Case Study of Community Outreach at Cal State Monteray Bay

April 5, 3 hours 15 minutes spent at Roberto Clemente

As Eastern Michigan Creative Writing looks to develop its community outreach program, one of the most impressive case studies I've seen and something we discussed this semester in the inaugural outreach class is at Cal State University at Monterey Bay.

Sited on the former army base of Ford Ord, closed in 1993, the university was founded on the core principles of service learning and community outreach based on an agreement reached with the local community that was losing 35,000 local soldiers and dependents.

In her article "Relationship, Reciprocity, Reclamation: The Arts at Cal State Monterey Bay," Jan Freya says consultants were brought in from several service learning movements to help articulate a core vision that created a campus uniquely suited to the region's needs.

The 22 page article impressively describes how this came to pass and how the service projects often lead to other unexpected collaborations between various departments and folks in the community.

I'm going to discuss only a couple here in broad strokes. Each fall, students in Gilbert Neri's digital public art class initiate a yearlong collaboration with a local community organization to develop a public art project. In 2003, they paired with the alternative Watsonville community school, whose students have behavioral and other learning difficulties. Most of them come from Latino farm worker families.

In the first semester, the Cal State Students worked on meeting the students and listening to their aesthetic issues and interests. They focused on building trust. In the second semester after all the interviewing, ice breakers and time spent with the high school students, they came together to start a digital art project.

In this case, the high school students wanted windows in their prison like building. With limited resources, they settled for an artistic answer to this. They worked with the college students in the digital art lab to create large scale images -- which acted as metaphorical windows.

That project led to a second project with teen moms at the school. The art students connected the teen moms to students in the humanities and communications department who helped them tell their stories and design scripts for a digital format like digital scrap-booking.

Other collaborations followed -- and I'm only giving a rough sketch here, but the point is that focusing many resources on a single mission led to a meaningful service learning project that helped the community and enabled Cal State students develop skills and pedagogy in their particular interest. The project-based learning engaged college students with the local community and shared common interests with people they might have other preconceived notions about.

We on the other hand were much more diffuse this semester on our projects. Most of us joined existing projects through nonprofits. Perhaps in the future -- and maybe not every time the class is offered -- the class might work as a single unit to tackle something in a unique way.

Incidentally, the writer of the piece, Jan Freya, also co-wrote the screenplay of the 80s break dancing classic: "Breakin' 2: Electric Boogaloo."