IMAGINING AMERICA: NATIONAL 2008-’09 PROGRAM PRIORITIES

Imagining America: Artists and Scholars in Public Life was launched at a White House conference in 1999 and is now a consortium of 78 member campuses dedicated to building democratic culture and fostering public scholarship and practice through the humanities, arts, and design. Last July, with the enthusiastic support of Syracuse University Chancellor Nancy Cantor – a leader in the consortium’s work since its founding – Imagining America (IA) moved from the University of Michigan to Syracuse University.  Concurrently, Dr. Jan Cohen-Cruz left New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts to become IA’s new director and Syracuse University Professor. In addition to ongoing services that include national and regional convening, a member listserv, public website (www.imaginingamerica.org), and bi-annual newsletter, Imagining America has three national program priorities in 2008-’09, descriptions of which follow.

Tenure Team Initiative on Public Scholarship (TTI)
This winter, lead investigators Julie Ellison, IA Director Emeritus, and Research Director Tim Eatman are writing the TTI Report. The report will contain recommendations for linking public scholarship to academic promotion.  It will be distributed to IA member institutions, as well as to higher education leaders and organizations more broadly. The report marks the culmination of two years of research, harvesting insights from a rich set of structured interviews with the national leaders who comprise the Tenure Team.  This document will set forth a robust definition of public scholarship, make the case for new promotion and evaluation policies, and analyze the plural roles and zigzagging work cycles of the campus-based public scholar. In June, a national working meeting will use the report as a springboard to develop more precise scenarios for change at the departmental, college, and institutional level.  Following the convening, IA will continue to develop these scenarios at regional meetings.

Curriculum Project (CP)
The Community Cultural Development (CCD) Curriculum Project will identify strengths and weaknesses in the education currently available at US colleges and universities in CCD (familiarly known as community-based arts programs). The goal in the first phase, which has recently received support from the Nathan Cummings Foundation, is to identify best practices for addressing what the researchers have found to be cross-cutting shortcomings and needs in the field’s pedagogy. The project will be carried out by a core research team interacting with a full range of stakeholders in the field. The lead investigators, each of whom has been engaged in community cultural development for decades, are Dudley Cocke, artistic director of Roadside Theater/Appalshop; writer and consultant Arlene Goldbard; and IA’s director, Jan Cohen-Cruz. Planned outcomes in future phases of the project include: a set of curricular standards to be circulated in draft throughout the field; a national conference at which CCD curricular standards will be discussed and adapted; and IA regional meetings to stimulate the learning dialogue needed to disseminate standards and implement model CCD curriculum projects.

Publicly Active Graduate Education (PAGE)
PAGE fosters a national network of graduate students in the arts, humanities, and design who have demonstrated sustained interest in public engagement. During a day-long summit at Imagining America’s annual conference, PAGE fellows build the theoretical and practical language of public scholarship, interact with leaders in the field, and lay the groundwork for a year-long support network and discussion group. Building on the success of the summit and to extend that conversation to include faculty and administrators working to incorporate civic engagement within their graduate programs, PAGE director Sylvia Gale has joined the “Working Group on Graduate Engagement,” initiated at Syracuse University. The Working Group will create opportunities for graduate students to examine trends and “best practices” in engaged graduate education, especially focusing on public scholarship within the humanities disciplines. An important part of this effort will be collecting and disseminating resources for civically engaged graduate education, including syllabi, bibliographies, and reading lists from existing graduate programs in public scholarship.