Inside VCUarts: Community Engagement
VCUarts is very involved with our community. As part of our community engagement efforts, we have developed an array of service-learning opportunities.
Service-learning is the integration of community service into the academic curriculum. Students become involved in a hands-on experience that helps them not only make better sense of what they are learning in class but also engages them in activities that help to meet a community’s needs.
The VCUarts Service-Learning video below includes faculty interviews to highlight and promote exceptional service-learning projects. This video was funded by the School of the Arts and the National Youth Leadership Council:
Examples of faculty-led service-learning courses include:
- Secondary Practicum students work with English teachers from a local Richmond middle school to incorporate Art into their English curriculum. VCU students gain practical teaching experience while partnering with an inner-city school that expressed a need for curriculum, teaching, and student-learning support.
- Students in the Foundations of Art in Education class work with The Children’s Museum, Art 180 non-profit organization, Southerland Assisted Living Center for the Elderly, and other community partners to increase the arts offering in the Richmond community while learning about developmental growth patterns of children and needs of the elderly.
- VCU students are providing art after school programs to Carver Elementary, a school that has limited art instruction. Preliminary and ongoing studies show that students’ critical thinking skills have increased.
- Students in the Art for the Exceptional Students course work with local organizations that cater to the Exceptional Student population.
- VCU Dance and Choreography students teach at Pine Camp, a Richmond Parks and Recreation Center. In addition, VCU students partner with two area high schools bringing in guest speakers, perform for the high school students, and work with these same students to engage in and teach them choreographic process.
Fashion Design and Merchandising
- Fashion students embark on a week-long trip to Guatemala to work with local women in learning about and helping to creating indigenous clothing. These clothing products are then sold in a Fair-Trade Non-Profit organization in the U.S. and revenue is sent back to those laborers in Guatemala, which helps to increase their daily wages.
- Students work on a project that reaches out into the community, beyond the school. Past projects have included creating campaigns to support local merchants (local community revitalization/community development), making presentations to high school and middle school students about the paper product wastefulness of certain design fields, and creating an awareness of the power of the media in defining our society’s cultural representation.
For more information on how VCU is involved in Community Engagement, click here.
