U of Ideas of General Interest -- April 1999
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Contact: Melissa Mitchell, Arts Editor (217) 333-5491; [email protected]
EDUCATION IN ACTION
Students interact with community residents to improve East St. Louis
CHAMPAIGN, Ill. -- At the University of Illinois, one group of students learned that you can fight city hall -- and win. And they didn't read about it in a textbook; they learned by doing.
The students -- enrolled in a design-studio course that satisfies curriculum requirements in the university's School of Architecture and departments of landscape architecture and of urban and regional planning -- lobbied the mayor of East St. Louis, Ill., and convinced him to reconsider the city's proposed location for a light-rail station. The students approached the mayor, armed with the results of their own comprehensive research on where to put the station.
The course in which the students were enrolled is one of a series offered as part of the East St. Louis Action Research Project, a 10-year-old initiative of the U. of I.'s College of Fine and Applied Arts. ESLARP's approach to learning emphasizes direct contact and communication among students, community residents and members of neighborhood organizations. Students visit the community at least four times a semester to participate in intensive "work weekends," and to solicit additional feedback from residents at monthly neighborhood meetings and other events.
"They are learning lessons that I can't teach," said architecture professor Robert Selby, who co-teaches the design-studio course with urban and regional planning professor Ken Reardon and landscape architecture professor Brian Orland. "This is a very important reciprocal learning situation, where the residents are the experts in setting the agenda and determining priorities." And, he added, the face-to-face contact between students and residents is the powerful magic that makes it all gel: "It's the way students break through stereotypes and learn about sustained hope in the face of adversity."
Such approaches to education -- which take students out of the classroom and introduce them to the challenges of "the real world" by emphasizing community involvement -- are gaining momentum on college campuses nationwide. In part, the emphasis on experiential learning has been a direct response to public demands, according to Reardon.
"Colleges and universities have been subjected to significant public criticism throughout the 1990s for pursuing research that has frequently not addressed the critical social, economic and environmental issues confronting local communities," Reardon said. He noted that higher education actually began addressing these concerns as early as 1985 when university presidents from several major universities established the Campus Compact "to promote greater community and public service and to better integrate the values of liberal learning, service-learning and civic responsibility within the core curricula."
The Illinois Campus Compact, a subset of the national network, will meet at the U. of I. April 8-9 for a symposium on "Promoting Community/University Partnerships for Civic Renewal and Social Justice Through Service-Learning." The event is co-sponsored by the U. of I. and the University YMCA.
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