Downtown Phoenix Community Encounters, a course offered by Barrett, the Honors College at the Downtown campus, will welcome the community to a showcase Thursday evening where students enrolled in the course will demonstrate the different facets of the community they have been exposed to over the duration of the course.
This is the fifth year of Community Encounters, and the first year the end of the semester showcase has been publicly promoted to the community. The showcase will be held Dec. 5 in A.E. Building in Civic Space Park from 7 to 9 p.m.
Tyler Prime, a freshman at the Walter Cronkite School, is enrolled in the course and is preparing for his presentation Thursday.
Prime said he enjoyed the class because he got to see parts of downtown Phoenix that he may not have seen otherwise.
“When I first moved downtown I saw big business buildings and didn’t realize all the small businesses,” he said.
Over the years, members of the downtown community have directed criticisms at Arizona State University for the way it has implemented its campus downtown. Most of these concerns have been about how the Downtown campus was built and its efforts to engage with the already existing community downtown.
Keith Mulvin, an ASU alumnus, took Community Encounters in 2008, the first year it was offered, and lived in Tempe at the time. He said the course ignited a desire to be a part of the community.
Mulvin is now the director of operations and community manager at CO+HOOTS, co-founder of Pedalcraft and a volunteer with Roosevelt Row CDC.
He said he believes the ASU professors and students are engaged with the community but that ASU could have done a different land-use plan to stimulate that engagement.
“We are a product of our environment, and so our values and our habits are a direct response to how things are laid out,” Mulvin said.
Mulvin added that having all the university’s buildings central to students is good for them, but does not create a curiosity to go outside.
Nan Ellin, professor and chair in the Department of City and Metropolitan Planning at the University of Utah, taught the class in its first year. She expressed a similar concern that students are unaware of their surrounding community.
“So many students come and their only community is ASU, which is a fantastic community, but it’s not the community in which ASU resides — it’s just ASU,” she said. “There’s also another amazing community there and that’s the non-ASU community in which ASU resides.”
“I think by taking (students) out and introducing them in this structured way to people who are doing really proactive things in the community, they get to connect with those in their own areas of research,” Ellin said.
Mulvin said Community Encounters highlights how easy it is to be a part of the community in downtown Phoenix, adding that the barrier to entry is relatively low here compared to other cities.
“You could get all the community leaders who are doing amazing things to interact with you,” Mulvin said.
He said the class shows that as busy as these leaders are, “they care about the growth and nurture of future leaders too, so it helps create a very supportive environment.”
Ellin said that she felt the university could have done a better job of connecting with the community at the time ASU moved downtown.
Jill Johnson, program manager of Barrett on the Downtown campus, and Ellin saw a need for a course that would build connections between the university and the surrounding community. Together, they designed Community Encounters as a way to solve the issue of community engagement.
Johnson accompanies the current professor of the course, Diane Facinelli. Together, they encourage students to immerse themselves in the downtown community, to make connections with community members and to find something they want to become involved in.
The two leaders of the course also invite community leaders to lead class discussions and tours.
Downtown Voices Coalition member Jim McPherson and downtown’s hip historian Marshall Shore helped to develop the class history tour. McPherson, along with J. Seth Anderson and Suad Mahmuljin, created the book “Downtown Phoenix.”
Sustainability advocates Stacey Champion and Jonce Walker were also guests of the course.
The course is designed to stimulate engagement in five different core areas: entrepreneurship and local business; government, politics and activism; places, spaces and adaptive reuse; promoting arts and culture; and sustainable and vital living, according to Johnson.
The first session of Community Encounters focused on the history of the city and its “boom-to-bust” pattern of activity, she said.
“We’re starting to see that rise again in downtown Phoenix, so that’s the theme of our course, ‘Can Phoenix rise again?’” Johnson said.
From dissecting downtown into the five course sections, students can see the city is continuing to grow and engage in those different areas to help support that growth, Johnson said.
Mulvin validates the influence Community Encounters has on students.
“From the outsider view, it seems like Phoenix has a lot of issues, but what the course showed me was these are not issues, they are challenges for someone to take on,” Mulvin said. “As millennials, I really think we are a generation that seeks value in something bigger than ourselves and so in that, this course highlighted this opportunity to be involved in a much larger level than you can anywhere else.”
At the student showcase, current students like Prime will share the insight they gained from the course.
Prime said he will present examples of downtown businesses that have supported the adaptive reuse approach to buildings in the city, in which old buildings are given new life with a new business — something he took away from the class.
Johnson said she hopes ASU will someday expand Community Encounters and offer it as an interdisciplinary course to students of all majors, whether they are honors students or not.
She said the showcase will prove to ASU and the surrounding community that Community Encounters provides ways for students to connect with the community in real world situations.
“I think the buzz, both from students and community members, is important in order to keep this class alive and to help it be repeatable in following semesters,” Johnson said. “Thursday will attest to how well received this course is. People can come and see how students grow and learn from the class.”
Contact the reporter at alejandra.armstrong@asu.edu
Editor’s note: Alejandra Armstrong is a member of Barrett, the Honors College. Connor Descheemaker, Downtown Devil‘s director of community initiatives, serves as a teaching assistant for the Community Encounters class. He did not contribute to the reporting of this article. Several other members of the Downtown Devil staff have taken the Community Encounters class.
