By Lilibeth Garcia
To review the human experience, it’s not enough for arts students to examine art, literature or film through textbooks. To soak up their lessons and enrich their research, UCI students have ventured out to and explored the broader campus and town of Irvine, in addition to cultural sites and landmarks across Orange County, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Seattle and more.
For college kids within the School of Humanities, the world is their classroom. Below are among the exciting ways five majors – literary journalism, art history, film and media studies, history and English – engage and teach their students through experiential learning.
Art history
For art history majors, leaving the state to check works embedded within the environment has develop into a fixture of the curriculum. In 2018, students took a 1,900-mile road trip across the Southwest desert to learn from earth art. Most recently, art history students got to go to Seattle and Las Vegas to vividly experience how art has evolved across time.
The trips were made possible because of the generosity of 1 alumnus. Last yr, the late Vince Steckler (’80) donated $5.4 million to the Department of Art history to supply experiential learning and research-related travel opportunities to diverse populations, who may not otherwise find a way to travel out-of-state or out-of-the country to experience art.
Earlier this yr, James Nisbet, professor and chair of art history, taught a traveling seminar,
“Site Specificity,” in regards to the relationship between artworks and the positioning(s) of their making and display. His class checked out the commissioned Olympic Sculpture Park dating from the 2000s, a site-specific landwork by the artist Robert Morris from the late Nineteen Seventies, an inter-tribal Indigenous arts and culture center, and a campus sculpture collection at Western Washington University.
The scholars were capable of see the works in person and discuss the ideas that that they had been reading within the abstract of their seminar discussions. The trip sure several groups together, from undergraduate art history majors to masters’ students to Ph.D. students in visual studies.
Within the spring, students in Art History Professor Roland Betancourt’s “Simulacral Spaces” course took a completely funded trip to Las Vegas, where they focused on town’s themed architecture and worked on a final research paper. They spent five days touring the whole strip and discussing its various structures, from Mandalay Bay to Resorts World.
The trip began and ended on the Special Collections and Archives on the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, which students utilized to write down their papers. Throughout the trip, they learned the way to read a landscape and placement and understand levels of alteration. On the Special Collections library, students had access to sources equivalent to promotional materials and original floor plans to construct context on the buildings’ histories.
“I feel some of the difficult, frustrating and exciting things about working on any type of historical site is that it should have numerous layers of change,” Betancourt says. “It’s an interesting a part of that process to be at a spot just like the Luxor, walking around this site that also exists but has very much modified from opening day and throughout its life.”
Betancourt is not any stranger to experiential learning. A few years ago, Betancourt took three different classes to Disneyland (about 25 minutes away from the UCI campus) as a part of his “Disneyland: Art, Architecture and Operation,” “History of Disneyland” and “Curating Disneyland” courses. Considered one of his trips was even covered by the Los Angeles Times.
While the department has led students to quite a few sites across the Western United States, faculty are planning to include international trips into their coursework within the near future.
History
Experiential learning doesn’t should be elaborate or costly. Sometimes taking a walk across campus can offer invaluable lessons. Last yr, Chelsea Schields, assistant professor of history, together with Ian Straughn, assistant professor of teaching in anthropology, led the History Club on a “field trip” to the three old farmhouses on UCI’s campus. Straughn teaches a category called “I Dig UCI” where students train in archaeological field methods to learn in regards to the past uses of the land on which the UCI campus sits. Students within the History Club toured the Bonita Camp farmhouse site to study its uses through time.
They discussed how UCI’s campus sits on the shared ancestral lands of the Acjachemen and Tongva people and other Native American communities of Orange County. Within the early twentieth century, the land was a part of the Irvine Ranch and the positioning included barns, a blacksmith shop and other structures used for raising and processing livestock within the pre-UCI days. With the event of the campus within the Sixties and Nineteen Seventies and the rise of the countercultural movement, some students took residence on these grounds. At the identical time, a couple of faculty within the Social Sciences used the three existing farmhouses to host ethnographic informants as a part of the short-lived “Learning by Doing” project. The positioning and its buildings’ next incarnation, from the early Nineteen Seventies to 2007, was because the “Farm School,” an experimental K-8 program that enrolled each children of school and people from the local people.
The group reviewed different ways in which archaeologists access the past through material culture, and Straughn shared among the findings from his class, including animal bones that exposed the previous use of the positioning for livestock processing.
“Students were empowered to think in regards to the campus space as one which can also be theirs to reimagine and shouldn’t strictly be as much as the imperatives of real estate development,” Schields says. “As students wandered the grounds, they were asked to think how they’d imagine this currently unused space to serve the needs of their communities. One concept that stuck with me was a fruit tree garden for breaking bread and relaxing.”
The history of ancient Persia is a little more complicated to access through a straightforward trip (in comparison with the hyper-local experience of studying the UCI campus). To immerse his “Ancient Persian History” students right into a world long gone, Touraj Daryaee, professor of history and Maseeh Chair in Persian Studies & Culture, took them to the Getty Villa last spring for its “Persia: Ancient Iran and the Classical World” exhibition. A book that was published for the exhibition included writing from Daryaee.
Literary journalism
Students in UCI’s Literary Journalism Program learn the art of storytelling through a wide range of writing workshops, which end in longform reported essays, investigative feature articles, podcasts, documentaries, in-depth social analyses and first-person narratives.
“I feel almost the whole lot we do within the LJ Program involves experiential learning opportunities,” says Barry Siegel, director of this system.
To review reporting, students are encouraged to take their notetaking outside and immerse themselves in a various array of – often unfamiliar – environments.
In “Community Reporting,” taught by mentor and lecturer Amy DePaul, for example, classes have visited Irvine City Council meetings to study politics and policymaking on the local level. Inspired by the trip, Mariah Castaneda (’17), went on to develop local news projects, including a photograph essay about homeless people in Santa Ana. At a community news internship, she produced a photograph that was picked up by the Latest York Times. Now, as a podcaster and skilled journalist, she has sustained her interest in local news by reporting on corruption in L.A. for the investigative series Smoke Screen: The Sellout.
For the courses “Intro to Literary Journalism” and “Reporting for Literary Journalism,” student projects have included learning the way to fly a plane (in an airplane, no less); learning the way to swim (“for somebody who was skittish about entering into the water,” DePaul says); working a taco truck; operating a fresh fruit stand; mountaineering; and attempting to eat healthy on a food stamps budget for every week (to higher understand community public health issues).
“Generally, I attempt to ensure that at the least one project in my class includes field work, which I consider experiential learning,” DePaul says. “Whether it should the Day of the Dead festivities in a Hollywood cemetery or interviewing people stocking up on toilet paper at Costcos within the early days of the pandemic or attending a Mexican religious ceremony (Las Posadas) in Huntington Park, students are at all times encouraged to be in the sector.”
English
Experiential learning opportunities have even enabled students to spend entire quarters outside of the classroom. Students in UCI’s English department can reap the benefits of fellowships and internships that place them “in the true world” well before they graduate, allowing them to reinforce their resumes and get a head start on their careers.
The UCI English Internship Program places English majors in campus and community offices with stories to inform for a period of 10 weeks. The scholars are paid to work five to 10 hours every week, and in addition they earn course credit from taking “Writing 197: Writing Internship” with English Professor Julia Lupton, who founded this system.
For a lot of undergraduate students, landing a job at a Silicon Valley startup immediately post-graduation is the dream, but for alumna Sherissa Go (’22), it was real life. Employed at SkyHive, a number one software company in Silicon Valley, she currently works with engineers, sales directors and marketing managers to sell artificial-intelligence technology to Fortune 500 firms.
In the autumn of 2021, 25 English majors were assigned to marketing and communications internships at UCI and surrounding organizations. Considered one of those students was Go. As a content marketing and copywriting associate for the UCI Division of Profession Pathways, she wrote podcast scripts for the hub’s Spotify on the way to get an internship during college, the way to ace a job interview and more.
“I graduated with my English degree at the top of winter and scored a job at a number one Silicon Valley startup with no experience aside from my internship work and my work for Latest University,” Go says. “I feel this serves as a testament to this system’s importance.”
“Our students are anticipating recent experiences that expand their visions of the long run. It’s exciting to see them take their writing skills and retool them in these real-world settings,” Lupton says. “The outcomes are tangible: some are kept on by their employers, others apply for related opportunities and all of them make recent friends and contacts while constructing their resumes. The scholars grow a lot over the course of 10 weeks, they usually take real pride within the work they do on behalf of UCI departments and Orange County non-profits.”
Film and media studies
The Department of Film & Media Studies hosted a visit to the Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival this past May. A bunch of six FMS students accompanied Department Chair Fatimah Rony and Associate Professor Desha Dauchan to the biggest festival in Southern California dedicated to showcasing movies by and about Asians and Pacific Islanders, now in its thirty eighth yr.
The primary program they saw was Still Life, which screened several animation shorts of varied formats, characterised by their intense and revolutionary themes. Considered one of the short movies featured was Rony’s award-winning animated short “Annah la Javanaise,” a few 13-year-old girl trafficked to Paris from Java in 1893 to work for painter Paul Gauguin.
After lunch, they saw two documentary features: “Bad Axe,” a few Cambodian-Mexican family’s struggle to maintain open their restaurant in rural Michigan during a time of polarization over race and politics, and the mystery drama-documentary “Free Chol Soo Lee,” a few man who’s wrongly convicted for murder and incarcerated and what happens when the Asian American community rallies behind his release.
Afterward, they attended a reception for the filmmakers of the festival (to which Rony was invited) and along the way in which bumped into several FMS alums: Janet Chen (’98), who’s now getting her MFA at UC Santa Cruz in film and social documentation, and Angela Park (’02), a movie producer. In addition they bumped into lecturer Jon Oh, who teaches “Advanced Sound” and was recording sound for filming being done on the festival.
“Field trips are a fantastic way for our students to study film festivals, discover more in regards to the various kinds of movies being screened at festivals, meet filmmakers and develop into inspired about filmmaking,” says Rony.
Thanks to the next donors for making these opportunities possible:
Roy and Janet Clifton
Alyson Kuhn
Katherine Basile-Fero and Michael Fero
Barbara and Donald Ormand
Fidelity Charitable Gift Fund
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