Multicultural America Media Projects: 2010-2011

Just in time for UWM Institute of Service Learning‘s award ceremony honoring distinguished service learners, I put together a website that collected many of the student multimedia projects from this year’s Multicultural America classes. Multicultural America (with media arts focus) has truly evolved from my first design of the course for the Cultures and Communities certificate program in 2005 (the course was then called FILM 150). It began as one small face to face seminar/lab integrating media arts theory/practice with community based service learning and is now a fully online, multiple sections (and very popular) course (now ART 150). I teach the fully online version, but still keep the commitment to service learning as well as theory/practice as you will see from our course projects. Shelleen Greene, my colleague at UWM has done great work on developing the face to face version for the Multicultural America class, by adding new critical/creative assignments on remix and digital storytelling. Shelleen will have some new projects to post next fall, and I look forward to seeing those (and will link). But I did want to note both our evolution of the class as well as our ongoing efforts to develop and reshape the class in line with the latest critical/creative tools and initiatives. Also I would be remiss if I did not note the incredible work of the Institute for Service Learning’s work in developing the partners and set of best practices for us as we venture into this new area of research/teaching of online service learning. I also want to thank my new department home and colleagues in ART & DESIGN at UWM for being so incredibly supportive of the class and understanding the mission of arts and community engagement. I look forward to developing this class and others in line with our commitment to this emerging area in the arts.

The student projects are multimedia journals of their service learning experience, and the work here is uniformly excellent and inspiring. Here then is ART 150 MULTICULTURAL AMERICA, 2010-2011.

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