Painting the Town

Breaking the Town-Gown Barrier Using Technology to Appreciate a College Town’s Cultural and Historical Development

Beyond Campus Confines

“I heard the assignment and sighed. A walking tour? Of Mankato? I sighed again. What's there really to know about this place? Here's the college, here's the mall, here's the suburbs…I thought it would be some rehashed information on houses, suburbs, and businesses,” so writes a student in a reaction paper describing his initial thoughts about Janet Cherrington’s Introduction to the City course, a course which requires that students venture beyond the confines of the Minnesota State University campus and down the city streets of their host city, Mankato.

How aware are students of the historical aspects of their environment? To what degree do they think about where they are geographically or how their presence affects the community in which they live? Apparently, very little, according to higher education instructors. Increasing this awareness was just one of the goals behind a recent Learning By Doing project funded by MNSCU and the Bush Foundation.

“Most college campuses have been designed to alienate students from a nearby town, rather than to connect them to it,” says Janet Cherrington, professor of urban studies and city management in the Urban and Regional Planning Institute at MSU, Mankato. “Because colleges and universities are self-contained communities, they often virtually stifle the need for students to learn more about the cultural, historical, and, yes, even the funky’ places that comprise a bordering community.”

Compelling Reasons

Wanting to give students a more compelling reason to study cities, Cherrington, who holds a Ph. D. in Urban Affairs and Public Policy, won a Learning by Doing Grant to fund her project called Breaking the Town Gown Barrier. “There is a need both locally and nationally to break down what is known as the Town-Gown syndrome between cities and the colleges or universities located within them,” says Cherrington. “As partners, rather than rivals, a city can benefit from having a college or university located in or nearby it. There are real and measurable benefits to training students to perceive their urban surroundings in different ways,” she says.

Cherrington created the walking tour class because she "was really anxious to learn more about the city and saw it as a way to do two things: educate [herself] about the historical significance that Mankato has and to learn to navigate the city which has a very confusing street pattern.” The tour begins in the neighborhood where the original university campus was, continues through Lincoln Park, goes down through the new mall development and then back through the homes at the base of the bluffs. After the tour, Cherrington discusses the history of the area and invites local guests who give student first-hand stories of the way the town was.

Using an interactive teaching-learning mode and insistent on the need to incorporate computer-based technology in the classroom, Cherrington required that students in her lower division general education course create multi-media presentations documenting their personal reactions to what they learned. Taught in the fall 2001 and spring 2002, the grant made the addition of multi-media technology possible.

Paying Attention

The Introduction to the City course, which appeals extensively to a wide variety of majors including management information systems, business, architectural drafting, civil technology, land surveying, and graphics, begins with an initial historical survey of the rise and fall of cities. Also, students increase their historical and geographical awareness of urban life by studying the origin and development of world cities, patterns of global urbanization, and processes for planning the urban environment.

One of the course readings, Kevin Lynch’s The Image of the City, encouraged students to pay attention to their mental interpretation of the city. In his book, Lynch, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology planning professor, asks the basic questions: How do people perceive the built environment? And what are the underlying elements common to human perception of the city? His premise is that armed with a better understanding of how people perceive the city image, urban designers can actually design better cities. The objective of having students read this book was to allow students to develop an individualized appreciation of the imagery and physical surroundings of the city.

Because the Learn-By-Doing grant funded the purchase of digital cameras, students could capture sites of particular interest to them with photos, which they used to illustrate their personal essays. The essay assignment asked students to highlight their impressions of the city historically, culturally, and socially before and after the walking tour of Mankato. In addition, students chose a site or concept of particular interest, researched and wrote about it in their essays. Finally, working in small groups, students reviewed their peers’ essays as a way to improve their own writing skills.

A Compass, A Lesson, and A Lens

The two-hour walking tour is at once several things: it is a map; it is a history lesson; and it is a wide-angle lens. As a compass, it serves as an orientation to help new students learn how to navigate their way around the town. As a history lesson, it provides students with an historical overview of their school, telling them how Minnesota State University, Mankato evolved from the valley campus of Mankato Normal School (1866), Mankato State Teachers College (1921), and Mankato State University (1975) to the present highland campus. As a wide-angle lens, it allows students to see that Mankato is a unique city with many examples of adaptive reuse, many different styles of houses, ranging from different time periods, and many cultural and historical landmarks, particularly those that evoke a personal mental image of the city.

“This whole tour opened my eyes to the greater scheme of things,” says the same student who originally expressed dismay at the thought of walking through Mankato. “My image of Mankato had not only broken down the barriers of districts, of paths that I took, and the node of the campus, but it broke through the barriers of time. It made me see the whole Mankato, throughout time. ‘Old Town’ now means something to me… Mankato was now no longer a place. It was a piece of history that belongs somewhere. My initial thoughts were wrong. I admit it,” he says.

Another student who took the course in Fall 2000 wrote that the concept of adaptive reuse intrigued her to look at some buildings more closely. “For example, what used to be the old campus for the Mankato State University Teachers College is now the Blue Earth County Government Center.” She also learned that in 1922 the first Old Main building was destroyed by fire. “As a result, the state legislature responded in 1924 by accepting funds for a new building, which was also called ‘Old Main.””

Funky Town
By leading students through what was once the downtown commercial core, the tour engages students to think critically about the processes of decentralization and urban renewal and how these processes apply to Mankato. The tour also invites students to see if Mankato has the inherent characteristics that make what author Mark Cramer calls a “funky” town. Funky, according to Cramer, means unconventional, bizarre, eclectic, or simply alternative. An Urban Quality Indicator reading assignment provides students with Cramer’s 12 categories with a point value for rating “funkiness.” These range from peculiar local identity distinguishing one place from another to different kinds of people interacting in genuine ways to “3^rd places” (beyond the campus, work or home) for hanging out that are not standard tourist spots.

Another student who took the tour in the Fall of 2000 had this to say about the funkiness of Mankato: ”The Two Fish Recording Studio located on the corner of Grove Street and Second Street is definitely one of the funkiest places in town. My group just happened to be passing the studio when the current residents arrived and were kind enough to offer us a complete tour of the interior of the building. The building definitely gives the block a distinctly unique feeling, being that it was once a church and most of the exterior remains unchanged…. The church’s pews are still intact and the owners have plans of renovating the whole hall into an area where they could have live concerts. This will definitely give Mankato yet another funky characteristic.”

A Picture’s Worth

The design of the Breaking the Town-Gown Barrier Project is grounded in a theoretical framework that suggests information that is gleaned with words and images is more memorable. The theory presumes that information from multimedia presentations, for example, is selected and encoded in two separate memory stores-- verbal information and pictorial. Through an integration process, the two memory stores create interconnections. Thus, if information is encoded both pictorially and verbally, it makes a more lasting impression.

The Technology Component

After taking the walking tour, the students wrote a personal assessment paper and made group presentations to the class with the students they toured with. Students were asked to incorporate visual technology into their class presentations that Cherrington says have turned out to be no less than “awesome.” Walking tour presentations have ranged from using slides and PowerPoint to actual video productions. More importantly, the students say they actually find the walking tour fun and many report having a changed perspective on the city of Mankato.

The technology component of the Learn-By-Doing project involved scheduling computer labs during class times to teach such skills as photo scanning, presentation software, inserting WAV sound files, and importing digital and web-based photography into PowerPoint. Also, Cherrington created a hard copy and online “how to” technology manual that provided reinforcement for student lab sessions. The instructor’s manual is available to all students and the broader population on the instructor’s web site at http://www.intech.mnsu.edu/cherrington/NewTech/HowTo.doc.

Students’ digital photographs were catalogued numerically during the walking tour, burned to a CD and uploaded to the instructor’s web site. The student-generated multi-media projects and essays are available at http://www.intech.mnsu.edu/cherrington/MultiMediaProject/List.htm and

http://www.intech.mnsu.edu/cherrington/papers.list.htm.

Results: Individualized Appreciation

Upon completion of this Learn-By-Doing project, students realized they had learned to pay attention to their mental interpretation of cities while simultaneously developing a first-hand, individualized appreciation of Mankato’s specific imagery and physical surroundings through the walking tour. An unexpected outcome of the project was that after walking the environs of Mankato, students reported feeling less isolated.

Student essays reflected synthesis of important city planning concepts; recognition of unique geographic, historic and cultural features in Mankato; and a keener spatial orientation of the university’s host community.

One student, in the Fall 2001 class, was impressed with Mankato’s Italian influenced architecture. She said, “It’s hard to believe that this type of housing was brought here by the picturesque movement in Europe and was a derivative of the formal Italian Renaissance townhouses of the 15th and 16th centuries. To think that our societies that we live in today were thriving with this kind of beauty way back then is incredible!”

Group multi-media presentations illustrated increased student familiarity with and sensitivity to social, cultural, and historical venues of the university’s host city. The multi-media presentations also demonstrated that students had become engaged in a type of learning that allowed them to construct their own experience of the host city—an experience that extended beyond the campus borders and beyond theoretical learning. Student projects also illustrated that students had become engaged in a multi-sensory approach to learning. Oral presentations reflected a high level of group interaction, creative use of technology, and good quality public speaking. Concept maps completed at the beginning and end of the course indicated that students could apply course concepts to the city of Mankato.

Building a Community

Cherrington says she believes the walking tour “has become a ‘win-win’ scenario: students break the traditional ‘town and gown’ isolation that so often plagues a community and a nearby university and Mankato gets an infusion to its economic base by students who frequent more of their sports and entertainment sites.” One student wrote that after the tour, “Mankato was not just a town where I went to school anymore, it now was alive with character, heritage, and information. It stopped being a one dimensional place, and started being a community.”

Asking students to walk their environs and create visual portraits of their urban environment for public dissemination, allowed students to demonstrate a better understanding of the relationships traditionally known as “town and gown” and the benefits to communities when partnerships between a city and its full time, as well as temporary citizens, fuse. In and of itself, this provides a rationale for implementing an expertly guided walking tour emphasizing group dynamics, city concepts, and the hands-on use of technology into a college or university’s curriculum. The net effect in this instance was a beneficial partnership for the students, the university, and the city of Mankato, MN.