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.

Wednesday, April 2, 2008

March 31st and April 2nd


This week the BG and Libbey students reunite at Libbey to begin to work on the performance piece and both days the BG students met with the Economics class. While the Libbey students were on break, the BG students worked on a rough outline of the performance and explored some techniques that could be used. The performance will be structured with an opening piece, four pieces discussing different issues pertaining to bullying, and then a closing piece. Both the American Government class and the Economics class will be split into two groups apiece, for a total of four groups, and each group will devise one of the main performance pieces. Two BG students will be responsible for providing a foundation for the Libbey students to create their piece around.

On Monday, March 31, the BG students read through the script for the opening of the performance so the Economics students could see what we had come up with and give us feedback. They really liked how we structured it! We then showed them an image theatre technique that allows images and movement to be created based on a particular story or phrase. After the demonstration, the class split into two groups to begin to work on their performance pieces. The Economics class will be devising the pieces that give voice to bullying victims as well as what role the government should play in dealing with the issue of bullying and the repercusions that could result from different actions. We got off to a good start with an interesting twist...a group of delegates from Morroco sat in on the class to observe this new approach to teaching! They really enjoyed what they saw us do and gave us some great feedback!

On Wednesday, April 2, we continued to work on the performance pieces. We started off with a warm-up exercise (psht-pajubi-dong) to make sure everyone was awake! We then split into the two groups. The group looking at the role of government in relation to bullying discussed what opinions and voices they want to be heard in the performance as well as began to decide who would be playing what role. The group giving voice to the victim shared some personal stories, some possibilities for images, and discussed what kind of music they want to use. All in all, a successful week!

Next Monday, April 7, the Libbey students will return to BGSU for another fieldtrip where we will work heavily on the performance pieces as well as make our t-shirts for the performance. It should be an exciting day!
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