Past Community Projects
Past Community Projects Courses (CCID 200/ CCID 300)
Food Not Bombs In this course, students collaborated with Food Not Bombs toward the end of war, poverty and environmental destruction. Students learnt how to apply their unique skills as practicing artists, in working with issues of social, and especially food justice.
Fall 2012: Designing for Democracy (A Community Partner, Elections BC) This course will examine and utilize a variety of communication design practices and principles including, but not limited to identity & branding, social & viral media, guerrilla marketing, web design, print advertising, and video production. Housed within the development of an actual advertising campaign for ElectionsBC, students will work collaboratively and to their unique strengths to develop a province- wide campaign that will engage young adults and motivate greater participation in the upcoming provincial election that will be held in Spring 2013.
Fall 2012: Art + Pedagogy (with the Vancouver School Board) This is a 3- credit elective course that presents an opportunity to develop and deliver an art program for elementary students in the West 1 Community School Team region of the Vancouver School District. This course is offered in two distinct parts. The first part involves 6 classes at the Emily Carr Granville Island campus where students will learn about the current educational turn in contemporary art, the West 1 CST approach to community based programming, methods for program planning and delivery, child development related to the arts, and strategies for classroom management. For the second part, students will deliver a 7 -week art program of their own design, to a small group of children ranging from grades K-7. Youth leaders from a local secondary school will assist in the delivery of your program and the West 1 team of programmers will help to support students’ growth as teachers and mentors.
Fall 2012: Natural Capital This is an interactive community mapping & storytelling project in partnership with Canada's leading environmental organization, the David Suzuki Foundation (DSF). Through a dynamic and collaborative approach to documentary practices, students will create a series of digital narratives for a "Natural Capital Map App" that will bring to life research DSF is launching on the 'Natural Capital' (economic value of ecosystem processes) provided by wetlands in the Vancouver region, while digging into the meaning this has for people in their day-to-day lives. These digital narratives will feature stories from diverse community members who, by sharing their unique relationships and experiences to specific wetland areas, will highlight the priceless Natural Capital of these areas. By promoting the concept of Natural Capital, this project aims to shift public consciousness towards advancing a green economy: an economy that not only considers the carbon footprint of its economic activity, but one which places the environment at the foundation of what defines and directs that economic activity. As a class, students will work together with the instructor and in consultation with DSF to determine the design and functionality of the App. The course will culminate in an exhibit, launch, artists' talk and school workshop at The Gulf of Georgia Cannery museum in BC's historic fishing village of Steveston. The Cannery is an important cultural institution with approximately 50,000 visitors annually. Students in Film/Video, Animation, Photography and Interactive Media Design are encouraged to apply for this course, although students across all disciplines are welcome.
Spring 2012: Archive City This studio course offers students the opportunity to encounter and collaborate in creative projects that are situated within the city’s known and unknown collections. Where are the places that contain the city’s stories and histories? Whose voices are spoken there, and whose are silenced through those collections and archives? How do artists and designers approach and intervene in those places and with those voices? Through site visits, interviews, projects, and presentations, students will have an opportunity to propose creative projects that collaborate with official and unofficial archives and collectors. Local collections including the Vancouver Police Museum, Japanese Canadian National Museum, Crista Dahl Media Library and Archives, Museum of Anthropology, Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre are some of the sites of memory that will be encountered in this course. The approach that will be taken in this community projects course will situate the projects alongside the work of other artists who have intervened in public collections like Esther Chalev-Gerz (Echoes of Memory), Peter Morin (Peter Morin’s Museum), Katherine Shozawa (New Denver Memory Project), Walid Ra’ad (Atlas Group), Ilya & Emilia Kabakov, and Mark Dion. Grounded in a thorough understanding of memory and post memory, participatory art practices, and collaborative design strategies, Archive City instructors will support students as they explore the values, ethics and aesthetics of creative work that draws on public and private stories and collections. This course could result in a curated web project that will house a digital archive of students’ projects.
Archive City is an artist team that exists to collect and re-materialize memory and post-memory within specific communities and places. In 2008, Cindy Mochizuki, Lois Klassen and Jaimie Robson produced Archive City: Portraits of Lulu Island (Richmond Art Gallery), which existed as fieldwork and a memory collection lab involving local residents of Richmond, BC. In 2009, Archive City re-materialized memories surrounding the location of the Richmond Olympic Oval in Frozen Fictions (Roberts Street Social Centre, Halifax, NS).
Spring 2012: Yes In My Backyard (YIMBY) is a 3-credit elective course open to students in any ECU program. In this course, students will collaborate with Pivot Legal Society in their YIMBY Campaign, which aims to gain public support for programs that make housing accessible to everyone.
Students will learn how to apply their unique skills as practicing artists, in working with issues of housing and homelessness. Students will be guided through a collaborative process, in which they will develop work in response to the specific needs of a partner organization, with the goal of addressing fears and prejudices about the people who live in supportive housing. Students enrolled in this course are strongly encouraged to register also in CCID: The Ethics of Representation, which will inform project work by providing an ethical framework and appropriate methodologies for community practice. These two courses are complementary in addressing collaborative process and the dynamics of working within interdisciplinary team oriented projects.
Spring 2012: Art + Pedagogy In the Communities of Practice: Art + Pedagogy course, students will gain a theoretical understanding of the critical role art plays in the social, emotional, cognitive, and physical development of children and youth. Students will be introduced to pedagogy and methods that inform the design, delivery, and evaluation of community-based arts programming. The course is offered in two distinct parts. The first part will provide 6 classes on-campus at Emily Carr Granville Island campus. In the second half, students will be supported to design their own 7-week art program, which they will deliver to a small group of children in their middle-development years (ages 6-12) at a local elementary school. Youth leaders from a local secondary school will assist students in the delivery of their program. The Communities of Practice: Art + Pedagogy course will provide Emily Carr University students with a unique opportunity to explore how values, ethics, and assumptions shape us as artists, learners, teachers and, ultimately, as “global citizens”. The goal of this Community Service Learning course is to deepen students' civic responsibility through the provision of rich experiential learning opportunities that are intrinsically tied to academic content.
Fall 2011: Dr. Peters Aids Foundation has been offered as a Community Projects course since Spring 2010. This course provides students with an ethical framework and methodologies for community practice. It focuses especially on projects that involve collaboration with marginal and at-risk communities such as the DTES (Downtown Eastside) in Vancouver. As part of this class, students at the Emily Carr University campus are given an opportunity to apply field research through site visits to the Dr. Peter Centre in Vancouver’s West End. The faculty team developing Community Projects includes Susan Stewart and Sabine Silberberg (co-instructors).
The Red Tent Campaign is another Community Projects course currently taught by Natalie Doonan. In this course, students collaborate with Pivot Legal Society in their Red Tent Campaign: Red Tent is an open source campaign spearheaded by Vancouver-based Pivot Legal Society. Across the country, individuals and organizations have become a part of the Red Tent Campaign to work toward the common goal of a funded national housing strategy that will end homelessness and ensure secure, adequate, accessible and affordable housing for all people living in Canada. http://www.redtents.org/ Students will learn how to apply their unique skills as practicing artists, in working with issues of housing and homelessness. Students will be guided through a collaborative process with Pivot Legal Society, in which they will develop a work in public space, with the goal of raising support for a Canadian National Housing Strategy.
Recent Exhibitions by our Community Projects Students
WRAP: A Student/Community Project
Emily Carr's Faculty of Culture + Community and the Downtown Business Improvement Association present a public art project on Granville Street. <read more>
