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Telling It
Telling It
This is an award-winning program grounded in Washtenaw communities that has established a close collaboration with the University through the RC course, “Empowering Communities through Creative Expression”. The aim of the program is to use engagement with the arts to help improve scholastic confidence and reduce the dropout rate among children and youth who may be homeless, runaways, in alternative education programs, or are otherwise at risk of failure in school. The aim of the class is to prepare students for this work. The class meets once a week and individual students then elect to do work in a community-based site in the area each week. Graduate students from the School of Social Work, under the direction of Prof. Richard Tolman, also take the course and act as mentors for undergraduates. Readings and discussions address issues of race, poverty, and education for at-risk youth, and offers training in community-based creative arts. Telling-it teams then work with four community partners – SOS Community Services, Ozone House, C.O.P.E School and Detroit’s Matrix Theater – and will include three more partners next year (Corner Health Center, Stone School, and the Neutral Zone).
On site, experienced artists from the community work with the Telling-it team to expose youth to new art forms, such as story telling, spoken word poetry, sculpting, and photography. Performance and literacy projects are developed collaboratively, and each semester, the team hosts a public presentation by the youth they’ve worked with to showcase what they have created together. Students on site are expected to integrate the experiential work they are doing with the intellectual issues posed in the campus-based course. There are weekly reflection essays to debrief experiences and two larger assignments that focus on what students are learning about the needs of local communities and how these might be addressed.
