Community Art Service-Learning: Challenging Homelessness Stereotypes

Introduction and Project Overview

Pamela Harris Lawton (2010) was encouraged by a colleague at the University of North Carolina in Charlotte to create a community art service-learning project that would bring art students and the homeless together through a hands-on creative activity. This activity centered on the creation of individual quilt squares that were eventually sewn together to make a large community quilt. To make this project possible, Lawton collaborated with the Urban Ministry Center (UMC) in Charlotte, an interfaith organization providing meals, showers, and counseling services to the disenfranchised living within the community. Most of the people served by the UMC are homeless and low-income residents of the community.

The collaboration between Lawton, the art education department where she taught, and the UMC created an opportunity to bring art students, UMC staff and volunteers, and the homeless together for the service-learning project. The project was designed to develop a better understanding of homeless individuals' perceptions of homelessness and of the community in which they resided. The overarching goals were to encourage art educators and art students to use their skills in community outreach activities and to broaden students' perceptions of art education through promotion of lifelong learning in community settings. The social justice goal was to increase exposure to the homeless population in order to dispel myths and stereotypes, and to increase a sense of empowerment in all involved.

Project Design and Activity Framework

A key reason for Lawton's choice of a quilt project as the art activity was that each individual square could be completed during the 9 a.m. to 12 p.m. art education period. The location was a table set up across from the UMC building, providing convenient access for the homeless as they arrived for the midday meal. The simplicity of the activity would also allow ample time for conversations to take place, as educators and students learned about homelessness and being homeless from the homeless. Finally, the cost of materials would be minimal, an important consideration for the project's sustainability.

Pedagogical Framework and Integration Phases

Based on the information cited by Lawton, a community-based art education service-learning project can be used to emphasize the more traditional goals of art instruction, promote social justice education, and encourage art students to critically examine important contemporary social issues such as homelessness and disenfranchisement. Accordingly, experiential learning and narrative forms of communication can play an important role by helping art educators and students learn the personal histories of community members, empower the marginalized through engagement, and form meaningful connections with the marginalized.

Lawton discusses the five phases of classroom and community integration developed by Gillis. The first phase involves students engaging in self-reflection to help identify their own biases and beliefs about homelessness and the homeless. The second phase requires students to reflect on the sources of these biases. During the third phase, students investigate the truth that may lie within their biases and beliefs about the homeless and homelessness by consulting research and documentary literature. The fourth phase involves examining beliefs and assumptions by engaging with the community through an art education service-learning project. Although Lawton fails to mention the fifth phase explicitly, a reasonable assumption would be to gather the information gleaned and reflect upon it, which may include publishing accounts of what was learned.