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SERVICE LEARNING
ARTsmart
ARTsmart is a service-learning program that pairs LMU student mentors with a local public school students who visit LMU for art instruction and to view on-campus art exhibitions several times in each academic year. This program is housed in the LMU Department of Art and Art History, whose students teach visual arts to the students at Westside Global Awareness Magnet, an under-served K-8 school in LAUSD, and from the Hoopa Indian Reservation in Humbolt County, California. The goal of this partnership is to build an appetite within these students for the exploration of materials, concepts, and innovation through artistic expression, and create visual literacy that will serve them throughout their lives.
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The dual mission of ARTsmart is to first provide underserved schoolchildren with an education in the arts that will provide both the instrumental and the intrinsic benefits necessary to become well-rounded, productive members of a rapidly changing society. Second, ARTsmart is a leadership-development program for LMU student mentors that incorporates teaching in the arts and community service. With budget cuts affecting Los Angeles Unified School District art programs all over the city, ARTsmart has filled an important educational gap.
The exchange with these two schools includes about 50 eighth graders from Hoopa and 50 eighth graders from Westside, who work together in LMU’s Thomas P. Kelly, Jr. Student Art Gallery to create installation art about their shared journey during important life transitions.
SERVICE LEARNING
Design Entrepreneurship
Offered within LMU’s Department of Art and Art History, Design Entrepreneurship is a class that has taken on many forms in recent years. Last summer, students in the class collaborated with the Al Wooten Center, a nonprofit youth center in Los Angeles that provides free after school and low-cost summer programs for boys and girls in grades 3-12. The project students tackled involved renovating communal spaces within the center, and was the product of a collaboration between the Center for Service and Action, Hannon Library staff, and HKS Architects. LMU students visited the center frequently, to conduct in depth field observations, interview staff and students and create design plans and renderings, selecting colors, furniture and educational/ recreational materials.
Previously, the course traveled internationally, taking students to Florence, Italy, to engage with local artisans and community leaders. The goal was to measure the potential of design to positively impact Florence’s urban well-being, raising awareness of social and environmental issues in the local community and among visitors. Students participated in a series of visits and activities in order to better understand the local context and collect information toward their own project proposal. To this end, students worked closely with the volunteer non-profit organization Angeli del Bello, which organizes cleanups in parks and piazzas around the city. Alongside local volunteers, students cleaned graffiti behind the Santa Maria Novella train station and tended to the Rose Garden in Oltrarno, just below Piazzale Michelangelo.
“We wanted to provide an efficient work space that serves multiple purposes. More importantly, we want to provide a space that is inspired by community and culture. Having the opportunity to interact with the students was pivotal in our process. Understanding what these kids’ ambitions and dreams are helped shape the resources we wanted to provide them. The success of the center is dependent upon the success of its students so we needed to provide a design that would enable them to reach their full potential. Their passion for the project was contagious!”
Summer Arts Workshop
Initiated over ten years ago by the Department of Marital and Family Therapy with specialization in Art Therapy, the Summer Arts Workshop (SAW) has been providing arts-based services to address the needs of adolescents at risk of gang affiliation.
Each year, the middle school workshop participants from Dolores Mission School visit LMU to collaborate with MFT faculty members, graduate students and alumni over the course of a week to explore and express their experiences and personalities through art.
Participants are invited to create representations of their personal and historical narrative and explore how they can stay grounded in their beliefs and values while remaining flexible and curious in collective spaces. Follow-up therapy workshops are conducted on-site at Dolores Mission, which is located in what was once the poorest mission in Los Angeles. Many of the students at the school face adversity stemming from their status as first and second-generation immigrants from Central America.
“The kids create art pieces that are thoughtful, intentional, and skillful. They also verbalize an understanding of the concepts that we are attempting to share. Together they create a shared story using words that describe their art piece – the story exemplifying their thoughts about the increased understanding they have for themselves and their peers.”
Jessica Bianchi, MFT Faculty
Dance Volunteerism
LMU Dance students participate in several dance service work and community projects. Dance majors and minors volunteer off-campus, teaching dance to children and adults at the Westchester Family YMCA, Mar Vista Family Center, Loyola Village Elementary School, Westside Global Awareness Magnet, and Gabrielle Charter School.
Each of these opportunities enliven dance students’ connection to LMU’s mission statement through their dance studies, and provide a valuable training ground for students interested in careers as educators. In this way, our students develop the skills necessary to be successful dance professionals who work in a wide variety of settings and communities.
LMU Dance maintains a student chapter of The National Dance Education Organization and its local state affiliate, the California Dance Education Association. LMU’s NDEO student chapter provides students who are interested in dance and dance arts education with opportunities to mentor local dance students, raise money to benefit local dance initiative and charity programs, and make lasting connections with community organizations to offer dance workshops or classes. The student chapter strives to provide a forum for intellectual and creative exchange for the talented students enrolled in LMU Dance.
The NDEO chapter works frequently with Movement Exchange, an organization that unites dance and service, describing itself as a growing community of dance diplomats—movers and shakers, activists and global citizens, dreamers and achievers, teachers and learners, volunteers and friends.
In 2016, our students raised funds to travel to Panama over spring break to support children in orphanages, a project coordinated through Movement Exchange. As international “dance diplomats,” they taught dance twice a day to children in two different orphanages. Following this program, the NDEO student chapter received a service award for most philanthropic student organization at LMU in 2016. Students returned to Panama in 2020 for another orphanage visits, with additional engagement opportunities currently being planned.
Caeli Koizumi ‘17
Music Advocacy
In collaboration with the LMU Family of Schools, members of the LMU Department of Music approached the WISH Charter Elementary School with a desire to assist with its string instrument program. The school had acquired about 40 string instruments, but were lacking in quality instruction for their students. This was a perfect opportunity for music students to assist the music educators at WISH by providing instruction to the new string students as well as operational support.
The goal of the program is to create a robust string program at WISH in which members of the LMU Orchestra conduct ongoing semi-private and group instruction sessions with the string students, and support the music teacher by assisting with instrument care and skill-building.
Dance as Social Action
LMU Dance offers a course called Dance as Social Action, where students participate in theoretical and artistic exploration of dance as a cultural phenomenon and consider its role in social change. As part of this course, students developed an instructional volunteer program with Hawthorne Science and Math Academy to offer pro bono services as dance teachers and choreographer/advisors with groups of high-school students there, many of whom have never attended dance classes prior to this experience.
The program has been so successful that it was recently expanded to include 25 students, and currently has a wait list of eager participants. The dance club the group has formed now perform at talent shows and school pep rallies, and many of the students are now applying their new skills to set choreography on themselves.
“While many of these students do not have prior dance experience, they are so eager to learn. They are the highlight of my week, and they make me believe in the power of dance. In the early stages of this program, I worried that they may give up or become frustrated, but each semester they come back with renewed energy and spirit. I am so proud of them and so grateful for the generosity they display each week. They have fully welcomed me into their space, and I will be forever changed.”
Young Choral Scholars Program
Part of the LMU Choral Program’s mission is to cultivate a love of choral music and collective choral singing with singers of all ages. The program is especially committed to encouraging and supporting the next generation of choral musicians. To that end, the program has established the LMU Young Choral Scholars Program within the Department of Music and in affiliation with the LMU Family of Schools.
The program is designed to engage young singers in good academic standing with rigorous choral music training that leads to both public performances and community-based outreach opportunities in their schools, public venues, and with disenfranchised populations. The program provides select students from the LMU Family of Schools with scholarships to participate in the LMU choruses through the LMU Extension Program and then pairs them with a LMU chorus member mentor. The young choral scholars then work in coordination with the LMU Family of Schools each semester to create meaningful, music-related service projects based on their areas of interest and the needs of our cooperating institutions.
Young choral scholars and their mentors actively work to create service-oriented projects that help provide knowledge about the arts and a practical, experiential learning opportunity, that helps to bridge the artistic and academic gap between the high school and the university experience. These opportunities add value to the emotional, spiritual, physical and social lives of these students through choral music.
“[In Bless Me Child for I Have Sinned] I wanted to approach this dark, secretive subject with light and transparency. I built a glass confessional in which the traditional roles are reversed: instead of the priest sitting and hearing confession, he must kneel down and ask forgiveness from the child.”
