The Courage You're Looking For: Linking Academics to Community Based Arts Programs in Oberlin

Naomi Roswell, Oberlin CollegeFollow

Location

King Building 239

Document Type

Presentation

Start Date

4-27-2018 3:00 PM

End Date

4-27-2018 4:20 PM

Abstract

At Oberlin, I have participated in and directed three community arts-based programs: Writers in the Schools, Girls in Motion, and Oberlin Drama at Grafton. Each program uses a unique and self-sustaining education model that produces creativity and knowledge and strengthens intra-community and community-college relationships. In this model, which I call a “cascade approach to learning,” an expert offers a workshop style course to students as an apprenticeship, who in turn develop and teach lesson plans for other students. Like water down a rocky slope, the knowledge and best practices passed down each step splashes back up in a new arrangement, invigorating the experts and providing immediate feedback and reflection. Through these programs, I am linked to dancers and writers in the middle school and actors in a men’s prison in a reciprocal learning-teaching dynamic. This talk will demonstrate how my classwork across the environmental studies, dance, creative writing, and education departments and my engagement in these three arts programs mutually ameliorated each other, while grounding my understanding of social justice and catapulting me into a life of community-based work.

Keywords:

community, writing, education models, movement, theater, arts, facilitation, Oberlin

Notes

FEATURED PRESENTATION
Session V, Panel 15 - Educational | Models
Moderator: Daphne John, Associate Dean of the College of Arts & Sciences, Associate Professor of Sociology and Comparative American Studies

Major

Environmental Studies

Advisor(s)

Rumi Shammin, Environmental Studies

Project Mentor(s)

Lynn Powell, Creative Writing
Ann Cooper Albright, Dance
Phyllis Gorfain, Oberlin Drama at Grafton

April 2018

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Apr 27th, 3:00 PM Apr 27th, 4:20 PM

The Courage You're Looking For: Linking Academics to Community Based Arts Programs in Oberlin

King Building 239

At Oberlin, I have participated in and directed three community arts-based programs: Writers in the Schools, Girls in Motion, and Oberlin Drama at Grafton. Each program uses a unique and self-sustaining education model that produces creativity and knowledge and strengthens intra-community and community-college relationships. In this model, which I call a “cascade approach to learning,” an expert offers a workshop style course to students as an apprenticeship, who in turn develop and teach lesson plans for other students. Like water down a rocky slope, the knowledge and best practices passed down each step splashes back up in a new arrangement, invigorating the experts and providing immediate feedback and reflection. Through these programs, I am linked to dancers and writers in the middle school and actors in a men’s prison in a reciprocal learning-teaching dynamic. This talk will demonstrate how my classwork across the environmental studies, dance, creative writing, and education departments and my engagement in these three arts programs mutually ameliorated each other, while grounding my understanding of social justice and catapulting me into a life of community-based work.