National School Reform Faculty

Harmony/VISTA

Service Learning Demonstration Project

Monday, July 07, 2003
VISTA & IPS Summer Theatre Project: “From Our Perspective”
By Stan Denski
sdenski@indianapoliseye.com

Twice a week I get up in the morning and spend a couple hours loading food in and out of a delivery van and driving to a half-dozen or so community centers, homeless shelters and similar agencies around Indianapolis as a volunteer for Second Helpings.

I do this because it has been the only exercise I got until a couple months ago when my wife found a dog wandering around an intersection, walking up to cars with an “Are you my mama?” look on his dog face. Now, in addition to the food deliveries, I can be found in Elenberger Park every evening thrashing around in the bushes. I’m the guy shouting “Hey! Come back here! Where the hell are you going? Aw c’mon!”

But I digress.

A few weeks back a new stop was added to our regular delivery route and I dropped off a box of sandwiches and some fresh fruit at Wheeler Arts Community on Sanders Street near Fountain Square. An enormous, 60,000 square foot, former warehouse reborn as an artists' residence (complete with classrooms, office space, 36 living/working studio lofts for artists, and a theatre space), the center is the result of a partnership between the University of Indianapolis and Southeast Neighborhood Development (S.E.N.D.).

I have a growing interest in the rich network of organizations, agencies and institutions that work on the local grass-roots level to keep this whole shebang — the whole society — together and moving forward. In particular, the organizations and agencies that work to keep Indianapolis afloat — places like The Wheeler Mission, Compassion Center, Horizon House, Second Helpings, Forest Manor Community Center and dozens more — operate across political lines and on the front lines of wars way older than the war on terrorism; wars on poverty and on despair.

Since 1965, more than 120,000 Americans have performed national service as VISTA Volunteers. VISTA (Volunteers In Service To America) places individuals with community-based agencies to help find long-term solutions to the problems caused by urban and rural poverty. The IPS/VISTA Summer Theatre Program held at Wheeler Arts Community is an intensive four-week experience for 12 IPS students, sophomores, junior and seniors f rom all IPS high schools. An academic opportunity to earn one credit in creative writing, the goal of the workshop is to improve communication skills and address contemporary social issues. In the rehearsal I watched this past Tuesday, dramatic performances touched upon issues of domestic abuse, gangs, interpersonal relationships and did so through the use of original poetry, dance, music and dramatic dialogue.

The program is run by a collective of people including VISTA members, Naomi Milstein and William Jackson; Dr. Carol Myers, a National School Reform Faculty member from the Bloomington based Harmony School Education Center; Lou DeBruicker, creative writing teacher at Broadripple High School; and Mike Bachman, a theatre student at Butler University. As a recovering academic, I have a standing interest in how theories of progressive education get applied to real world situations. In the critique session that followed the rehearsal I saw the two primary instructors share their notes with the class in ways that worked particularly well in dissolving the rigid expert/learner teacher/student structure effective for the memorization of factual data, but ineffective in engaging students in more transformative ways.

I don’t mean to obscure the point I want to make here in theoretical jargon. A progressive approach to education sees the most fundamental goal of education as the transformation of the person from an object that is acted upon by the world, to a subject capable of acting upon and changing the world. Butler student, Mike Bachman, in effect , filtered the student’s work through his more extensive experience in theatre, giving it back to them, but now opened up in ways they may have been previously unaware of.

More experienced in the high school classroom, Broadripple teacher Lou De Bruicker engaged her students in a way that was devoid of condescension. She spoke from a passion for written expression and never spoke down to or over simplified the points she made, in particular when critiquing one woman’s poetry reading for an emphasis on the rhyme to the detriment of the message.

Both instructors were also adept at creating safe spaces within which students could express their own concerns and criticisms. I stopped teaching in 1997 and haven’t missed it even once since then until last Tuesday when I was reminded how exciting and rewarding it can be when a connection gets made among a room full of minds.

The goal of VISTA is “to help eliminate and alleviate poverty.” After the session I had the opportunity to ask the question: “Given that goal, what is the role of VISTA in the arts?” The answer to this question lies in an expanded notion of “poverty” as not only financial and economic. We’ve read in the paper numerous stories of economically disadvantaged people who win the lottery for tens of millions of dollars and wind up worse off than they were before. Suddenly being able to pay your bills and buy houses and cars does nothing to address a far more serious poverty of the heart, what Dr. Carol Myers described as “…a poverty of the imagination.”

As we spoke we drew a picture of poverty that took the form of tight restraints, a set of severe limitations placed upon people. These limitations are only partially economic. Experiences like this Summer Theatre Project are a direct assault upon the poverty of the imagination; a battle to open up a far wider world of possibility than some students may have been aware of.

I hope some of you reading this will come to Thursday evening’s performance and bear witness to just a glimpse of what the imagination is capable of. This is the sort of thing that makes you feel better about the state of the world today. It’s stuff like this where hope comes from.

Source: Indianapolis Eye News Online Magazine