Socially-Engaged Arts Curricula Development with the USU Guild for Community Arts
Meg Wilson, Utah State University

Faculty Mentor: Laura Gelfand, Utah State University

SESSION C (1:45-3:15PM)
POSTER C70

Utah State University has been awarded the Carnegie Community Engagement Classification. USU’s Caine College of the Arts, however, has thus far only been minimally involved in community-engagement certification for its offered courses. Emerging artists must be trained to utilize the arts ethically, effectively, and sustainably, as well as to analyze and critically revise their own arts engagement with their community. Faculty of community-engaged courses gain networking opportunities with engaged faculty in other disciplines, foster relationships between institutions and local organizations, and find new opportunities for collaborative work. Through the research of contemporary cases of political arts engagement, sustainable behavior change, and community-based social marketing, we have developed a new framework to support arts faculty in the effective implementation of socially-engaged curricula. The pillars of this framework are: participatory curriculum planning, collaborative research and analyses, horizontal classroom discussion, outside the classroom work and hypotheses testing through art, and critical group evaluation leading to the redesign of the study module itself. In collaboration with the USU Center for Community Engagement, we have developed the USU Guild for Community Arts to train student mentors to assist peers in their artistic projects and to partner faculty with community members to achieve these ends. The Guild will empower students to increase inclusion, diversity, and equity both on and off campus through collaborative research and creative work. Our research continues this spring in the pilot application of Community Engaged Learning courses in the arts developed under this new framework, as well as quantitative and qualitative analyses from stakeholders and participants following their conclusion and a resulting revision of course modules.