Laura led a series of workshops on cross-cultural learning through art brought new depth to West High School students' studies of Japanese culture by incorporating visits to the Chazen Museum to view 19th century Japanese prints and images. The workshops exposed students to new methods of studying history and culture through the use of visual materials.
Community partner: Madison West High School, Chazen Art MuseumLindsey worked with the DeForest Area Historical Society to create innovative educational programming for the Hansen-Newell-Bennett House and DeForest Public Library that encouraged interactive touring and learning, especially with local elementary students.
Community partner: DeForest Area Historical Society, DeForest Public Library, Hansen-Newell-Bennett HouseKerstin developed a website, HarriertandLeone.com, to encourage citizens to read and discuss the PATRIOT Act, and established a PATRIOT Act discussion group.
Community partner: www.HarrietandLeone.netCydney and Keith drew together teens in Madison's Neighborhood House to help them develop the critical thinking and writing skills needed to understand the cultural and socioeconomic impact of the media.
Community partner: Neighborhood HouseIn line with his research on the international role of Hip-Hop, especially in Berlin and Paris, Griff organized a project and wrote a script for Madison Public Access Television, introducing both the history and the current international role of Hip-Hop music to Madison youth.
Community partner: Madison Public Access TelevisionDrago and Marina hosted a series of readings, film screenings, and discussions of fictional and non-fictional materials on the topic of war and life in a war zone. Participants primarily included student veterans and service men and women. This series of readings, screenings and discussions fostered a better understanding and appreciation of the humanities, namely literature, film, and other narrative forms; engaged its audience in critical explorations of the human experience; and prompted participants to see their place in the human community through a new prism, namely war, combat, and life in the war zone.
Community partner: Veteran's Museum, Vets for Vets, Veterans for PeaceLucienne brought together Madison residents of South Asian descent at monthly meetings to discuss concerns such as immigration, historical memory and the experiences of displacement by engaging with literature from the South Asian diaspora. The project culminated in the creation of a short documentary film, From Madison to India: In Pursuit of the Desi through Literature. Note: The Madison Desi Reading Group is funded in part by a grant from the Wisconsin Humanities Council, which funds from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the State of Wisconsin. Any views, findings, conclusions or recommendations expressed in this project do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Community partner: Madison Desi Reading GroupTyina collaborated with Professor Stephen Kantrowitz to bring scholarly and public accounts together to offer a deep, interpretive history of Selma, Alabama, the site of "Bloody Sunday" in March of 1965. Tyina spent several months in Selma identifying primary sources for study and working with the National Voting Rights Museum to help contextualize and interpret its collection.
Community partner: National Voting Rights Museum in Selma, ALRebecca brought UW-Madison undergraduates to an East High ESL (English as a Second Language) class to assist with the writing of college application essays. These personal statements were later published in an anthology of writings.
Community partner: Madison East High SchoolDavid expanded the educational and cultural role of the L.R. Ingersoll Museum of Physics by creating new displays with the help of UW-Madison undergraduates and engaging Madison-area public school students with the museum.
Community partner: L.R. Ingersoll Museum of Physicsused a study of hip-hop culture to help young people of color develop skills of critical and creative writing so as to become more expressive about cultural and ethnic complexity in Madison. His project culminated in a one-day symposium featuring spoken word, hip-hop dance performance by Crushin' All Force high school dance troupe, and a talk by Prof. Gwendolyn Pough on "Women, Rap and Hip-Hop Feminism."
Community partner: Lussier Teen Center, Girl Neighborhood Power (now Girls Inc), Crushin' All ForceRay and Marianne founded a writer's community and GED/HSED tutorial service for incarcerated men at Oakhill. Writers would workshop their writings, particularly poetry, and reflect on social justice issues, and participants were able to recite some of their work on a local radio program. The tutorial service helped prisoners with the essay writing portion of the state High School Equivalency Diploma. This project later became a service-learning course in the UW-Madison English department.
Community partner: Oakhill Correctional InstitutionCrystal encouraged East High School students to think about new methods of looking at the past, using primary materials (women's cookbooks from the Civil Rights era) from the Wisconsin Historical Society to study black women's activism during the Civil Rights Movement. For a capstone project, students published their own historical cookbook, having gathered recipes from family members.
Community partner: Madison East High School, The Wisconsin Historical SocietyNmachi led East High School students in a study of African literature, with the Nigerian novel Purple Hibiscus as an example of the complex interrelation of writer with local and international audiences. Students were able to meet the author due to a project collaboration with the 2007 Wisconsin Book Festival.
Community partner: Madison East High School, Wisconsin Book FestivalJeremy worked with fifth-grade students at Thoreau Elementary School to write and film a bi-lingual English-Spanish documentary on the Civil Rights Movement. In the film, students share insights they have gained about the history of civil rights in the U.S. and about racial discrimination in their lives.
Community partner: Thoreau Elementary SchoolAbigail and Jarett helped students at in Pierre Abarca's 7th-grade class at Wright Middle School gain a more complete and nuanced understanding of contemporary Africa. Students listened to African music, ate African food, and learned about life is like for schoolchildren their age in different parts of the African continent.
Community partner: Wright Middle SchoolJeanette worked with Wright Middle School students to analyze media and consider how their communities are represented. These efforts culminated in the creation of a student magazine reflecting students' critical reading, writing, and thinking skills. To view the project website click HERE
Community partner: Wright Middle SchoolPaula worked with Spanish classes at West High School to prepare students for college-level literary interpretation and critical writing. Students read short stories and cultural theory in their original Spanish, including the works of Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortazar, and Augusto Monterroso, and others.
Community partner: Madison West High SchoolIn 2005-2006, English PhD candidate Lucienne Loh established the HEX project Madison Desi Reading Group (see below for more). In 2006-2007, Anthropology PhD candidate Krista Coulson took over the project and brought together Madison residents of South Asian descent to present "Four Conversations on South Asian Literature," a series of public discussions on Indian authors and books. The informing objective for the "Four Conversations" events was twofold: To raise awareness of South Asians' presence in Madison's community in a way that is engaging for all participants; and to share the model for a reading group in hopes that it would foster discussion and sharing on other topics and regions. Note: The Madison Desi Reading Group is funded in part by a grant from the Wisconsin Humanities Council, which funds from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the State of Wisconsin. Any views, findings, conclusions or recommendations expressed in this project do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Community partner: Madison Desi Reading Group, Bayview Community Center, Madison Senior Center, YWCA Downtown, East Madison Community CenterWill brought together students from his English 100 class, UW student athletes, and East high school students at the East High Writing Center to foster an ongoing dialogue on the role of athletics and academics in university and national culture.
Community partner: Madison East High SchoolTracy developed a project that candidly addressed the pressures created by modern media and historic literature on teen girls' gender, body and femininity.
Community partner:Julie rehearsed and presented an original variety show with female cancer patients and survivors. The exercise and community-building program of short dances, songs, monologues, and skits was devised through structured improvisation and storytelling with the goal of bringing Julie's training in community performance and her research in American burlesque to the Team Survivor support program in Madison.
Community partner: Team SurvivorShannon established the Young Playwrights Collaborative. Playwriting, as a creative writing discipline, lends itself to educational workshops. It is portable, malleable, and offers immediate, live reactions from audience members. Young Playwrights challenges and encourages students to use theatre and performance as mediums in which to explore and express their unique visions of the world. As a HEX project, Young Playwrights taught students at East High School to write short plays. Now, Young Playwrights has placed teaching artists in five schools (Sherman Middle, Monona Grove Alternative, Madison East HS, Edgewood HS and Middleton HS) and has partnered with Madison Repertory Theatre to present an annual Young Playwrights Festival at the Overture Center in Madison. At the festival, local and professional directors and actors work closely with the young playwrights. The resulting event is a staged reading/performance for the community.
Community partner: Madison East High School, Madison Repertory Theatre, Overture Center for the ArtsJenni led East High School students on an interdisciplinary exploration of female musicians' contributions to American cultural history via the creation of a radio series for WORT 89.9 FM Madison.
Community partner: Madison East High School, WORT 89.9 FMThrough a collaboration between his English 100 class and the East High School Writing Center, CREW, Justin fostered an ongoing dialogue on the role of athletics and academics in university and national culture. This project was founded by English PhD candidate Will Rogers in 2005.
Community partner: Madison East High SchoolCathy worked with youth at Toki Middle School to learn to craft fact-based stories that took a variety of forms, including written, audio, and visual. During weekly meetings, students developed and built on a variety of skills, including journalism processes, research, and creative and critical thinking.
Community partner: Toki Middle SchoolBeatriz engaged Madison’s Latino community with literary works of art that originated in Spanish-speaking countries. Beatriz partnered with Centro Hispano and involved Latino adults in reading short stories from well-known Latin American authors in order to familiarize community members with academic endeavors; improve their quality of life through the consumption of cultural goods; and provide tools to interpret and cherish their cultural heritage.
Community partner: Centro HispanoBimbisar brought together community members in a monthly reading group at the Sequoya Public Library to discuss and analyze American immigration and experiences of crossing borders. The project utilized a variety of texts, including fiction and graphic novels, to facilitate a discussion of these concerns.
Community partner: Madison Public Library, Sequoya BranchIn 2005, English PhD candidate Ray Hsu established a creative writing community at Oakhill Correctional Institution where inmates read, discussed, and published their work. They also established an essay-writing tutorial service that helped inmates earn their High School Equivalency Diplomas. In 2007-2008, English PhD candidate Emma Snyder brought a narrative focus to the creative writing community at Oakhill while maintaining the previous programs.
Community partner: Oakhill Correctional InstitutionJarett collected information from around Wisconsin about African Americans from the last 150 years. He compiled the information into a pictorial exhibit and online resource for Wisconsin's educational institutions and libraries, particularly the America's Black Holocaust Museum in Milwaukee.
Community partner: America's Black Holocaust Museum in Milwaukee, WI
Tessa will develop a humanities-based curriculum to facilitate a language exchange program between English and Spanish speakers at Quann Community Garden, where she has gardened for the past two years. Assembling a variety of texts—- short stories, poetry, news articles, and other short pieces of writing—- that are translated into English and Spanish, Tessa hopes to provide functional connections among conversation partners. The relationships that grow out of these conversations will help strengthen Quann Garden’s grassroots leadership, build community among a multicultural group of gardeners, and potentially found deeper, personal relationships.
Fred plans to create an online forum for high school students across Madison, with the goal of fostering critical engagement with the digital world. Covering topics such as historic “media revolutions,” and contemporary issues of ownership and legitimacy with regard to the growing amount of data at our fingertips, Fred’s project will facilitate discussion about how we interact with digital information and online resources.
Rebecca brings together University of Wisconsin-Madison writing students and Madison community food organizations to create texts about food. Students and community partners share histories, ideas, and research about food issues like hunger, local gardens and farming, food prices, and food education, and together write texts to be published and used by local food organizations. The Writing Food Project both provides support for local nonprofits and real-world writing application for students, and also helps all of those involved develop further connections to their communities and local food systems.
Maria facilitates a writing workshop at the AIDS Network of Wisconsin that enhances awareness of how the AIDS epidemic has impacted people’s lives and helps deconstruct the stigma that surrounds the disease. Maria envisions her project as an adult writing class that provides a safe space to discuss, process, and write about the experience of being HIV positive. The AIDS Network is a nonprofit organization that supports clients in south central Wisconsin with medical, legal, emotional, social and educational outreach
