Finding the Core of Place Based Education at a Rural University
By JOE BROOKS, with LESLIE ALVAREZ, SHIRLEY ATENCIO, and ONEYDA MAESTAS
Some places and spaces seem somehow more ready for deeper community building. The San Luis Valley in southern Colorado appears as such a place, holding a balance of natural beauty, an inherent sense of place, big hearted people and creative community based organizations, along with significant human need. Traveling south from Denver, across and down the Continental Divide, one comes into the San Luis Valley as a vast and breathtaking open space. Situated at nearly eight thousand feet above sea level and surrounded on three sides by the Rocky Mountains, with its southernmost end extending into New Mexico, the Valley seems a world apart and yet somehow always at the center for those who live there.
Coming Together to Deepen the Work
Down in the middle of the Valley, at Adams State University, administrators and faculty were in the midst of a week long Institute on Place Based Service-Learning, led by Joe Brooks, director of Community Works Institute (CWI). The Institute was designed as an extended residential consultancy, with a series of interwoven professional development sessions, coaching, and a culminating weekend Institute. This effort followed months of co-planning between Brooks and his colleagues Kay Adams and Shirley Atencio at Adams State. Kay Lewis is Assistant Director of Career Services and Civic Engagement, while Atencio serves as Program Coordinator of Civic Engagement at the University. Atencio and Adams are both alums of CWI’s Summer Institutes on Place Based Service-Learning with great enthusiasm for what Place Based Education can offer Adams’ students.
The goals of the week long Institute at Adams State were focused on supporting University faculty and their community partners in deepening and connecting their work around Place Based Education and community engagement. For some Adams faculty Place Based Service-Learning is a new strategy, while others brought to the Institute existing well developed courses and programs to work on and critique during the week. Over the course of a week, the Institute provided faculty and community partners with training, coaching, and collaborative design sessions, along with creating the beginnings of an ongoing community of practice and support.
Joe Brooks’ mantra is that to really do Place Based Education, to “use the community as the classroom,” we must fully understand the community in all it’s manifestations, and that means actively exploring the community in ongoing ways. Brooks is especially interested in using this approach to shed light and tell the stories of those often left out of the dominant narrative. With that in mind, he gave a mid-week workshop for faculty and community partners on Collaborative Ethnography, a central tool in CWI’s approach to Place Based Education. Collaborative Ethnography offers a lens into the many layers of each community, offering students important roles in telling that story.
Surrounded by the majestic Sangre de Cristo and San Juan mountain ranges, Adams State University is located in the small city of Alamosa, deep in the heart of Colorado’s historically, geologically, and culturally unique San Luis Valley. The San Luis Valley itself is a sprawling place of stunning beauty, predominantly agricultural in nature, and is also one of the poorest rural areas in Colorado. Adams State University serves as a community hub, a crucial educational resource for local students, and its presence is especially important for the Valley’s many first generation college students. In addition, many Adams students come from other parts of Colorado and well beyond, so providing a grounding experience for them is also much on the University’s mind.
Creating a Sense of Place, Belonging, and Mattering
The Institute at Adams State fits into a larger institutional effort. For newcomers and locals alike, Adams State has placed great priority on building a sense of community, and of fostering a “sense of place” and “belonging and mattering” among its students. This emphasis is aimed directly at increasing student wellbeing, retention, and academic and social success. The San Luis Valley advantageously has an unusually strong network of social, arts, and cultural non-profits that interact with and support the University and its students in a wide variety of ways. And now, at the core of a major curriculum redesign, Adams State is creating a highly student centered approach that uses a focus on Place Based Education opportunities as a linchpin to engage its students in the essence of belonging through local community studies projects. They term this approach as “The Adams Experience,” with the goal of involving students in the community through integrated coursework, co-curricular programs, and local partnerships.
Support for a deeper more personally engaging college experience starts at the top at Adams. The University’s new president Cheryl D. Lovell, herself a low-income, first-generation college student, brings a keen understanding and passion for Adams State’s mission to provide access and opportunity to all students, regardless of their ZIP code or economic status. She is fond of talking about the “mobility bump” that occurs for students who come from impoverished and historically underrepresented backgrounds to campuses of higher education, and how a college degree, and the experiences that go with that, helps move people up the economic ladder and creates social mobility within their lives.
An administrator with a big heart, early on during the Institute, Lovell pulled out a copy of a Parker Palmer book during an administrators’ breakfast meeting with Community Works Institute’s Brooks. Palmer has written extensively on the need to revisit the roots and reclaim the vision of higher education. He proposes an approach to teaching and learning that honors the whole human being — mind, heart, and spirit — which he says is an essential integration if we hope to address the complex issues of our time. This is very much in sync with the work taking place at Adams State.
Getting a Feel for The Real Community
During the week of the Institute, Community Works Institute’s Brooks joined Adams faculty and partners in exploring the sprawling Valley, meeting with a number of dynamic non-profits and resource organizations. One primary local resource partner, La Puente provides emergency shelter, food assistance, transitional housing, self-sufficiency services and job training for the homeless and other community members in crisis. The Valley’s Boys and Girls Club also works closely with the University, with students doing internships and playing other support roles there. The Club’s president Aaron Miltenberger is also the former Director of Student Life & Recreation at Adams State and like many local non-profit leaders, is an alum of the school.
Local leaders are extremely enthusiastic and supportive of Adam State’s emphasis on putting student interests and passions at the center of a Place Based approach. Throughout a variety of local conversations there was a palpable sense of shared desire to collaborate around commonly understood need. Many students from the Valley drive long distances to and from campus, often working full time while in school and supporting their families at home. Dialogue between faculty and community leaders is helping to keep students’ needs and day to day reality in perspective.
Increasing Equity and Inclusion Starts with a Place and Its People
Victoria Martinez is an Adams State graduate who returned to work in her native Valley. She continues to work closely with Adams as a now veteran community based educator. She opens numerous doors into the community for students. Martinez serves as a consultant with the Colorado Trust and is the former Executive Director for the Sangre de Cristo National Heritage Area in the San Luis Valley. As a multi-passionate social scientist who has been involved in numerous place based projects, including a series of important oral histories with Valley residents, she understands well the importance and impact on students of Adams State’s attention to place and community building. Her passion is for student projects that involve utilizing the history, culture, traditions, and environment of the Valley.
Martinez believes that, “By acknowledging historical trauma and oppression people can then deal with it. People can then be open to how it may be impacting community health, social capital, the economy, access to food, local education, well-being, and much more.” She feels strongly that Place Based Education is a teaching practice that “informs, inspires, empowers, and initiates healing.”
She shares that. “I’ve learned that the work of increasing equity and inclusion starts with place and the people in that place, before it can move on to other work such as building capacity or economic development. Creative Strategies for Change have a beautiful saying that is essential to their work, ‘empathy before education.’” To Martinez this means allowing people to discover and express their voice, culture, heritage, and history before pushing them to learn new skills or giving them new tools. She calls this “the ‘must do’ work before the “need to do” work.”
Building on a Strong Foundation
Adams has a strong set of existing Place Based courses and programs to build upon and the Institute on Place Based Service-Learning was designed to identify and put a spotlight on what already exists, while drawing more faculty into that process through training and collaborative learning. Over the past several years leaders from Adams State have attended intensive Summer Institutes offered by Community Works Institute (CWI), where they have gained innovative ideas and approaches from K-16 educators attending from across the U.S. and beyond. This has enabled them to synergize outside experience and new thinking into their own evolving process.
The effect of Adams’ emphasis on Place Based Education and strong partnerships with the community is already evident. In the words of recent graduate Vince Alcon, who came to Adams from Denver and is originally from the Philippines, he says that what he found most unique is the opportunities he found at Adams to “really touch the community.” He shares that while he thought he might not like life in such a small town atmosphere, “The community really grabbed my heart.” After graduating and being involved in a number of engaging local internships, Alcon ultimately stayed in the Valley after graduation and now works at the local Boys and Girls Club. He says that Place Based Education helps students to “really get to know the community around them and who you really are as a person, which is more important than ever right now”
Unpacking The Adams Experience
Curt Howell, Director of Adventure Leadership Programs at Adams explains that, “’The Adams Experience’ is more than just courses, degree plans, and experiences. It’s ‘how we do things around here.’ Adams State is carefully crafting our university learning environment to enrich a student’s life within a community of learners.” Howell notes that the University is focusing now on helping each student understand their own unique story, embrace where they’ve been, connect with where they are now, while shaping their future by making the most of their experiences. He says that “The Adams Experience” will challenge each student to be their best self, build meaningful relationships, and to be part of something bigger that makes a difference. A large part of this aims at social and emotional growth, especially when students experience setbacks. So, as Howell sums it up, college in this model becomes much more than just a series of courses and a degree. It becomes about deeper preparation for a successful and personally fulfilling life.
Navigating the Disconnects Around Skills
We live in a time when higher education is often maligned as unnecessary, overpriced, even elitist. While some argue the rising costs of college tuition and increased debt upon graduation does not yield a return on investment, the majority of employers rate a college degree as “important” or “absolutely essential” (AAC&U, 2018). The American Association for Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) have commissioned surveys of business executives and hiring managers who agree that the skills attained in college are valuable in the workplace. They rate as particularly important: oral and written communication; team work; critical thinking; ethical judgment; and the ability to apply knowledge to real-world situations.
However, research conducted by both the AAC&U and National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE) also suggests that students’ self-assessment of their preparedness in these areas are often grossly misaligned with employers’ assessment of recent graduates’ skills. For example, NACE reported that 79.4% of surveyed students reported proficiency in communication skills, while only 41.6% of employers rated students similarly. And, with regard to leadership, 70.5% of students rated themselves proficient, with only 33% of employers agreeing. So, there is clearly a large disconnect between the expectations of employers and the actual skill levels that students are leaving college with.
Place Based Education as a High Impact Practice
So, what can universities do to equip students with the skills needed in the 21st century workplace? One recommendation of the AAC&U is the inclusion of High Impact Practices (HIPs) throughout the curriculum. HIPs are activities and practices that can be implemented at both the course-level (for example writing intensive courses, collaborative assignments and projects, and undergraduate research) and the program or university level (e-portfolios, capstones, first-year experiences, community based-learning, internships). Eleven in all, the AAC&U’s research indicates that these High Impact Practices, when done well, enhance the experience of ALL university students, but in particular, these practices help to level the playing field for historically under-represented and under-served students. Place Based Education and all that goes with that has been identified as a High Impact Practice. The faculty at Adams State has clearly taken that to heart and practice both.
A Grassroots Effort to Redesign Curriculum
Faced with the hard reality of challenges to public support for higher education and under prepared students entering the workforce, Adams State University, a small, rural, federally designated Hispanic-serving Institution (HSI) decided to take on the challenge of a massive curriculum reform. The goal was to address these deficiencies and equip graduates with the skills they need to be successful in the workplace. A grassroots effort primarily comprised of faculty and staff, and supported by a team from Adams’ Title V grant including the Diversity and Inclusion Liaison, Professional Development Director, and Grant Project Director (all of whom double as faculty), set out to create a new experience for Adams undergraduates. Dubbed the “Pathways Project” and guided by the AAC&U and educational best practices, the Essential Learning Task Force (ELTF) was born to carefully consider the University’s strengths, weaknesses, areas for improvement, and ultimately to redesign the undergraduate curriculum. Place Based learning experiences are intended to be a core experience for all students as the process unfolds.
The Pathways Project
The Pathways Project became a three-year expedition for Adams faculty and administrators, leading to development of “The Adams Experience.” The initiating sixteen members of Adams State’s Essential Learning Task Force (including the Associate Vice President for Academic Affairs) soon grew to seventy-five faculty, staff, and student members of eight “Curriculum Innovation Teams”, each led by a pair of members from the Task Force.
These members participated in retreats, trainings, and professional development opportunities, some of which were led by AAC&U consultants. At one of those retreats the AAC&U facilitator stressed that it’s time to get away from general education and major work being a series of “checking boxes” both for faculty and students. Adams State and many other universities are in the midst of a paradigm shift in higher education.
Opening Opportunities for Deep Social and Emotional Learning
The thinking at Adams (and in much of K-16 education) is that University faculty members can no longer see themselves as, or perform, as fact givers. Thanks to the Internet, facts are more than abundant. What is important in today’s educational landscape is being a deeper level skill builder. It’s not that the content or the discipline a student studies is not important — it is — it is more about developing skills via content. Teachers are the foundation layers and skill builders. With that in mind, the faculty of Adams State is in the process of building a curriculum that allows students to experience, integrate, and synthesize from an integrated combination of classroom and community based learning. By focusing on Place Based Learning experiences in the community great opportunities open up for both crucial Social and Emotional Learning and the application of academic content and skills.
Now branded as “The Adams Experience”, the new four-year curriculum requires a First-Year Seminar, Capstone, and the use of e-portfolios. Woven throughout the Adams Experience are High Impact Practices and Place Based Education experiences. Being a regional institution in a rural agricultural valley with a long, rich history, the faculty and administration at Adams felt it is essential to honor the San Luis Valley’s vibrant, unique personality. Involving students close hand in the Valley’s unique heritage and cultural creates ways creates powerful vehicles for students and faculty to learn from and contribute to that heritage in real time.
Building a Deeper Sense of Belonging
At the root of Adams State’s efforts is their identity as a Hispanic-serving Institution, and ensuring that their mission to serve a diverse student body was at the very heart of creating a new curriculum. As the process unfolded the Curriculum Innovation Teams proposed models of the new curriculum, and through a collaborative process, the core components of each team’s designs were integrated into a final model which was presented to campus and voted in as Adams’ revised curriculum. Using a Place Based pedagogy is at the center of these efforts and the course offerings themselves.
The University’s efforts go well beyond classrooms and typical school support programs. Oneyda Maestas is director of Adams State’s Casa House and a longtime faculty member who focuses on kindling a sense of place and belonging in order to help ground Adams students in what they need to succeed in college and beyond. Casa House, which Maestas and others founded, is an innovative hybrid, a campus center that brings together students and community members for home cooked meals and cultural events. It is a place of making community. For students, both from the Valley and beyond, Casa House represents a crucial part of the foundation of student well being and belonging.
As Maestas sees it, “We really are keepers of culture. We take our students who have lost their language, they’ve lost their heritage and have a loss of identity and through Place Based Service-Learning we bring back the very things that they grew up with, that help them understand who they are. These experiences bring the students back to their roots and where they come from, after being made to feel the things are not important. We honor who they are, where they come from, their traditions and their language.” Casa House offers an array of events and projects to reconnect students with their cultural heritage while also serving as a place of grounding for students new to the Valley.
Using Place Based Education
Place Based Education is essentially a pedagogy and process for using the local community as the classroom, understanding that each community or place is unique and with a story to tell. According to Shirley Atencio, lifelong resident of the San Luis Valley and Coordinator of ASU’s Office of Civic Engagement and Career Services, “Place Based Education is a learning process that makes things real. It enriches, expands, examines and entices that which is often neatly packaged within four walls.”
Atencio goes on to say that “When students are able to use all their senses in exploration of both the new and familiar, they commit to memory what otherwise might be lost or never appreciated. I have been with students who learned about a Mexican family’s beekeeping micro-enterprise by donning protective clothing for a close-up inspection of the beehive and then later, around a meal, spoke with them about geopolitical factors adversely affecting the family business.” Atencio says, “This gives students a human reference to what would otherwise have been dry facts.” She goes on to say that, “Mining the wisdom held within a community is key to understanding its soul. When students and community members feel that they matter and have something to offer, a community thrives.”
Getting to the Heart of Community and Relationships
Place Based Education, done well, takes its participants to the crux of any strong relationship: respect and reciprocity. It calls forth and recognizes students’ ideas, questions and abilities and puts them into service for the immediate project which in turn serves the whole. It inspires both action for positive change and reflection for better understanding. Shirley Atencio attended CWI’s Summer Institute in Los Angeles and knows that, “Place Based Education can be messy. It can raise more questions than it answers. It is sometimes ragged on the edges and raw in its presentation. It is often a process, a discovering.” As Atencio outs it, “when we step onto the path of Place Based Education, we are treading holy ground and holding sacred stories sometimes etched on canyon walls or engraved onto human hearts. Young people are eager to be useful in meaningful ways. I have experienced students being free of technology for days and have seen the joy and lightness they become when they are creating, doing, and serving within their community.”
Art Professor Leslie Macklin at The Institute. Macklin’s artwork explores the connections between vernacular space and the human condition, inspired by objects that embody the collective history of a place, from local architectural structures to historically significant objects. Often found in various states of care, reuse, or neglect, these objects reflect the passage of time and reveal relationships between living space, history, memory, and the discarded. By manipulating of these familiar spaces, Macklin believes in inviting viewers to reflect on their own surroundings, reflect on history and change, and encourage reflection on the complexity of human connection with others, objects, and experiences.[/caption]
Using a Study Group Approach to Design and Critique
During the week long Institute at Adams, faculty and administrators met in a Place Based Service-Learning focused design lab session, led by Community Works Institute’s Joe Brooks, to look at and critique current and proposed Place Based Service-Learning and land-based curriculum.
Dana Provence, Professor of Sculpture, Jewelry & Metalsmithing attended and shares that, “I, like others, was able to share ideas that I have yet to launch, to get feedback and ideas from the group — the collective conscious. It was encouraging to see and hear the invigorated voices, viewpoints, and ideas that a group of like-minded individuals could bring to bear on my projects. At the conclusion of our session, I realized that some of my land-based curriculum is ready to implement; and as for service-learning elements/projects, I found new allies and also some potential funding sources.”
Dana Provence is an ideal hybrid of a life experienced teacher, he initially studied and worked as a scientist, becoming skilled at investigating and engineering form and function at the microscopic and molecular levels; but as a sculptor, he has used these abilities of thoughtful observation and analysis to create visually engaging three-dimensional designs. His artwork is driven by conceptual themes and a fascination with language. Provence says that as an art professor he has taught off and on for years a Place Based project called “Land Art” in the San Luis Valley.
This has been successful for many groups of his students, but he says he says that he has also long sought to incorporate Place Based Service-Learning whereby his students would interact with communities, hearing their stories and learning about their journeys. His vision is that his students would then begin a design process in concert with their community member partners and make an artifact that could range from small and intimate like a jewelry piece or larger like an outdoor sculpture. The artifact they co-create would then remain within the community.
Theater as a Catalyst for Social Justice and Community Engagement
Art matters and theater can have a real and lasting impact on students and the community. John Taylor, Professor and Director of Theater at Adams State shares that, “In my work, one of my goals is to explore the ways in which theatre can be a catalyst for community engagement. The classroom and the stage should be at the forefront of efforts to examine our personal beliefs and the major societal issues of the day. Both can be places where injustice, ignorance, and the prejudices of the past can be exposed and new understandings of the human experience explored. Most importantly, each can be a site where a multiplicity of voices can be heard in discourse.”
Since joining Adams faculty two decades ago, the focus of John’s creative work has been to explore the ways in which theatre can be a catalyst for social justice and community engagement. Working with his students, they have created a variety of issue-oriented public theater events including Of Words and Walls: The Anne Frank Theatre Project centered on learning from the past, Standing Strong: The ASU Equality Project on marriage equality, The R&J Project which focused on forgiveness and reconciliation, The ASC Fahrenheit 451 Project dealing with 1st Amendment rights, the 365 Days/365 Plays project, the ASC Dead Man Walking Theater Project illustrating implications around the death penalty), and The Laramie Project which tackled homophobia and hate crimes.
Next year John and his students will be presenting a new project “Express Yourself: The ASU Gender Theatre Project.” Their work will feature the award-winning new play A Doll’s House, Part 2.
Through art, music, public forums, a faculty lecture, and more, John Taylor and his students seek to engage their community in an ongoing dialogue about the most fundamental issues which shape our society and personal lives including the continuing need to combat sexism and stereotypes, fight for gender equity, and to value the extraordinary diversity which enriches the San Luis Valley community.
On Coming Back to the Valley as an Adams State Graduate
It is extremely noteworthy how many of Adams State’s faculty members are natives of the Valley and also graduates of the University. A relatively recent graduate of Adams State, Patrick Ortiz now coordinates the San Luis Valley and RIO Generation Wild Coalitions. Patrick and his colleagues are implementing a campaign focused on youth programming for outdoor experiential learning, environmental/water education, and various outdoor recreation activities throughout the San Luis Valley.
Ortiz says that, like many Adams graduates, he came back to the Valley because his parents live there and he really loves the pace and intentionality of life there. “I’ve lived in large cities and it was always refreshing to come back to the Valley. The dramatic landscape, never-ending places to explore on public land, and the big color sunrises and sunsets are also why I wanted to get back here.”
Using Place Based Education to Engage with Larger Issues
During the week long Institute on Place Based Service-Learning at Adams State, at a community roundtable hosted by the university with local non-profit representatives, Ortiz shared that he is very pleased by Adam State’s efforts to instill a deep “sense of place” in the educational process. He feels that “by making intentional efforts to implement the most effective Place-Based Education strategies, Adams State will help begin to significantly move the needle toward stronger community partnerships and collaborations.” He went on to say that, “Educating the youth of the San Luis Valley seems to be something that has somehow not been a priority over the years and it’s very important that it’s being addressed now. Not addressing this would continue to lead to talented, bright minds leaving the Valley seeking opportunities for advancement elsewhere.”
Ortiz believes that many former Adams students would like to move back home but there is not yet an equivalent job market that matches their skills. He also feels that common community issues of “social isolation, cyclic generational poverty, drug addiction/alcoholism, and inferiorism end up being a direct result when there is a lack of extra-curricular and summer activities for underserved, underrepresented, or isolated youth populations, other than organized sports.”
Another community lead project that Patrick Ortiz is coordinating is the Revitalize the Rio Community Initiative. The initiative’s goals are to enhance the economy, river stewardship, outdoor recreation, and health and wellness of the community with an inclusive, adaptable approach. Former Adams student Ortiz’s vision includes a multi-sector, concerted effort to cultivate better educational institution and local business relationships (through apprenticeships, internships, etc), entrepreneurship, engaging the local arts and culture assets outside of the institutions, sustainable economic development, and workforce incubators beyond the agriculture and health sectors.
The Chemistry of Trout
Place Based Education takes many forms at Adams State. And, though it is far from done in all courses, there are significant existing exemplars for other faculty to learn and model from. Dr. Frank Novotny, Professor of Analytical Chemistry at Adams shares that his best example of integrating Place Based Education involves his analytical and instrumental chemistry lab courses.
Novotny says that over the past several years “a student, Sam Reid, and I have been working with a private trout club located in Southern Colorado, half-way between the small mountain towns of Creede and Lake City. In recent years, the quality of fishing has deteriorated to the point that in the summer, some of the lakes are not fishable due to the amount of aquatic vegetation and/or turbidity of the water.” Novatny notes that the club wants to improve the fishing while also being good environmental stewards.
This January, a group of eight students and Novatny went to the trout club to collect and analyze water samples. Novatny recollects that, “Because of its location, there were many firsts for the students, including snowshoeing through several feet of snow to the lake at an elevation of 10,300 feet, drilling a hole through two plus feet of ice with a hand auger, collecting water samples when the air temperature was -15 0F, and catching a trout ice-fishing. The application of their knowledge to an unscripted field project like this will have long lasting effects.” He says his students are still talking about the trip including the challenges with field work, seeing the wildlife on the trip (elk, big horn sheep, fox, and trout), working together as a group to accomplish a task, and most of all, learning how they can have a positive impact on local communities. Best of all says Novatny, “They are all asking when we are going to collect and analyze more water samples and hoping that it is warmer than -15 0F.”
Social Practice Through the Arts
Being located in a very rural area that is also the third-poorest county in Colorado Adams State has its own challenges to face, something it seems to do quite well. Despite a dearth of resources, Adams State boasts a thriving art department, including the ASU Rare A.I.R. visiting artist program. With the help of Challenge America funding from the National Endowment for the Arts, the University is now expanding that program to include social practice artists working in theater, music, or the visual arts. This program exemplifies Place based Education and The Adams Experience both.
According to Adams’ Assistant Professor of Art Leslie Macklin, who manages the project, one of the goals of the expansion is that the artists selected for the social practice residency will help create safe places for the community to have difficult conversations around local issues such as water conservation, homelessness, and opioid abuse. “I truly feel that it’s in the ability of artists to make connections between communities and to create a space for dialogue that is not as formal or maybe politically charged,” she says. “Bringing people together to physically make something is a great way to start conversations and connect people that wouldn’t talk to one another in another format.”
Macklin also thinks that having an outsider’s point-of-view can help foster creative problem-solving around community issues. “[The artists] are coming in without bias. They’re coming in with fresh eyes, and I think sometimes it takes those fresh eyes to really understand and approach problems in a new way,” she said.
Creating a Lasting Vein of Engagement
As part of the social practice residency, Macklin is also hopeful that the participating artists will be able to make deep, long-lasting connections with the community. She explained, “There are a lot of social issues that the community struggles with and they’re used to people coming, interviewing, understanding, and then disappearing. Our hope is to combat some of that and create some sort of lasting vein of engagement. We want [the artist] to come here, experience our unique community, this unique place, and then respond… to realize how they can creatively meet the needs of the community.”
Each social practice residency lasts roughly the length of an academic semester, which Macklin noted would not be possible without Arts Endowment funding. “Right now we’re only able to support artists that can afford to bring themselves here,” she said. “Without this funding from the National Endowment this social practice element would not at all be possible.” The financial cushion provided by the grant will allow artists to spend a longer stretch of time embedded in Alamosa County, hopefully leading to projects that more directly respond to the community’s needs.
New Perspectives and New Eyes for Community
While Macklin hopes that the artists connect both with the campus and regional communities, she also hopes that, in particular, engaging with the artists will help the Adams State student body to strengthen their bonds to the community by allowing them to see the area with new eyes. “We get a lot of students who come to Alamosa, and they [think], ‘There’s nothing here to do. There’s nothing here for me to see,’ because it’s a very small rural mountain town. But there actually are so many interesting, cool things about where we are, both historically and culturally, and so I’m hoping that our students are able to see their place in a new way and become more connected to it.”
Adams’ Social Practice Arts Residency Program will support artists who create projects that involve a specific area of the community, and in some case the entire community. The participating artists will live for an extended time the San Luis Valley and invite locals to take part in creating projects that are specific to the regional community. Macklin says that, “The goal of the program is to support the creativity of the Valley’s diverse population and provide a new platform for citizens to make connections with one another and address the complex social issues of our region.
Honoring Heritage and Culture
Three artists have been selected to participate, each representing a different arts discipline. Shelby Head is a visual artist and her residency and project will focus on collecting stories from the beneficiaries to the 1844 land grant from Mexico and Spain. Head is an award winning artist who gained her M.A. in Art from Adams State. She plans to record their personal stories involving the 50-year range war with the landowners of the Taylor/Cielo Vista Ranch. These stories will be shared in an exhibition at the Cloyde Snook Gallery where she also plans to design and construct a shrine with the Castillo County land grant heirs. The shrine will be dedicated to the spirit of the mountain range and to the generations of families who have used the mountain range for grazing, logging, wood, hunting and fishing.
Another residency and project will happen with Cory Hills, a multi-percussionist musician and composer. His project will engage elementary and middle school aged children throughout the Valley in a Percussive Storytelling program. One common thread his stories share is nature; specifically, how indigenous peoples relate to the natural environment around them. Hill’s program brings classical music and storytelling to young community students in fun and accessible ways. He has presented more than 520 programs to over 135,000 children in nine different countries, released two international award-winning children’s albums and two children’s books.
Uncovering Untold Stories
Ethnographic performance artist Mike Durkin will also do a residency at Adams State in the coming year. Durkin’s goal with the residency is to create a performance working with residents and students as creators and performers, through interviews, oral histories, performance making workshops, and rehearsals to uncover stories from the San Luis Valley. He will create opportunities for community members to come together, hear different perspectives, find common ground, and collaboratively create performance. Performances may take the form of story sharing circles, meals, parades, or walking tours. As an outcome, Durkin hopes his project will reveal new and revive old histories of the San Luis Valley, provide visions of the future, and engage in day to day Valley life.
Moving Forward
Adams State Faculty and their community partners, attending the culminating Institute sessions on the weekend, looked closely at pragmatic ideas for next steps to move The Adams Experience’s use of Place Based Education forward. Much of the thinking revolved around how to fully engage more faculty and facilitate implementation of Themes, First Year Seminars, e-portfolios and High Impact Practices and other components with Place Based Education in mind.
One priority identified was the need to hold workshops and creating collaborative cohorts to support creating theme courses, along with opportunities for professors and resource people to discuss and develop ways to teach and integrate material in a new way focused on place associated themes. Brooks had emphasized his strong belief in using a cohort or study group approach to advance local curriculum design work. Participants at the Institute also saw as crucial the need to build in the use of metrics and measurement tools to show the relationship between Adams’ new approach and class enrollment, retention, student well being and the Social and Emotional Learning outcomes associated with Place Based Education. There was also conversation about the need to look at class schedules differently to make it easier for instructors to collaborate and get their students into the community. Significantly the Institute participants at Adams realized that it will be very important to integrate interest and experience with Place Based Education into the recruitment and hiring process.
A Campus and Community Full of Opportunity
Understanding what already exists campus wide, from department to department was seen as an immediately needed step, in part to highlight what already exists and is going along with helping faculty overcome challenges they have come across. Sharing models and successes, along with an honest assessment of challenges, is the hallmark of any successful approach.
Among the Institute participants there was an obvious willingness by those who have attended workshops and have experience with projects to take ownership in helping the University implement and grow its wider use of Place Based Education. A number of ideas were floated including creating an advisory group of people interested in helping move the process forward. This could include Adams State faculty and resource people and community partners present throughout the week at the Institute such as Sangre de Cristo National Heritage Area, La Puente, Boys & Girls Club, and many more — groups that may offer internships, service projects, connections to the community, etc. Providing ongoing training and development to faculty around how the structure for course design was seen as hugely important
Adams State University has embarked on a well founded journey to personalize student learning and indeed the entire four year college experience for its students. The curriculum and program pieces and human partners assembled are all indicators of great potential for success. Most of all the passion for this work is so clearly evident among an unusually talented faculty. The challenge, as always, will be on maintaining a focus that supports faculty as they design and unfold what is essentially a new paradigm for university teaching and learning.
EDITOR’S NOTE: We greatly appreciate the many Adams State faculty members and community partners who contributed to this article. Paulette Beete contributed to this article from her piece on Adam’s Social Practice Arts Residency Program originally published by the National Endowment for the Art’s Art Works
References:
National Associate of Colleges and Employers (NACE) https://www.naceweb.org/
Association of American Colleges & Universities (AAC&U). High Impact Practices. https://www.aacu.org/leap/hips
About the Authors
Joe Brooks is is the Founder and Director of Community Works Institute (CWI) A veteran teacher Joe has taught at all levels K-16 and is an internationally recognized expert, leader and advocate for Place Based Service-Learning. He believes that the path to a meaningful life and education lies in deep community engagement and intentionally building students’ sense of self efficacy. In that spirit he believes that education must focus on a creating a developed sense of place and empathy that is informed by the goal of sustainable communities. His work with teachers is based on principles of democratic teaching and social justice.
Leslie Cramblet Alvarez is Professor of Psychology and the Founding Director of Adams State University’s Center for Teaching, Innovation, & Research. She is also Professional Development Activity Director for Title V. Leslie became interested in educational inequity while working with street-dependent youth in Austin in the late 1990s. After receiving her Ph.D. in Educational Psychology, she began teaching at Adams State University, a small, Hispanic-Serving Institution in rural, southern Colorado. Her work focuses on supporting under-served students, removing systemic barriers to student success, and faculty education.
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