Welcome to the Citizen Artist Blog!

The Citizen Artist is a new 6-credit service-learning course offered by the Department of Theatre and Film at Bowling Green State University (BGSU) designed and taught by faculty member Kate Collins. Our community partner for this course is Libbey High School, a diverse urban high school in the south side of Toledo in the Toledo Public School District. The development of this new service-learning course at BGSU reflects our commitment to giving students (both in high school and college) an intensive opportunity to explore the significant ways in which art can enrich civic life in America.

For this new Spring 2008 project, eight BGSU undergraduate and graduate students will partner with 32 11th grade American Government and Economics students from Libbey High School and together they will use theatre as a means to explore the concept of citizenship - in particular, the rights and responsibilities that come with it. Together we will work to become informed on public issues, partake in civil discourse through research, discussions, and interviews with friends, family and community members and with all of this, we seek to create a compelling theatrical performance encompassing all that we’ve learned in the hopes of promoting further public dialogue with the surrounding community.

During the first week of February the Libbey students identified bullying and school violence as the particular issue they would like to tackle this semester. Frustrated with the perpetuation of bullying within and beyond the walls of America’s schools, some Americans feel that society is not recognizing the seriousness of the problem. Some want to see harsher punishment and are suggesting that this is a grave problem that should be treated along the same lines as a hate crime. Others point out that like a hate crime, bullying is a very insidious offense often difficult to define or prove. This is further complicated by those who deny its impact, often suggesting that bullying is (an unfortunate) part of growing up that kids simply need to go through as part of adolescence. No matter how you see it, it seems clear that bullying and violence in schools is a pressing public issue and this semester BGSU and Libbey students will work together to explore the complexity of this issue. We will use theatre as a means to exercise our role as citizens by sharing what we’ve learned and promoting further dialogue in our community.

This blog is meant to document our ongoing work over course of this spring semester at Libbey High School. You can expect week-to-week updates to track our progress. We hope you’ll check in now and then over the coming weeks to see how it’s going! We have a culminating performance scheduled for April 16th.

Funding for this project has been provided by The Learn and Serve America, Great Cities Great Service grant led by Otterbein College, Ohio Campus Compact, and University of Cincinnati. We are also grateful for the support of the Department of Theatre and Film and the Office of Service-Learning at Bowling Green State University.

Thursday, March 20, 2008

March 10th and 19th


Monday, March 10



It's been over a week since the BG students went to Libbey - we were on our spring break! Today the BG students and the American government class did a story circle together. A story circle is when all of the participants sit in a circle together and one-by-one tell a story relating to a particular topic. Unless it's to clarify a point in the story, no one is allowed to speak except for the person telling his or her story. This rule ensures that the focus is entirely on the one person speaking. Since the topic we're exploring through this project is the question "should bullying be considered a hate crime?" we told stories about our experiences with bullying. Since the American Government class is a big class, we split into two groups. The stories in both groups ranged from people telling about being bullied themselves, to being the bully, and what they did when they witnessed bullying. One of the most important outcomes to this activity was that while everyone knows bullying happens, it's generally thought of as an abstract, non-personal thing - "it doesn't happen to me" kind of mentality. The story circle really highlighted that everyone's lives have been touched by bullying in some way, whether it happened to them personally or someone they care about. In order to even begin talking about the complexities of treating bullying as a hate crime, its importance needs to be recognized and we started to see that today.






Wednesday, March 19



Today the BG students and the Economics class did a story circle as well. Since the Economics class is a smaller class, we stayed in one large group for the activity. Similar to when the BG students and the American Government class did a story circle, the topics amongst the BG students and the Economics class ranged from people telling about being bullied themselves, to being the bully, and what they did when they witnessed bullying. In addition to highlighting that everyone's lives have been touched by bullying in some respect, this story circle brought to light that bullying does not just occur amongst kids in school. Adults, both relatives and non-relatives, bully children as well as each other. What is the difference, then, between bullying and stalking and/or assault? Can you bully yourself? The story circle, like the one we did last Monday, further complicated our understanding of bullying.


We also had a little fun at the end of class today, taking photos for the t-shirt design that will be our costume for the production. On the next fieldtrip to BGSU, a handful of Libbey students will have the chance to go over to the School of Art and work with faculty and student printmakers on silk screening our t-shirts. There are a number of extremely talented visual artists at Libbey so we thought this would be a cool opportunity to work with a new art medium and contribute to another aspect of the project.







Next week the Libbey students are on their spring - the BG students are going to start brainstorming ideas for the performance so we can begin to work on creating it when Libbey comes back from their break. Stay tuned!
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