Multicultural America ART 150, SPRING 2010
Welcome to the site for the online class of Multicultural America from the 2010 Spring semester at UW-Milwaukee. We (Professor Shelleen Greene and myself) have been posting several of these sites based on the class projects from the Film 150 classes over the last couple of years. This semester and this posting is a bit different in that this is the first time the class was run all online, which put forth some new tech and service learning challenges in terms of coordination, feedback, troubleshooting problems, etc. I have to say everyone from my amazing students to the resilient Institute of Service Learning deserves big props for their hard work and patience as we entered into this uncharted territory -- and the work from both the service learning experience and student media projects was awesome! I also should note we tried out the Posterous blogging freeware for the first time and it worked like a charm. Posterous deserves its own special shout out for such an easy to use and elegant writing platform.
The assignments this semester were also structured a bit different than in past classes. Since past students had noted a better understanding of an organization and its work through direct activities in collaboration with our community partners I modified the class projects to be more of a documentation of a process of engagement rather than solely a reportage of an organization. It did mean a tradeoff of some archival diversity and depth in exchange for better communication, collaboration, and insights. Students worked with a variety of organizations: Growing Power; Boys and Girls Clubs; Our Next Generation; COA Youth and Family Centers. In addition to their ongoing blog about their service learning experience, students were asked to create one photo essay on some organization or person in the community in which they were working. Their final assignment asked them to construct an "imaginarium" as a result of their work that semester -- what would the student like to give as a gift to the community partner as a result of their understanding of the organization's mission and needs.
Below are the links to the students' sites:
Some pictures of our students in Multicultural America, Spring 2010
