Creating Artists and Citizens: Teaching Community through an Arts-Based Mentoring Program

Abstract

This article describes a community-based arts and humanities mentoring program linking undergraduate students with children from underresourced communities. The authors argue that an interdisciplinary approach to the arts can provide liberal arts students with a community engagement experience that teaches citizenship and community. This type of program could serve as a model for an integration of the humanities curriculum and service learning, which in effect creates a practice of critical pedagogy—a practice often used in professional schools but left out of liberal arts text-oriented curricula.