Educational service delivery and implementation

¶ … students, the university experience is not simply a matter of academic induction into the larger world. Colleges located in the heart of bustling metropolitan centers as well as those buffered by less economically healthy urban areas provide some more sheltered suburban students with their first intimate glimpse of less affluent communities and cultures. It is with this in mind that the service project in question proposes to devise a method through which to educate the student and benefit the neighborhood.

Too often, students of the arts are confined by the sterile and contrived environs of the classroom or studio. Likewise, a neighborhood child attending a poorly funded, urban public school may not have an outlet for some of his more creative tendencies. This course will commit art students to a credit earning curriculum in a local elementary after-school program. College students of multiple disciplines such as painting, dancing, theatre and music will instruct and assist elementary aged children two hours a day in their chosen arts.

The environment, a far cry from a lecture hall, will engage college students in a process that is both spontaneous and consistently rewarding. Observing and aiding in the development of young talent will help artists to better understand their own status as performers and craftsmen. Where the monotony of the classroom setting may be a useful form of regimenting for a college level talent, the occasional escape into this alternative is certain to grant new perspective and a much needed release from traditional grade-oriented tension. The quality of their work will be determined by how much they and the children with whom they participate derive from it as artists and students.

Elementary school students will also find the program to be an ideal deviation from the everyday business of academic education. Often, in inner-city and urban grammar schools, the relative dearth of financial backing deprives the children thereof of the extra-curricular benefits inherent in suburban schools. Artistic pursuits often are the victim of low funding, leaving more abstractly inclined children without an appropriate outlet. This can both manifest itself negatively in the child's disposition, behavior and grades and in the child's missed opportunity. This could be a route through which to uncover obscured talents in underachieving children and to provide greater access to success for those already cognizant of their abilities. And it goes without saying that providing inner city children with any structured activity after-school when circumstances may have not otherwise provided such a luxury could prove to be a valuable influence.