Common Fire

From 21CC Wiki

Common Fire: A Facilitated 21st Century Chautauqua on Race, Culture and Ethnicity Based on They Poured Fire on Us from the Sky

Common Fire is a facilitated 21st Century Chautauqua in which faculty-mentored students from across the campus will engage in four dialogues during Fall 2008. Each of these dialogues, which investigate the overarching themes of race, culture, and ethnicity, will address additional themes from the 2008 One Book, One Community selection They Poured Fire on Us from the Sky. These additional themes include: “the other,” “propaganda”, “children and violence,” and “rites and initiation.” Students, along with help from MSU artists and faculty, will then use these dialogues as a starting point to investigate various ways of storytelling through art and rhetoric, including oral storytelling, photography and visual art, music and poetry. We will use various forms of communications technology to leverage these dialogues and student artistic productions across campus. For instance, the facilitated dialogues will be aired on 89X (the student radio station) with edited pieces airing on WKAR, while student creations will be displayed on various websites, blogs and other cyber sites across the campus community.

The project has a number of objectives, including:

• Tapping “unknown” student leaders and participants and increase their level of preparedness to become globally engaged leaders.

• Creating an opportunity for a dialogue on race, culture and ethnicity that crosses racial, ethnic and cultural identities as well as campus units and disciplines.

• The promotion of relationship building and collaborating through the practice of interbeing through story.

• The practice of engaged learning through dialogue and artistic expression.

• Encouraging students to think, create, dialogue, engage and innovate using story.

• The opportunity for students and faculty to build relationships and connectivity across identities, roles and disciplines.

This joint project of the Residential College in the Arts and Humanities, the Office of Cultural and Academic Transitions and the LGBT Resource Center, currently has 12 mentors from across campus. A number of CASTL Fellows are considering the project as their focus for the year. Should they decide to participate, their role will be to convene and facilitate the dialogues and assist in the leveraging of the conversation across campus through communications technology. An orientation luncheon, sponsored by OCAT, for faculty mentors and any involved CASTL Fellow will be held on September 11th at 12:30 p.m. in the Gallery Cafeteria at Snyder/Phillips Hall. The dialogue schedule will be decided at that time, including a joint pre-dialogue session to be held in late September with both students and mentors. The dialogues and artistic production will begin in October and will be held in the LookOut! Gallery at the RCAH.

Meeting Information

There will be a pre-dialogue meeting Tuesday, October 7th from 6:30-8 pm in the Snyder Seminar Room.