GEN S 400 Professional Experience & Community Service 3 Units Cr/NC: Sustaining Our Community Through the Arts - Fall 2011

 

Course Description

This is a project-based research collaborative and civic-engagement opportunity offered as a new professional and community service learning general studies course (GEN S 400). Topics include community sustainability through the arts, with a focus on community practices of intergenerational dialogue.  Students are addressing community sustainability through the arts as a paradigm from a host of intersecting social and environmental platforms in relation to those identified by community members residing near and south of Highway 54 in San Diego County.  Particular attention to community arts advocates is one focus as we identify what the community is, continues, and hopes to sustain via its arts practices.  Civic engagement is underway through a kind of praxis that mediates community building theory and action steps in the local communities.

Student Learning Outcomes

One of the many assessments of student learning include a two-fold capstone project involving reflective documentation in the form of a Story-Teller’s Documentation of our community partners, and their experiences in the greater community implementing the SDSU Resource Development Plan for South Bay.  One intention of this unconventional civic engagement is its potential larger implications for cultural providers and grantee community, as the students exhibit community art advocacy through the documentation of formal and informal arts practices and identify the resource needs of the local arts community. So with the inspiration of leading initiatives, our civic engagement model is stretched; ­that is, students not merely seeing themselves as civic participants, but as a unifying collaborative of greater social change, hoping to leave lasting impacts far greater than any mere 15-week semester can afford.