Exploring or observing a need

Border-crossing, community building, and teamwork began at the initial stage of the project at the first general meeting: exploring or observing a need through a group drawing experience. I adapted the first project from Foster, Deafenbaugh, and Miller (2016) prior to their publication, and I refer to it as the Poster Project. As a method of “group-based metaphor map making” (Foster, et al., 2016, p. 6), I provided a poster board with concentric circles orbiting around the phrase “Our Group,” placed it on the floor, and the students drew who or what defined their shared communities on the board with crayons (Figure 18 below). This was the first step in the development of the overall reflective artmaking service-learning experience in which the students defined their shared communities (Brown & Leavitt, 2009) through an aesthetic practice of reflection.

Figure 18: Students creating the Poster Project on the floor

This activity was difficult for Lisa, who commented, “Well, my family doesn’t really do much of anything, except stay home, and do speech. So, I didn’t really have much of a community experience to build off of.” Lisa is in her mid-teens and lives with her family on more than twenty acres of beautifully forested property not far from our meeting site. In fact, she voluntarily walked to nearly every general meeting through paths and fields, across a bridgeless and active creek, and over a barbed-wire fence. While enjoying her deep-country home, Lisa stays intensely connected to the academic and social settings of speech and debate programs. With her pseudonym referring to the public speaker Condoleezza Rice, Lisa decided to include on her poster contribution a drawing of a podium as a symbol of public speaking because “we need to articulate.” She explained to the group who was drawing with her,

When I was working in the corporate office with my internship I noticed over and over again there were people who had no idea how to give a speech. There was all sorts of awful. It was really interesting. There were many young people who were not confident. So, I think learning to articulate is an important skill to have, in the work place and off of it. It should be more a part of our community than it is.

After about ten minutes of drawing, discussing, laughing, and learning more about each other’s interests and backgrounds, I noticed that reservations started to melt away, students began to recognize differences and borders, and I began to recognize the beginnings of border crossing. The group started to resemble a team as they discussed their contributions, lying on their bellies or sitting, radiating from the poster like the rays of the sun shining on them, and colorful crayons everywhere. Most of the students, including Lisa, opened up and added more personal contributions to the poster, such as family members, pets, church, and God.

The students then explained their contributions in turn, practicing Embodying and Making Connections, connecting what they noticed and the patterns they saw to their own prior knowledge and experiences, to others’ knowledge and experiences, and to the poster before them (Holzer, 2009). For example, Jo decided that the jail should be included and placed on the outermost circle. In response, Solomon quipped, “What is this, Monopoly?” In another case, Lisa announced to the group, “There. I drew the White House in white. The White House in on there, guys.” Hanna suggested, “Draw the President in front.” Lisa laughingly, yet passionately, responded that she would draw the President getting impeached, adding, “That is a topic for the middle.” The group laughed and some continued with their political views on the topic.

Following these informal presentations, the students then Identified Patterns by commenting upon other’s contributions. The students placed small sticky notes on three

drawings that they felt accurately represented the group’s shared communities, and three drawings that did not. Then, in turn, the students shared their selections and rationales. The process cultivated an awareness of socio-cultural borders, which some students found hard to cross. For example, Petin was not convinced of Thomas’s inclusion of Toothless, a dragon from the popular animated film How to Train a Dragon. She objected, “Toothless, it is a figment of the imagination. It doesn’t belong in the community” to which Thomas responded “Exactly!” Lisa offered her rationale, an argument that I doubt Thomas had developed or owned completely, if at all (knowing Thomas, I wonder if he included the dragon only because he enjoyed it). “I think the thing about Toothless is that it is a cultural icon that is a figment of imagination that is being symbolized as imagination overall. So, think less literal and more metaphorical.” Petin was neither impressed nor convinced, concluding the conversation with “Whatever.” Identifying Patterns through the Poster Project clarified the starting place for community building by making visible particular borders that existed between group members. “A major strength of the [group- based metaphor map making] method is the realness- or accuracy- of the images (as opposed to their aesthetic quality), which was the catalyst for deep emotional sharing and bonding” (Foster, et al., 2016, p. 15). It was at times confrontational and emotional, as in the case of Petin and Thomas, exhibiting the emotional aspect of Embodying. It represented how some borders are harder to cross than others, requiring greater effort from the students to practice teambuilding as the overall project progressed. This stage of exploring and observing through defining the community (Brown & Leavitt, 2009) characterized the reflective artmaking experience.

The processes of community building, as well as defining their internal and external communities, were complex because each process level intertwined and reverberated with the next. The dynamic interaction was facilitated by the principles of experiential learning. The

process followed Kolb’s (1984) circular model of Experiential Learning as well, because I guided the students through the process of community building and community defining by way of Kolb’s concrete stages. While the students considered the details of the service activity through 1) concrete experience, 2) observation and reflection, 3) forming abstract concepts, and 4) testing in new situations, they were simultaneously constructing a team in much the same manner. The activities of each stage drew people from “different social worlds” together to cross borders and to become a more unified team as they engaged in each stage (Keith, 1998, p. 86). Some students were only marginally familiar with other members of the group, such as Petin and Thomas. Their social worlds merged at church on Sundays and special events; however, they did not interact because their interests, personalities, and philosophical convictions differed. Although the social worlds between the students overall did not diverge exceptionally, they diverged enough to introduce socio-cultural tensions when the students converged (as exemplified by Petin and Thomas), a dynamic made visible by the Poster Project. Thus, I was able to observe a recognizable starting point for the dissonance that catalyzed ongoing learning (Kiely, 2005a) within the group itself.

The following diagram highlights the initial dynamics found within the internal community of the group and the process of building an internal team, or community building (Figure 19). The diagram focuses on three types of persons, for example:

Type A: Thomas, who included Toothless more than likely because he simply enjoyed it.

Type B: Lisa, who argued that Toothless was a metaphorical representation of imagination within the group’s shared communities.

Type C: Petin, who was not convinced that either Thomas or Lisa authentically wanted Toothless on the poster as a group-shared representation of imagination. These three students began the project being marginally familiar with each other, they differed in interests and personalities, and they diverged in their view of Toothless on the poster. This number is arbitrary, as there were more types of persons within the group (at least eight); however, I chose three to generically symbolize that there were different types of persons within the group. Furthermore, to visualize the social boundaries that existed between the differing types of persons, each type is separated from one another in the diagram and contain different shades of gray. The shades are solid, as opposed to gradated, because their differences on the topic of Toothless were rigid at the start of their internal community building experience. Thomas (Type A) is represented as dark gray, Lisa (Type B) as light gray, and Petin (Type C) as white. Figure 19 is below:

Figure 19: Stage one: internal community building

As the service-learning facilitator, I cultivated teambuilding through leading discussions regarding exploring and observing a need. The group discussed the observed overall community needs, sharing ideas and deciding which needs to meet. When the students considered the assisted living center, they imagined the needs therein based upon their understanding of the center, observations of others like it, and observations of nursing homes. They did not previously visit the assisted living center to observe it in person. Consequently, the focus of Petin’s idea, for example, was upon the needs of the residents: “The goal is to make them feel like someone cares about what they have accomplished in life.” Needs and reciprocity were the foci of Solomon’s idea: “Playing games [such as checkers or chess] is the main idea, we can get to know one another, we can interact, we can have fun, we can bond.” Desiring to build

relationships, Solomon thus reflects the meaning behind his pseudonym, the famous builder of the God’s Holy Temple in the Old Testament of the Bible.