New VCU course offers cultural insight into RVA

Screenshot from RVArts.
Screenshot from RVArts.
Screenshot from  RVArts.
Screenshot from RVArts.

A student living in Richmond, it isn’t always easy to keep up with the happenings around the city as concerts, festivals, gallery openings and more seem to take place every single day.

This is what inspired VCU’s Cultural Passport course, created by John Freyer and Jill Ware of the Cross Disciplinary Media department in VCUarts in collaboration with ALT Lab, aims to show students and faculty some of the exciting and sometimes-obscure events within the university and around the city.

Though the course number falls under the ARTS banner, it’s open to non-department students as well — something the instructors have found especially gratifying.

“They’re excited about things going on in the art world that they had no idea about,” Freyer said. “It’s fun to introduce them.”

This is also the only course which allows students in a non-arts program to pick up credits that apply to their major through an arts class.

Throughout the course of the semester, students are charged with creating and maintaining the event calendar on the dedicated RVArts website, which normally details a dozen or more art events a day.

“They’re posting about shows at Strange Matter, or a show in a thrift shop or an exhibition that a friend is doing in their house,” Freyer said.

Students are also tasked with writing reviews and responses to various events and art pieces. Unlike the calendar, these events are not immediately available to the public. The idea is to create an intelligent and lively conversation around the art, with some of the reviews and responses being published to the site after editing.

The course is structured as a hybrid, with work being able to be accomplished from home and in the classroom. Tuesdays, however, are reserved for a pair of alternating in-person sessions.

The first of these are the “In Conversation” events, where a pair of creatives are invited to the Depot to discuss their craft in front of the class and the public.

The other Tuesdays feature “co-working nights.” At that time, people can email-in or hop on Skype or Google hangouts, withe Freyer and Ware there to assist. It provides both a real-world and cyberspace group work session. Like the rest of the course, co-working nights are meant to extend out to the public, and as such feature an open door policy to anyone who wants to come in.

This was a key part of the class’ inception. Ware had been wanting to teach a course like this for years — one where they could ditch the traditional classroom setting to provide an augmented learning experience.

“I’ve wanted to do this forever … I looked into doing as a lecture course when I first started at VCU,” Ware said. “When I found out about the Online Learning Experience I thought ‘It’s my time.’”  

Freyer and Ware see this as a movement that will spread past VCU and into the city at large. With a Facebook group boasting over 200 members, they’re already well on their way.

Freyer said their goal is to create ambassadors for the arts who will create a dialogue between artists in the city and members of the university.

“The arts have given so much to me, and this means so much to me,” Ware said. “For other people to experience the arts … I want the pathway to be there for them.”


Music Desk, Josh Buck

Josh Buck, photo by Brooke MarshI’m an almost annoyingly outspoken feminist who loves writing about gender and race in mainstream art. I once had to be almost physically removed from Disneyland because my friends said it’s not cool to be the very last person in the park. I can’t wait to graduate in the spring so I can point my car West with no money and no plan, and spend months seeing the country, writing and meeting people.

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