Students in the Spectator to Citizen course studied how people in urban settings use art forms like graffiti to express their public voice. As part of the hands-on course, they painted some graffiti of their own. Photo: Wayne Armstrong
The University of Denver always has prepared students to become leaders in business, law and other academic fields. A new sequence of courses offered through DU’s Center for Community Engagement and Service Learning (CCESL) aims to prepare students to become leaders in their communities as well.
Titled Spectator to Citizen, the three-course series teaches students to identify problems in their immediate communities — and how to take steps to solve the problems they find.
“As lofty as it sounds, we’re hoping to create stronger, healthier communities,” says CCESL Associate Director Frank Coyne. “And in order to do that, we create stronger, more engaged citizens. So instead of graduating commodities to be swallowed up by the workforce, we are graduating students who are thinking critically about issues and becoming problem solvers and engaged citizens.”
The first class in the series, Community Organizing, focuses on the basic community organizing principles created by legendary author and organizer Saul Alinsky. The CCESL staff trained at the Chicago-based Gamaliel Foundation, which once employed Barack Obama.
“Community organizing is when the community — the people who are living and experiencing problems in their community — get together and make a plan as to what they need to happen in that community,” says CCESL Associate Director Jenny Whitcher. “They do that through building relationships and building community with city government officials and others and then dialoguing and meeting with them one-on-one to talk about how do we work together.”
In the School-Based Civic Engagement class, students focus on education, applying community-organizing concepts to issues in Denver public schools. Coyne, who teaches the course, hopes that some of the students will go on to participate in Public Achievement, a separate CCESL program in which DU students serve as mentors to kids in public schools.
“Several students who took my class were really interested in urban education and interested in becoming teachers,” Coyne says, “so this was a way of testing their ground and getting DU students hands-on experience with the issues facing urban education.”
The final class, Denver Urban Issues and Policy, brings students into the larger Denver community to study issues such as homelessness, poverty, education and housing. It culminates in a spring break immersion project that lets students spend more time off campus, interacting directly with local nonprofits and government groups. For their 2009 immersion project, Spectator to Citizen students worked with Senior Support Services, the African Community Center, the Denver Rescue Mission and youth shelter Urban Peak.
“What was best about the immersion week was that we were empowered to lead the week in whatever way we wanted,” says junior Cameron Lewis, who went through the inaugural Spectator to Citizen sequence in the 2008-09 school year. “We were given free rein to pick the issues that were important to us, and all of the contacting of nonprofit organizations or government officials, that was all left up to us. For me, personally, that was an experience I had yet to have in college, to be given the power to lead something in that way.”
That’s the whole point, CCESL staffers say — to make students aware that they have the power to make change in their communities.
“Too many people are upset about what’s going on in their communities and doing nothing about it because they don’t think they can or they don’t have the time,” Whitcher says. “We’re teaching students concrete public skills that they can use, and telling them you absolutely can do it. Use this, and keep doing it. The hope is in 20 years they’re still doing this kind of work and not only volunteering at Christmas.”