TTI
The Curriculum Project
We are delighted to announce that The Curriculum Project Report: Culture and Community Development in Higher Education is available for download. With support from the Nathan Cummings Foundation, project researchers have gathered information on the current state of community cultural development education, its strengths and its needs. As we explain in the project’s glossary, community cultural development describes a range of initiatives undertaken by artists in collaboration with other community members to express identity, concerns, and aspirations through the arts and communications media, while building the capacity for social action and contributing to social change. For a synopsis of project findings, see the Executive Summary and Jan Cohen-Cruz’s Curriculum Project Overview.
The Curriculum Project was conceived by veteran community arts educators and activists as a way of involving people in the community cultural development field in taking stock at this important moment of growth: how are we educating community arts practitioners? How could training in this field be deepened, strengthened, made more effective? What is needed to effectively embody the field’s commitments to scholarship, training, and community engagement? What is needed to support those doing good work and assist those who want to develop new, excellent educational programs in community cultural development?
The first phase of the project, from January 2008 to September 2008, focused on research. The hypothesis that the research tested was that a model curriculum should have a balance of three key elements: training, in both aesthetics and community organizing; community engagement, based on reciprocity; and scholarship, focusing on the field’s history and animating ideas – for example, the history of cultural policy. Hundreds of community artists, educators and friends of the field took part in the interviews and surveys on which the report is based.