Spaces In-between: Text Poems from Community Practice and Research

Abstract

A commitment on the part of the academy to address social issues has increased over the past three decades, resulting in service learning courses, volunteering opportunities, and community-university partnerships. Faculty, staff, and community practitioners collaborating to lead these efforts often carry enormous responsibility and answer to often competing interests of students, community members, and universities. Using the experience of an scholar/artist/teacher in a university-community partnership founded by the first author in a racially polarized town, this article explores the potential of arts-based methods, specifically poetry and collage, to mitigate the consequence of this work. The format is a dialogue between two engaged teacher/researcher/practitioners and friends to clarify the hidden experience of the researcher with narrative truth to articulate and share not only experiences, but also lessons learned as a contribution to our fellow teacher/researcher/practitioners.

What COVID-19 has brought us to: Art, activism, and changes in social work education

“…My teaching is project-based, a social justice service learning model informed by Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed ( Freire, 1971 ; Stoecker, 2003 ), The Learning Record ( Styverson, 1995 ), a portfolio assessment centered on learning versus performance, and perhaps the most exciting is a multi-modal approach that includes visual art, mapping, music, poetry, and storytelling. I have written about the use of arts-based methods in research and practice, and recently added these approaches to my teaching ( Gerstenblatt, 2013 ; Gerstenblatt et al., 2018 ).…”