similar to ours.

For my individual research, I’ve continued looking up articles on the community arts and arts education and have begun outlining the purpose of my project for the individual research proposal. Carey suggested that I focus my question (How can Community Arts Organizations, especially those that offer youth programs, interact with and supplement standard education models? What practices does a successful youth program employ, and how could those be translated into education?) on multicultural arts programs in education. This seems like a natural way to focus in this question, as the majority of community arts youth programs are established in underperforming school districts with multicultural populations that wouldn’t otherwise have access to these programs. Also, this focus pertains to the work of my group and of the class. I’m really excited to get started on the individual research project, and I’ll start posting pertinent articles up here as I find them….

That this trend is (always) the most prevalent among college students makes it come as no surprise to me that Goldbard states that work on CCD infrastructure and training “has been most vigorous at the university level” where the socially conscious young adult demographic mixes with the largely liberal academic adult demographic. Her analysis of higher-education’s treatment of CCD established the connection between Community Cultural Development and Community-Based Research and showed how the latter is essential to the correct development of the former. “One point of virtual unanimity among practitioners is that any academic program removed from “the trenches” of day-to-day community work cannot succeed,” she writes, “It is challenging to design training modes that embody the democratic, participatory values of the practice.” Yes, it is challenging– thank goodness we have Community-Based Research and Higher Education: Principles and Practices to guide the way. It is moments like these in the reading– Goldbard’s account of the university and community arts on pages 215-217– that bring a course together. Here’s the intersection between the two fields of our class work. Her call in these pages, as well as the calls for CCD policy that make up the rest of Chapter 8, should guide our group work this semester, especially as so many of us are working to establish the funding and programming structures of The Bridge and Gallery 5. Although many of Goldbard’s policy ideas are radical and may not speak to our own generation as well as does Gates’ “creative capitalism”, they are calls from the field itself, and CBR teaches us that the voice and the will of the field and the community are to be respected. We can update Goldbard’s policy and opinions for a new generation, but we need to remember the field’s roots as much as the community’s roots.

I hope my group can successfully do this as we move into working on our project. We have articulated our aims and design with our memo and our next step is to meet with Greg along with another group who is interested in similar topics (programming, outreach). From there we will better know how exactly we can benefit the Bridge– we know what we want to do, but that’s irrelevant if it doesn’t help them.

In terms of my own individual work, I had a great experience surfing the CAN website for articles in order to help me determine my individual project focus. From looking up articles and info on our group project (where I found, among a lot else,  some interesting info on the state of arts organization in Virginia, where our congressional district has the fewest amount of such organizations than any other district in VA save the Southern/westernmost region) I moved into browsing until I found articles that, for the lack of a better term, “moved” me. These articles tended to be on the use of arts in education and an articulation of the best practices and infrastructure for that aspect of the field and the field as a whole. I hope that this topic will work out as I’m passionate about this and using CBR and CCD to study it further. In the meantime, I’ll keep browsing the CAN Reading Room: an incredible resource for anyone, college student or otherwise, interested in the relationship between art and the social good.

-What is the “community” that The Bridge is working with (how would they define it): Proximity, Interest, Demographic, or other (pg 140)

-Who should we interview and work with to complete part 2 of Goldbard’s “thick description” building process as outlined on pg 145? (Additionally, this coming from personal interest, how far does “thick description” building move into the field of community organizing? How is community cultural development the same or different from community organizing along Political or DART models? According to Goldbard?)

- From what I’ve observed/learned about The Bridge, they seem to have successfully achieved the “Process versus Product” objective outlined on pages 148-149. How can we help The Bridge to continue this success even as they move into a more quantifiable arrangement? Much of Goldbard’s argument in Chapter 7 focuses on the tension between PvP and quantifiability/access to funding. What can we as part of academia do to reconcile this relationship at The Bridge before the tension grows?

- How can we best promote what Goldbard/Cohen-Cruz calls “reciprocity” (pg 148), for example, ensure that The Bridge isn’t seen as too “hipster” in the working-class neighborhood it inhabits?

- In terms of interviewing/evaluation, I’m excited to use Goldbard’s “Indicators of Success” checklist (pg 154) as an evaluative method “pre-approved” for community cultural development. Her arguments about accountability will be very important to keep in mind as we work with The Bridge (especially as probably more fiscally-minded academics).

Again, I must reiterate my continuing belief in the purposes of CCD and CBR and Goldbard’s description of its connection to our “zeigeist;” Chapters 6 & 7 only contributed further to this belief.

To touch briefly on the Assaf and McKnight articles, especially in relation to what Mary and I have in mind for our project (looking specifically at The Bridge’s outreach programs): What is the relationship between art and humanity/compassion? Assaf in her explanation of art and dialogue and McKnight in her description of art as documentary both touch on this larger theme. How does art (making it together, viewing it, interacting with it) foster empathy/sympathy? CBR and CCD are so invested in harnassing the humanity/compassion/sympathy/empathy that comes out of art and using it to enfranchise and better the community. How does art do this in the first place??? Huge question; most likely unanswerable. I’m sure these projects will move us towards an answer.