News

stART now: change is central

December 9, 2009

Design Ignites Change was the catalyst for an exciting mentoring program led by University of Tennessee undergrads who engaged local high school students to address issues in their school and local community. Every year the University of Tennessee offers a special topics class within the graphic design curriculum. Professor Deb Shmerler and Central High School art teacher, Peggy Leland, joined together to offer their students the unique opportunity to collaborate on projects for social change. Shmerler and Leland made the decision to take a back seat and let the students run the initiative, acting in the roles of facilitator or consultant.

The UT students also made a conscious decision to let the Central students help choose the issues they cared about. Shmerler said, “It would have been much easier for my students to walk in with a defined problem and simply have the Central students help them solve it. But that would have made the Central students feel like they were only problem solvers and not problem finders as well. It also made them feel more like they were the leaders driving the individual projects.”

The UT and Central students defined six areas of focus and broke up into groups based on their interests: War & Violence, Green/Recycling, Education, Health, Eco-Gardening and Poverty. Even though the students were working on different teams they wanted their projects to be linked so they developed a unifying name for their mentoring program that would remain relevant in the future. The overall name became stART now: change is central.

Once a week, for fourteen weeks, the UT students met with the Central students at the high school for about an hour. They spent the first two weeks getting to know each other and teaching the high school students about design. Following the brainstorm session that revealed the six themes, the groups worked independently on their projects. For most of the University of Tennessee undergrads it was their first experience teaching and they strived to demonstrate design process and design thinking each step of the way.

All the groups tried to create projects that would impact the whole high school, not just the 26 art students. One project to come out of stART now was a short documentary about problems at Central High. The goal was to open a dialogue between the students, administration and faculty. Central and UT students conducted interviews for the film, asking questions such as: Are there any voices at Central that should be heard but aren’t? Are stu¬dents involved in making decisions about what and how they learn? What aspects of Central should be changed? What is good about Central?

By the end of the semester, many students felt that the social change mentoring class should be a requirement, not just an elective, and that it should be open to the entire university. Professor Shmerler reflected, “Working with the high school students on Design Ignites Change really empowered the college students. Their whole perspective on what it means to effect change as a designer can evolve in one semester. It couldn’t happen in a week or two but over the course of a semester, a shift takes place.”