Faculty Spotlight
Larry Gant works to make big cities better. He focuses on program evaluation of small and moderate-size human service and social action organizations in urban communities. He works to create and evaluate community-based health promotion initiatives in the areas of early childhood development, substance abuse prevention, sexually transmitted diseases, and HIV/AIDS.
As an associate professor of Social work, Gant uses service-learning projects in all of his courses. In his course on program evaluation, students created an evaluation plan for the Catherine Ferguson Academy Farm in Detroit. At first, students were going to create a plan for a prospective garden, but eventually decided to use the 15-year-old Ferguson Garden as a baseline because little data existed for evaluating community garden outcomes and impacts.
Service-learning projects have altered the way the Gant approaches and carries out research. For example, because of the many experiences that service-learning projects have provided him, Gant said that logic models are the first and best approach for evaluating a new project. He has also found new ways to communicate research findings by using computers and immediate feedback on responses to community surveys. Service learning has also turned his research in a more applied direction, where Detroit case studies serve to illustrate theories.
Gant is co-principal investigator for The Good Neighborhoods Initiative, an effort in conjunction with the Skillman Foundation to improve Detroit's neighborhoods, one by one.
Six neighborhoods spread throughout the city that house about 30 percent of the city's youth are targeted. The School of Social Work is providing support with a Technical Assistance Center offering professional assistance and information, data retrieval and analysis, interns, and some evaluation and documentation of the process as it unfolds.
With grants from Skillman, the GNI has seen a number of efforts: One neighborhood worked to encourage students to wear their uniforms to school by holding a uniform fashion show. One held a job fair. Another created a system to monitor potentially dangerous vacant lots. And another took a group of parents to the Ann Arbor Hands On Museum so they could learn age appropriate activities for their children.
Janet Gerson is teaching her University of Michigan students the basic principles of economics through the three Es: Eating, Education and the Environment. The senior lecturer in the Department of Economics is taking her undergraduates off campus and into the community to test the economic theories they learn in the classroom.
Gerson partners with the community for her supplementary section, ECON 108, Introduction to Microeconomics Workshop: Economic Analysis Through Service Learning (ECON 108) for Principles of Economics I (ECON 101). Students work with a variety of local organizations, including Food Gatherers, St. Andrew's Breakfast Program, Junior Achievement Program, Community Action Network, and various environmental programs.
By exploring the themes of eating, education and the environment in service-learning experiences while learning about basic economic principles, Gerson shows students how economic theories play out in the real world. She wants students to gain a better understanding of the role of nonprofits and the government in solving specific problems and to understand why the market does not provide these services without government intervention.
"The exploration of these topics in a real life setting helps students learn about the important role of intervention when there are externalities or spillover costs and benefits," Gerson said. "Students see what is happening in these programs." For example, when U-M students assist in after-school programs, they see how the students enrolled in these supplementary programs are benefitting, and also the spillover benefits for the larger community from this enrichment program.
Gerson also gets to witness these safety net organizations at work. "I have been really impressed by how well many of these organizations function, and how effectively they can seamlessly integrate community volunteers into their organizations," she said. Gerson wants her students to have an in-depth understanding of these programs and services and how they function. She hopes that students will learn about how a successful organization functions, so they will want to serve these types of organizations in the future.
Terri Sarris proved you don't have to be Steven Spielberg to make a movie. The senior lecturer in Screen Arts and Culture at the University of Michigan is part of an effort to take filmmaking out into the community. The result: The EFEX Project - Encouraging the Filmmaking Experience, a U-M course that pairs university filmmaking students with high school students from southeast Michigan who work together to make films.
The idea for EFEX came from Sultan Sharrief when he was a student at U-M. It grew out of his efforts to make his film "The Spiral Project," where members of the community worked as cast and crew in order to keep costs down. This low-budget filmmaking model, Sharrief concluded, could do more than help a project stay on budget. It was a way to engage the community in making art.
Since EFEX began in 2006, it has completed the feature-length film "Bilal's Stand" and recently wrapped production of the short "Taffy, Cigarettes." Bilal's Stand tells the story of an inner city high school senior who struggles between joining his family in their taxi stand business or breaking tradition and applying for college while learning to carve ice as a way to earn scholarship. "Taffy, Cigarettes," is a coming of age story that follows two young boys confronting a range of social pressures.
The EFEX films grew out of the Screen Arts and Cultures class "Collaborations in Media: Community Filmmaking" where U-M students work with local high school students to learn about filmmaking. The course and project allow high school students to work with professional screenwriters, actors and cinematographers.
Sarris said it is gratifying for her to see her U-M students take what she has taught them and turn around to teach others. "My students learn more about their discipline when they have to teach it to others. They also learn not to take for granted the opportunities and privileges they have," she said. "They learn about diversity when they engage in communities in which they are not normally a part."
When in production, U-M and the high school students can spend up to 80 hours a week filming. They learn about teamwork and how to get along on a shoestring budget. And the high school students learn about the mysteries of the filmmaking process. "These students find a different appreciation for media through the course," Sarris said. "Students learn to understand the complexities involved in filmmaking and learn media literacy skills that help them become more critical viewers. ... The arts can be a way out for (high school) students disenfranchised by traditional education. Providing students with resources for media creation can spark an interest and help these students see a future beyond what they currently envision."
Sarris said the collaborative filmmaking process has become part of her scholarship. Making films with this kind of collaborative approach has made her a better filmmaker and teacher because she is able to share how the filmmaking process works first hand. She said the effort also demonstrates a broader philosophical shift in filmmaking: The work does not belong to one individual. Rather, it is collective effort that influences a film's outcome, she said. "In some ways this work is both the most demanding and the most gratifying work that I do."
Larissa Larsen knows first-hand that if something counts, it has more meaning. When she was a graduate student at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, she worked on a community service project in East St. Louis. "I found the learning experience enriched by the reality and complexity we were presented with. I worked harder because I knew this could actually benefit people," she said.
So when she came to teach at the university level, she knew she wanted to be out in the community. Larsen teaches at the U-M's Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning. She has been examining how community benefits agreements can empower communities of color and poor communities in addressing the impacts of major development or infrastructure projects. She is working with community groups in southwest Detroit who are addressing proposals for a new international bridge that would connect Detroit with Windsor.
Her areas of expertise include landscape planning, neighborhood design, and social and natural capital. She's also worked with neighborhood mobilization against environmental threats.
When she was teaching at Arizona State University, her students came up with alternatives for a proposed Habitat for Humanity neighborhood in South Phoenix. "In a presentation to potential new residents, I noted that some attendees had very clear internal images of what a single-family neighborhood should look like. Many of these images were much like new middle-income neighborhoods in a nearby suburb," Larsen said. "Our challenge in planning is to recognize and distill these aspirations and attempt to accommodate these in affordable and more environmentally responsible patterns."
Julie Lumeng, M.D., knows that physicians can provide more than immunizations, a weight check and advice on feeding schedules to families of their youngest patients. They can encourage reading.
Lumeng, assistant professor of pediatrics and research investigator with the Center for Human Growth and Development at the University of Michigan, involves her students in the national, non-profit program Reach Out and Read, an effort to make literacy promotion a standard part of pediatric primary care.
ROR trains doctors and nurses to advise parents on the importance of reading out loud to their children beginning at six months and up until five years of age. The program focuses on children growing up in poverty, and is designed to develop a love of books and develop literacy skills from an early age. Local community partners for ROR include The Corner Health Center, the U-M Ypsilanti Health Center, the U-M East Ann Arbor Health Center, U-M Briarwood Health Associates, and the U-M Family Medicine at Domino's Farms.
ROR also benefits her students, Lumeng said. "They learn about working with diverse communities, and get outside the Ivory Tower of academia to interact with people they don't interact with on a daily basis at the university." Working with people from different backgrounds can change they way students understand the world and interpret what they are learning at the university, Lumeng said. Contact with members of the community helps her students understand child development and the social factors that impact it, the influence of poverty on children's well-being, and the impact literacy and a literacy-rich environment has on children's lives, she said.
While Lumeng's own research deals with eating behaviors in low-income and minority preschoolers, ROR targets the same populations, she said. And while children benefit from the program, so does the university. "Community members are doing us a huge favor when they participate in research with us, and we owe them more than we can ever repay them," she said. "ROR must be shaped to meet the needs of the community, and it is therefore critical that we listen to community members. This has helped us shape the Reach Out and Read program."
Petra Kuppers has spent her career looking at the intersection of disability and performance art. She is a disability culture activist, a community artist, author and director of the Olimpias Performances Research Projects which looks at community art, identity politics and the media.
But the University of Michigan associate professor of English who also teaches Disability Studies has also found a way to make the community her classroom, teaching the class Elements of Dance and Writing where she has partnered with the Center for Independent Living in Ann Arbor. Students learn about community dance techniques and gain a better understanding of the dignity, pride, and vibrancy of disability culture, movements, and politics. Students must learn to think on their feet and come up with their own answers to questions while immersed in the community, she said. They cannot rely on the expertise of someone else for the answers. Students learn about the complexity of the world through their interactions with community members, Kuppers said. "They learn that easy stereotypes hardly work and learn to respect different kinds of knowledge and gain a better understanding of the role of their own knowledge in the community," she said.
Kuppers wants to help build university students' skills as community facilitators while also teaching students to work with community members to form respectful relationships. "Learning is a process for me–it's not about a specific product, rather it is about grasping certain tools," she said.
Kuppers said involving students in the community also helps her own scholarship as she gains an understanding of the reactions people have to different cultural forms. Examining how students learn through community process contributed to the material contained in her recently published book, "Community Performance: A Introduction," which serves as a comprehensive primer for those interested in facilitating community performance.
Kuppers said community partnerships have taught her other lessons. "The most important is to have respect for the different types of rhetorical convention people have, to have respect for the knowledge that is generated in these types of environments, and to have respect for the immense talent and effort it takes to run these community organizations," she said.
Working in the community isn't new to Kuppers. When she taught at Manchester Metropolitan University in the United Kingdom, students learned to build their dance and teaching skills and then went into the community to teach others to dance.
In her book "Community Performance: A Introduction," Kuppers explained that, "Each new project involves a continual process of digging beneath the media representations of reality to find out what is really happening in people's daily lives. This reality is frequently revealing, often shocking and always an education for us. It is after all a privilege to be able to reflect on these concrete experiences, and to take these experiences, combined with our own reflections, to a wider audience."
Carol Jacobsen lets her University of Michigan students join in the fight to advocate for battered women who have struck back against their abusers. As director of the Michigan Women's Justice and Clemency Project, Jacobsen works to free women prisoners convicted of murder who acted in self defense and did not receive due process or fair trials. But as professor in the School of Art and Design, she works to involve students in the battle.
Jacobsen involves students in the community because it is part of her own creative research, she said. "I am committed to the struggle against women's criminalization and censorship." Students help by summarizing cases, working on charts, collecting data, and research. The research is used in public awareness campaigns to lobby for laws and with policy makers with regard to women's criminalization and human rights in prisons.
Jacobsen involves students with the Michigan Women's Justice & Clemency Project, where she serves as director. "My partnership is with a community organization that I have directed for many years, and built many friendships through, and it is very integrated into my creative research, advocacy, teaching and life," she said. "Because it is a long term struggle for justice, it is frustrating and exhausting and infuriating, as well as deeply rewarding." A second goal of the clemency project is to conduct public education and advocacy for justice, human rights and humane alternatives to incarceration for women.
Jacobsen also partners with the American Civil Liberties Union, American Friends Service Committee, Prison Creative Arts Project, and Amnesty International.
Her students benefit from their work in the community. "Students learn about their own power and freedom as citizens: How to question and access policy makers. How to critically analyze social issues and injustice. How to analyze issues of representation, including gender, race, class and other frames for analysis. How to conduct research in court cases. And how to broaden their understanding of art's role and possibilities for making ideas visible in the world," Jacobsen said.
Jacobsen involves students in the community in all of her courses, including: Art & Design 310/Women's Studies 344: "Bodies in the World: Representing Human Rights", Art & Design 310/Women's Studies 344: "Women, Prison and Human Rights" and Women's Studies 690: "Clemency Project".
A social documentary artist, Jacobsen's films and photography have been shown throughout the United States and abroad, and her essays have been widely published, including in the New York Law Review.