 Innovative Response to the 2006 Undergraduate Satisfaction Report
Is UCSD a place that students want to revisit as alums? Although
campus administrators may hope the answer is yes, research from the
Undergraduate Student Experience and Satisfaction Report released
in June 2006 suggested otherwise.
UCSD students complained that they felt less
than fulfilled by their college experience, citing the size of
the University and the lack
of campus life and social cohesion.
The Place Matters project, launched in fall 2006, was one of the
responses to the report. It is a collaborative effort between Art
Power!, and Eleanor Roosevelt (ERC), Thurgood Marshall and Sixth
colleges, working in association with the Urban Bush Women dance
troupe. Their
mission: to develop a sense of community at UCSD through artistic
development.
 The Urban Bush Women are a Brooklyn-based dance
ensemble that has been dedicated to connecting dance with civic
engagement for the
past 20 years. Their performances relate stories about the underprivileged
through both speech and movement.
Art Power! Artistic Director Martin
Wollesen developed the Place Matters
initiative with Urban Bush Women artistic director and choreographer,
Jawole Willa Jo Zollar. The program consists of three classes offered
by each participating college in the fall and winter quarters.
Each class is designed to get students thinking about the link
between
civic engagement and the arts. The students in each course are
developing artistic performances that reflect their research. They
have complete
creative control over the writing, directing and performing and
will present their site-specific presentations at the end of the
two-quarter
program.
Some of the Place Matters organizers had a chance to attend the
Urban Bush Women’s Summer Institute, including ERC senior Zandi De
Jesus, ’07. De Jesus’ experience in the summer institute
led her to assist in teaching the ERC course. Although she had very
little formal dance training, her experience working with the Urban
Bush Women had a profound impact on her life.
“I felt like I was a dancer, that I had it in me the whole time,” De
Jesus says. “They showed me the power of dance and the power
of art as a tool for building a community.”
The program is in its early stages and
its level of success is yet to be determined, but Wollesen hopes
that the initiative goes on to become a permanent fixture in
the undergraduate program at UCSD.
“What the program is trying to do is
define the difference between a space and
a place,” says Sixth College provost and Place Matters co-instructor,
Gabriele Wienhausen. “A place is an environment that has a
soul, it makes people want to come back. A space is empty … Some
students would argue that UCSD is a space. If that is the case,
then we need to figure out what we need to do to change that.” 
— Christine Clark, ’06
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