Specifying the Scholarship of Engagement 2.

0: Skills
for Community-based Projects in the Arts and Design
Stephani Etheridge Woodson

Introduction: Background and Context

Trained as a K–12 theatre educator and a theatre for young audiences
specialist, I teach in the School for Film, Dance and Theatre (SOFDT) in the
Herberger Institute of Design and the Arts at Arizona State University (ASU),
where I specialize in community-based practices. I approach my work in
theatre by, with, and for children with a focus on youth embedded in
communities, rather than top-down instruction aligned with institutional
hierarchies. I feel fortunate that both ASU and the Herberger Institute
understand their missions as fundamentally and practically rooted in publics.
In fact, my school understands the praxis of working in community cultural
development as a core competency for our MFA and PhD students, and
therefore my graduate course, Projects in Community-Based Theatre, is
required. I also teach institute-wide undergraduate courses in community-
based/socially engaged work, enrolling students from music, design,
architecture, arts management, art, museum studies, and digital culture.

Having to articulate the "why" of community-based theatre as well as the

"how" across multiple arts specialties requires specific attention to the cross-
curricular learning and skill sets developed. In traditional theatrical production
formats, once theatre artists learn the general scope and process of bringing
a work from conceptualization through to formal production, they can apply
those understandings to other performative contexts. Community-based
artists, in contrast, have to design how to work and how to apply their art
form and creative practice to the ever-changing cross-disciplinary contexts in
which they work.

To help students understand the underlying skill sets used in community-based

projects so that they can integrate core principles as they learn to adjust
them to diverse contexts and communities, I adapted a project-based skills
taxonomy developed by Julie Ellison, founding director of Imagining America
(IA). I tried to create a comprehensive list of skills necessary for multiple kinds
of community-based projects in multiple settings. In a seminar at IA's 2012
conference, I brought up Ellison's inventory and discovered I was the only
individual in the room familiar with the tool. Recently revising the inventory for
my graduate class, I offer the resource here for conversation and comment.

Imagining America published the original proficiencies taxonomy in a 2005 IA

newsletter as a list called "Specifying the Scholarship of Engagement: Skills for
Community-Based Projects in the Arts, Humanities, and Design," within an
explanatory essay titled, "From the Director: The Naming of Cats." Ellison and
several of her students compiled a list of abilities they believe university
students practice in community-based, project-learning environments. Ellison
wrote in her introduction:

"Specifying the Scholarship of Engagement" identifies the elements of three

dimensions of public scholarship: a commitment to the arts of translation needed
to work towards a common language for the project team; an ability to think
organizationally and to work sociably; and the willingness to adopt models from
disciplines such as architecture and urban planning that have a tradition of
project-based, culturally complex work with material outcomes and products.
(2)

The taxonomy has been helpful in my teaching and curricular administration

duties (most recently in the creation of undergraduate and graduate
certificate programs in socially engaged practice). Like Ellison, I believe
learning-in-context or project-based activities provide unique modalities
integrating procedural and propositional knowledge (knowing facts and
knowing how to accomplish something). My pedagogical training
concentrated on constructivist philosophies and I understand authentic
learning as social and contextual. Biggs (2003), for example, argues that a
focus on declarative or propositional knowledge separated from situated
practice results in shallow or irrelevant understandings. While I believe Biggs's
criticism true for multiple fields, in the creative arts—and I would argue
community cultural development—we cannot separate facts from
processes. So I depend on the taxonomy to categorize highly complex
environments and to help structure learning and teaching methodologies as
well as assessment and evaluation protocols. A taxonomy supports structured
intentionality.

Over time I adapted Ellison's inventory specifically to address performance,

design, and civic engagement with children and youth. Four principles guide
my revision of the skills classification:
 1. Project-based learning. Project-based courses facilitate learning in
domain-general and domain-specific skills sets while providing
experiential grounding. Although projects change semester to
semester, the taxonomy articulates applicable skill sets that remain
constant.
2. A framework of collaborative studio practices. Theatre is and always
has been project-based; I treat the class as a company, and we
develop projects collectively. There are always real-world outcomes
and real-world risks involved, and our common language revolves
around articulating creative practices within civic environments.
3. Praxis. The interconnections of theory, ethics, and action.
4. Focus on civic engagement with children and youth. My scholarship
concentrates on childhood and youth studies, particularly the social
construction and circulation of performed childhoods. I study how
cultures create and enforce the meaning of "child" and "youth." Using
Amartya Sen's capabilities approach (1999), my work generally focuses
on children/youth as artists, as citizens/publics, and as community/civic
assets. Although not all of our class projects involve children and youth,
my adaptation includes necessary area understandings.

I have expanded Ellison's original 18 skills to over 60 while eliminating Ellison's

original organizational categories in favor of skill domains as conceptual sets.
I crafted an organizational graphic to help structure my thinking (below). In
my multiple iterations of the skills domains, I have tried to craft a taxonomy
that is nonhierarchical, necessary, complete, and irreducible. The taxonomy
attempts to list all skills/learning possibilities grouped within a categorization
schema structured through the above four philosophical principles. By its
nature, a taxonomy attempts inclusivity; thus, part of each learning
experience includes thoughtful adaptation and implementation of the
particular skills used. I do this differently in my undergraduate and graduate
course work, but in each case I foreground metacognitive processes in order
to move through the listing of skill possibilities. In my undergraduate courses I
edit the taxonomy to include only those skills/knowledge domains that we will
address in our course projects. For my graduate theatre and dance students I
include the entire taxonomy and we decide together which skills and
knowledges are addressed. I provide the graduate course example here as it
includes all skill/knowledge domains and the exhaustive list.

How I Use the Taxonomy in my Graduate Course

I use the skills inventory pedagogically. I arrange different projects every time
I teach my graduate course. We have partnered with schools, mental health
facilities, a children's hospital, museums, retirement homes, crisis shelters, etc.
Each semester, the short-term residency component (generally six weeks) has
different contexts, collaborative needs, and partnership parameters. For
example, in one museum residency we crafted a non-linear narrative
structure for use with fourth grade students visiting an Arizona History exhibit.
In a hospital residency, we created individualized digital stories with bone
marrow transplant patients. The student cohort functions as an artistic team
and creates unique art actions for each site. We spend the first half of the
course building ensemble, literacy, and ethical engagement structures, and
the second half in residency at the site. The course always results in some
form of public artistic production or art happening: performances, street
theatre engagements, a digital storytelling showcase, or a community
discussion/workshop.

Evaluation in a course like this one can be particularly fraught as it integrates

process learning, specific data, creative processes, and collaborative skills. If I
had my druthers I would eschew grades altogether, but ASU does not allow
that option, particularly in a required core course. I use a modified form of
Montessori reporting, framed through the skills inventory. Montessori reports
are individualized, highly detailed evaluations focused on the learner's
strengths as well as areas for further development. Thus summative
assessments are understood as grounded in individual capacities, not
competitive achievement. Additionally, I facilitate lateral responsibility and
evaluation—e.g., among the students—as well as personal control over the
learning environment. Students keep learning journals and evaluate
themselves periodically on their personal learning-in-context. Here, too, they
use the taxonomy to structure their thinking. I ask them to engage
thoughtfully within each conceptual category to address particularized
learning or skills they used in the experiential processes. At the end of the
course, I have one-to-one meetings with each student to discuss and
evaluate their performance and learning progress, again using the skill
domains. Final grades are equally weighted as an average of the students'
self-evaluation, my assessment of each student, an average of all the
students' assessment of each other, and our community partners' and/or
project director's assessment.

We use the taxonomy/skill sets to structure thinking through and in community

cultural development with the following criteria: preparation and personal
responsibility, thoughtfulness and insight, and creativity and professional
conduct. I include the skills taxonomy on the syllabus and frequently refer to it
during the course in order to bring the skills into consciousness. The
metacognition necessary to process their learning helps engage students'
strategic thinking. The course takes as a metafocus:

students' professional development (the ability to make reasoned judgments,

warrant claims, and reflect on assumptions);
the integration of practical (procedural) knowledge with formal (theoretical)
knowledge;
negotiation of the complex relationships between personal values, theories,
desires, and the complex social forces limiting and shaping possibilities.
Thus the taxonomy frames skill possibilities and contextual knowledge, and
structures learning intentionality within a professional development
framework. The MFA students tend to be highly practical individuals who
continually want to know why we are asking them to learn something and
how they can use the information in their career paths. Highly motivated,
ambitious, and overworked, our MFAs perform best when we help them
understand skill/knowledge transferability. The taxonomy helps me structure
conversations to include why as well as how. In many ways, the taxonomy
helps students structure skill/knowledge "portfolios." What do they know how
to do? And how can they apply that knowledge within multiple contexts to
accomplish diverse goals?

The Taxonomy in Action at the Graduate Level

I worked two summers in a row with the San Solano Youth exchange on
Tohono O'odham (TO) Reservation at Topawa in southern Arizona. This
program partnered youth from St. Pius parish in Tucson with Topawa youth
from the San Solano Missions community. Living together for a week in the
San Solano mission dorms, they focused on leadership training, service, and
cultural exchange.

The first year I was asked to participate, adult leaders wished to address a
community problem. The parish school at Topawa—which had for almost
eighty years been the only school in the village—recently had burned down
from arson linked to young people in the village. Many adults and community
elders received their K–12 education at the Topawa School and were
distraught by the physical destruction. The burned building contributed to
ongoing tension between families, elders, and youth. Many elders in the
community felt the arson as a slap in the face as well as representative of
young people's casual attitudes towards education itself. The youth
exchange leaders wanted to focus on the Topawa School to acknowledge
the school's history in the village as well as to explore youths' attitudes toward
education. Participants in this problem-solving residency created a digital
story documenting the history and meaning of the Topawa School while also
exploring education itself.

The adults approached me with a well-developed plan of action; the young

people had little involvement in subsequent planning. However, we built the
engagement and facilitation structures such that young people developed
and explored understandings of education through their own capacity,
desires, and lenses. We did not shy away from controversial discussions such
as the discordant and pessimistic views the youth aired on the value of
education provided at the local school and for their futures. Youth engaged
in substantive conversations with their community elders and spiritual leaders.
Using this example, I note how we moved through community cultural
development process and engaged the skills taxonomy.

Skills Taxonomy Discussion

Civic Skills

Build alliances among people and groups with diverse interests.

Claim legitimacy for the work/partnership/project and public agency for
children and youth.
Define public good, civic space, and "the commons" in the context of the
project or partnership.
Navigate conflict and disagreement.
Reflect on and raise questions about what democracy, citizenship, public-
making, and participation mean in and for the work/partnership/project.
Change minds—other people's and one's own.
Negotiate agreements between the possible, the probable, and the desired.
Understand how to map and negotiate power and status.

The project integrated several groups of people: facilitating artists, youth from
St. Pius, St. Pius adults, Topawa youth, parents, religious leaders, and
community elders. The project engaged youth in exploring the meaning
(defined contextually) of education and place. The Topawa School was built
in the center of the village square and near the historic location of the
primary well for the village. We explored conceptions of "center," "public,"
and "participation" through place and the memory of place. Youth and
adults understood the function of education and place differently. While I
believe we opened dialogue, I do not know that anyone's mind was
changed. Tensions, however, seemed lessened. Negotiation is part and
parcel of every residency I have ever conducted: in the planning, in
problem-solving, in aesthetic decision-making—internal negotiations focus on
what is possible and what is desired. The manner in which elders, youth, and
adults interact and understand one another on the TO Reservation structures
power and status in particular ways. Elders are provided pride of place and in
order to respectfully interview them we had to pay particular attention to
traditional behaviors and necessary protocols. This was particularly important
for the Tucson youth, who did not necessarily understand the cultural
protocols in play.

Communication Skills

Code switch to communicate with multiple audiences while maintaining

message consistency.
Listen to and absorb ideas from a wide variety of perspectives.
Write accessible prose in multiple genres for various audiences.
Negotiate multilingual groups and occasions, including professional
terminologies.

I always teach my students skills in nonviolent communication and active

listening, skills useful in multiple contexts, including this one. Additionally, as
resident artists, we needed to practice deep listening and to communicate
across multiple cultures and linguistic practices. The language of the TO
elders has a particular rhythm and cadence. In particular, the elders perform
humor differently than the youth. Spoken English and Spanish, however, were
the dominant languages of the residency, although music and movement
were also used to communicate effectively. We also had to communicate
within the artistic team, and weigh our aesthetic desires and understandings
with those of our partners. This project did not depend on written
communication.

Creative and Aesthetic Skills

Craft narrative structures in multiple registers.

Foster participants' creative risk taking and symbolic literacies including
knowledge of the creative process.
Parse communities' diverse aesthetic languages and use them appropriately
and ethically.
Stage and shape natural and built environments to highlight and expand
people's meaningful experience with them.
 Be keenly conscious of one's own craft and creative practices.
Possess poetic, visual, musical, dance, theatrical, craft, and other artistic
literacies.

The creative practice I followed understands children and youth as artists. The
resident artists were responsible for articulating creative choice-making while
building literacies in aesthetic practices. The digital story in this residency
pulled from the cultural capital and natural environment of the Topawa
village contrasted with the burned hulk of the Topawa school. We used the
creativity cycle—preparation, incubation, insight, and verification—to
process and structure visual images and poetic writing, and to conduct and
edit interviews. We used location and memory as a narrative structure.
Additionally, the youth focused on future iterations and educational
opportunities, not framing education solely through formal opportunities but
including informal learning from elders, spiritual practices, and the natural
environment.

Domain Knowledge and Grounded Theory

Be familiar with the practices and histories of activism, public service,

advocacy, associations, volunteerism, and other forms of engagement,
understood in cultural terms.
Grasp educational systems, their historical outlines and recent trends.
Understand the defining character, place, and context of one's own
experience.
Understand the organizational character of collaborating entities.

Understanding the educational context and history of both Arizona and the
TO Nation was important in this residency. Additionally, we needed a working
knowledge of Catholicism and the history of colonialism, mining, and
missions/missionary practices in southern Arizona. Located on the border of
Arizona and Mexico, the politics of immigration and the splitting of the TO
Nation by the imposed international borders were also in play. During the
week of our residency, the paramilitary presence of immigration enforcement
frequently interrupted our filming. The political relationships of different tribes,
particularly a nearby Apache enclave and Gila River, were also discussed.
Finally, TO is open range and we needed knowledge of range protocols and
live stock awareness as we moved around and through the landscapes.

Group/Ensemble Skills

Assess and leverage ensemble participation and creative capacity.

Honestly and collaboratively reflect on and hone aesthetic structures.
Form purposeful relationships and networks; sustain them through inclusive
and democratic planning; negotiate difficulties with transparency in
meetings, over the phone, and by email; reflect together on the import of the
project; and collaboratively assess its successes and failures.
Give equal weight to process and product.

Our responsibilities included facilitating participatory space in which the

youth of St. Pius and the Topawa youth felt comfortable and safe creatively.
They worked together in cross-cultural groups to build the digital story. We
had to strike a careful balance between allowing for slow creative processes
and our limited time together. We needed to constructively deliver feedback
on aesthetic structures without negating the youth's capacities in favor of our
own. Planning for the project included individuals in three different cities, one
of whom did not use email and had only unreliable cell service. We had
several group telephone planning meetings and conducted round-robin
collaborations with our local partners—e.g., St. Pius youth, priest, youth group
minister, etc.—that we brought back to one another via phone calls.

Intercultural Skills

Publicly engage in reflective practice.

Reflect openly on and work across social and cultural differences understood
broadly.
Recognize that others, no matter their age or identities, are experts in their
own experiences.

Participants came from multiple ethnic and religious backgrounds. The work
depended on crafting mutuality of experience and communal participatory
language while also reflecting openly across difference. Additionally, we
needed to balance adult ways of knowing and youth ways of knowing. This
last bit was quite difficult, as tribal elders understood youth through one
particular lens, while youth understood their identity practices differently.

Interpretive and Critical Skills

Describe and analyze aesthetic experience.

Make choices that anticipate potential outcomes and potential challenges.
Use the tools of textual, theatrical, and/or cultural criticism to unpack how
contextual meaning is constructed both individually and structurally.
Deeply understand genre, form, symbol, and metaphor.
Closely analyze words, material culture, and everyday performances.
Interpretive and critical skills closely align with aesthetic capacities. Working
as collaborative artists means being able to unpack the whys of the art as
well as the hows. Resident artists need to project choice-making forward so
that we can adequately position the public-making and place-making of our
young artist partners. In this way, we can have grounded conversations with
community partners in order to help them negotiate how the aesthetic
choices they make construct an artistic whole. Additionally, we can explore
together the ways in which narrative and symbol or metaphor allow us to
unpack larger life narratives and constructs. We thus hopefully build the
cultural and symbolic power of the community and contribute to capabilities
valued by the participants. With a close eye on the practice of everyday
performance in situ, we can participate in the aesthetic register of the
community rather than imposing external aesthetic practices or artificial
constructions of "good" or "important." Finally, we have to understand what
we do not know. For example, have we unintentionally ignored an elder who
will be angered by their exclusion? Knowing what questions to ask often
depends on advanced interpretive skills.

Philosophical Skills

Think and talk about concepts and ideas and why they matter.
Be open to the manifold forms of explanatory systems created by different
cultures and societies.
This residency depended on understanding philosophical implications of
education, social capital, and diverse understandings of spirituality.

Project Management Skills

Construct and read a budget.

Structure creative flow from abstract concept to concrete product.
Talk to people about money and resources.
Understand, leverage, and build community capital.
Calculate the human effort it will take to get collaborative work done, taking
into account variables such as time, space, and funding.

We needed to calculate what we could accomplish in one week, how we

could integrate youth and elders, and what equipment would be needed.
We developed the project from the conceptual stage through to an edited
digital story presented for feedback at a village-wide dinner cooked and
hosted by the youth. We leveraged built capital, the natural environment,
cultural capital, familial capital, and social capital. Additionally, we needed
to plan logistics (transporting youth around the village to interview elders,
transporting ourselves and equipment to Topawa), timing, and strategic
planning.

Research and Evaluation Skills

Find, organize, and evaluate diverse sources of knowledge, such as personal

and group memory, and cultural elders.
Be familiar with basic qualitative and quantitative data gathering.
Be familiar with standards of ethical research practices.
Understand the principles and methods of collaborative evaluation and
assessment.

We mined the collective memories of community elders for diverse

experiences of the Topawa School. We looked for teachers, students,
neighbors, and historical documents and photographs. The project was
evaluated collectively along agreed upon criteria and informally by the
youth after the project's completion. Project partners followed up with
participating adults and elders to make sure they felt comfortable with what
had been accomplished.

Skills of Place

Navigate as a geographical and/or cultural "other."

Read and map natural and built environments and people's experience of
them.
Understand the complex interplay of belonging and individuality, and how
that interplay is embodied and performed.
Map cultural, community, and human capital and social wealth.
Have a sense of the layered histories of places and communities, including
the nested meanings to multiple constituencies as well as the potential to
engage larger civic and national narratives.

Facilitating artists were both geographical and cultural others in this

experience of living together in community. We had to quickly grasp the
complexity of the context while also parsing the subtle interactions of humans
and environments. On TO, landscape functions in particular ways to structure
metaphorical and sometimes even narrative place. Finally, understanding an
expansive definition of wealth was necessary for crafting a participatory
structure based in abundance and capability development rather than risk
management or blame (for the loss of the Topawa School).

I have found the taxonomy useful for myself and for my students. The list helps
us parse the skills and learning structures while promoting advanced
metacognition and the development of strategic thinking. I wonder about
my organizing principles, however, and how other participants might frame
learning differently. I also wonder how my design and humanities colleagues
might respond, reevaluate, and reframe the learning categories or specific
skills. As someone trained as a K–12 teacher, my understanding of taxonomies
in general is weighted by primary and secondary pedagogical philosophies.
Do my colleagues with adult-learning specializations or critical pedagogy
foci offer alternative frameworks or critical commentary on the politics and/or
hubris imbedded in taxonomies in general or this one in particular? Finally, my
emphasis on children and youth creates unique power dynamics not
necessarily operational in other communities. I happily invite commentary,
revisions, and feedback.