Imagining+America+Conversation


 * CS14. Tim Eatman, Adam Bush, Kim Yasuda, Urmila Venkatesh, Dana Edell ** – //Imagining America Conversation//: Playing with Imagining; Fostering creative methods of critical discourse

May 27 Friday 9:00-10:30 PM HM 138

This session explores the importance of meaningful relationships as a dimension of engaged creative arts practice. Drawing on examples from //Imagining America// programs, //UMich MPortfolio// projects – which focus upon generative knowledge interviewing, //viBe Theater Experiences’// collaborative performance design, and models of engaged pedagogy from the //University of California’s// //Institute for Research on the Arts// and //Big Picture Learning’s College Unbound//, participants will be challenged to explore and build upon their own sustained reflective practice. Presenters maintain that these methods foster moments of collective improvisation in the face of dissonance both inside and outside the Academy.

Affiliation/Bio: Syracuse University and Imagining America, tkeatman@syr.edu Co-presenters: Adam Bush, College Unbound and Imagining America, asbush@gmail.com; Urmila Venkatesh, University of Michigan, urmila@umich.edu; Dana Edell, viBe Theater Experience, vibedana@gmail.com; Kim Yasuda, University of California, Santa Barbara; Mike McCarthy, College Unbound, drawalong@gmail.com

All three panel-participants are board members of Imagining America, a national consortium of colleges and universities which works to ‘strengthen the public and civic purposes of humanities, arts, and design through mutually beneficial campus-community partnerships that advance democratic scholarship and practice.’ IA challenges notions of scholarship and professionalization that belong in academia and, in doing so, creates new opportunities for collaborative knowledge production and assessment. Given IA’s vision to realize the democratic, public, and civic purposes of American higher education and its mission to animate and strengthen the public and civic purposes of humanities, arts, and design through mutually beneficial campus-community partnerships that advance democratic scholarship and practice, Imagining America puts forth a concept of “integrated assessment,” which ensures consideration of community impact to examine the collaborative, reciprocal, generative, rigorous, and practicable purposes of student work.