Three Initiatives for Community-Based Art Education Practices

Art educators should be concerned with teaching their students to make critical connections between the classroom and the outside world. One effective way to make these critical connections is to provide students with the opportunity to engage in community-based art endeavors. In this article, three university art educators discuss engaging preservice art teachers in community arts events. The first author (Lim) reviews a collaborative mural project at the Reedy Fork Elementary in Greensboro, North Carolina, as a meaning-making process that fostered a constructive partnership between the university and the local public school and promoted preservice art teachers' positive attitudes toward community service-learning art projects. The second author (Chang) examines the Pecan Festival, Florence, South Carolina, as a community service-learning activity for preservice art teachers. She emphasizes the importance of studying the local community and environment while connecting the art education course curriculum to a community art event. The third author (Song) reflects on the significant benefits preservice art teachers achieved through community involvement and outreach with the Youth Art Festival of East Carolina University (ECU) in Greenville, North Carolina. These three initiatives demonstrated that when an art curriculum goes beyond an isolated classroom, it can create a vital connection between students and real-world situations, showing both possibilities and challenges.