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Christina Bechstein (Pi Class)
Professor, Maine College of Art
What is your project/work?
I work as a social-public artist and as a Professor in the BFA program at Maine College of Art (MECA). At MECA in both my administrative and teaching work I support and co-create teaching and learning partnerships with the greater Portland Community. I work to foster creative site and community specific dialogue among students and community members and co-create multi-year projects that blur teacher, student and university boundaries.
At MECA, I'm currently coordinating the service-learning portion of our new and radically groundbreaking first year program called FY-(In). Each class works on a very specific community issue or need and works to respond to it in a variety of ways as artists and designers. We have about 100 first year MECA students, in five different classes, doing remarkable civically engaged creative work in our community. Our community partner for this course is a Portland organization called CULTIVATING COMMUNITY (the Director, Craig LaPine was a Pi Class graduate). We work closely with CULTIVATING COMMUNITY, who become almost co-teachers of our students. This course puts our first year students right into the world to engage, learn, collaborate and co-create all the while building real skills and helping improve this city we live in.
In my own collaborative and public art landscape projects I investigate the role of art in place-making and community-building. Currently I'm working on "Pattern", a project that brings together Lewiston neighbors, pre-school children, and other diverse collaborators and stakeholders to co-create public art and is funded in part by the Kellogg Foundation and the Harry Faust Fund. On such projects, I work to convene diverse neighbors of all ages and backgrounds around a creative project, food, translating, sharing and imagining to co-create the places we call home.
What is the intended impact of your project/work on our community?
As a Professor of art and design students, service-learning is for me the most effective teaching tool to empower my students with outcomes and skills that allow them to see themselves as, and then become, active creative agents in our shared world.
For almost 15 years, I have been threading service-learning (SL) into the whole of my studio and interdisciplinary courses, merging a partner/community need with course objectives. For instance, in my course Art for Social Change, our partner The Telling Room requested: Work with Portland new-neighbor refugee youth to make visible their stories of coming to America so that they can travel and be shared throughout Maine. I guided students carefully through a process in which they engaged with a real set of conditions and thus collaborative problem solving, community art education, project planning, diversity training and more. The result was "STORYHOUSE," a co-authored series of large circular house structures that held inside their rolling walls life size digitally printed cloth banners of the youths' story collages.
Service-learning builds the capacity for our students to discover how to be learners. While taking action on community needs, students learn to ask questions and solve problems, learning from the community and one another. A re-framing of Professor as facilitator allows students to absorb course content in a more active way participating more fully. Learning is guided by careful course construction, where I aim to find the balance between a creative outcome and learning goals for each student.
Artists strive to speak about their world and usually yearn for others to listen, when they realize that what they can give does matter to the world, they grow in confidence and thus take greater personal risks, stretching their ability to become deeper learners emotionally, physically and intellectually. The civic outcomes I address all revolve around a student's ability to grow empathetically and with confidence as active citizen and social artists. If students can view themselves as social artists, then they believe that they have the ability to shape a humane and ecologically viable world.
Can you sum up your project or work in one sentence? A.k.a: "Elevator pitch"
Artists strive to speak about their world and usually yearn for others to listen, when they realize that what they can give does matter to the world, they grow in confidence and thus take greater personal risks, stretching their ability to become deeper learners emotionally, physically and intellectually. I think we are all artists and long for this transformation.
How do you think ICL helped you with your project/work? Has your Intensive experience impacted your life in other ways?
The ICL experience helped me recognize that the creative work I was doing in the world was leadership work. I also learned valuable skills in group decision making, mindful group facilitation and careful stakeholder analysis. Additionally, after my experience with ICL I'm taking risks on an even greater scale than before - I feel a sense of urgency for our world.
Our theme for the appeal will be how the work that's being done to move Maine forward often has an impact far beyond - the idea that one person's work really can have indirect implications they'd never imagined. How can local change have national or even global implications? Can one person really make a difference?
There is no doubt that what we are doing here in Maine can and does affect work on a national and international scale. As any teacher will tell you, the impact and change we witness in students is remarkable.
If so, how have you seen this in your own work?
The summer after my experience at ICL I was given a scholarship to gather in Germany to study with group of scholars and artists from all over the world to around the theme of sustainability. I was able to see that the kind of work we are doing at MECA in our FY-(In) course is adding to a global movement of educating our youth to be creative agents of change and transformation. I was honored to be the only American given a scholarship, and I think I was because of what we are doing here in Maine.
One of the charges of ICL's mission is to engage our community to move Maine forward. What do we need to strengthen our community? (specific to Portland, or your passion project/work)
We need to continue to see ourselves collectively as stewards of a healthy community and state. I believe creative partnership models can transform how we see ourselves, solve problems, and act.
How would you recommend others get started in their civic engagement?
First, give yourself room to imagine!
Start with the block you live on - and then imagine a city, a state, a country and a world that is more humane, just and ecologically viable than the one we currently live in. It is a hard thing to do, but that kind of visioning can push us to take greater personal risks to work with our neighbors to help build better places.
Secondly, find ways to work with others that are different from you and in ways that make you feel uncomfortable. We find in service-learning partnership work that when we partner and collaborate, we have to find common ground to meet real community needs. We learn best with and from others: and prepare to be humbled! Our greatest teachers are those we think we need to help: we all need each other, and that is how we grow.
Any other thoughts?
Yes - I'm launching in November, "What if We", is a web-based project that is about making room for utopian, creative, imaginative thinking about our world. Funded in part by the Maine Art Commission Visibility grant, I welcome your "what if we"s, a place to practice your imagination -- just e-mail me at cbechstein@gmail.com.
We invite you to read our other stories of how ICL has changed the leadership and life of fellow alumni. Click here to read our interview with Najim Animashaun (Kappa Class), click here to read our interview with Steve Hart (Xi Class), or click here to read our interview with Kolawole Bankole (Nu Class and HLD II). We ask you to consider how ICL may have changed you, and how that has helped to change the world around you.
We also invite you to help ICL continue positive change by supporting this year's annual appeal. Please consider a gift to ICL's Annual Fund, which will allow others to experience and learn needed skills and new ways of leading to move Maine forward. It's easier than ever to give to ICL. Give online by using the Network for Good button below, send a check to ICL at PO Box 422 Portland, ME 04112 or contact Celeste LaBadie at clabadie@civicleadership.org to request a gift envelope today.
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