From St. Thomas Magazine - Winter 2009
Professor Tom Connery stood in the middle of Learning Garage No. 2 at Cristo Rey Jesuit High School and surveyed the chaos. Ninety University of St. Thomas and Cristo Rey students were jammed into the room, chattering away and paying absolutely no attention to him.
When the noise subsided, Connery took a deep breath and shouted, “Okay, so what do you want to do with this newspaper?”
Blank stares.
“We’re going to look for connections here,” he said. “And ideas… we need ideas.”
And just like that, hands shot up and students offered suggestions on what should be in a Cristo Rey newspaper: A student-of-the-month profile. A teacher spotlight. A “Shout Out” section in which students would salute each other. A “Pride and Joy” feature to highlight a student’s special talent. An entertainment section with reviews on new CDs and movies. Comics drawn by students – one had a certain teacher in mind, “but not to be mean; just fun and silly.”
Connery deftly handled the students, prodding them to speak and probing for details. “An advice column?” he responded to one suggestion. “Who’s going to give the advice? And about what?”
At the end of 20 minutes, Connery congratulated the group. A newspaper had been planned, albeit quite loosely, and everyone had a smile on his or her face. You could almost see the thoughts whirring through their minds: “So this is what we’re supposed to be doing here!”
Every new program has a defining moment – one that tells leaders and participants that yes, this possibly crazy idea will work. That mid-November brainstorming session at Cristo Rey was a defining moment in a novel and ambitious collaboration between mostly white students from a 124-year-old university firmly rooted in the community and students of color at a fledgling two-year-old high school in a struggling neighborhood.
The Cristo Rey project is part of COJO 111: Communication & Citizenship, a new foundational course in the Department of Communication and Journalism. St. Thomas faculty created the course in 2007 to emphasize relationships between all kinds of communication (interpersonal, intercultural, organizational, rhetorical and mass media) and to foster a commitment to informed and active citizenship. Three themes were introduced: that communication is fundamental to human identity, builds community and citizenship, and advances the common good.
One component of COJO 111 is a service-learning project in which students “contribute to the community while gaining knowledge relevant to their academic and professional lives,” according to the syllabus. “In other words, when we take our learning out into the community, we put our skills into practice.”
So on nine occasions during the fall semester, 135 St. Thomas students boarded buses and rode down Lake Street to Cristo Rey to spend an hour with the 145 freshmen and sophomores there.
St. Thomas wanted to collaborate with Cristo Rey for several reasons: it’s new, it’s college prep, it’s Catholic, it’s easy to get to from the St. Paul campus and, most importantly, its population is incredibly diverse in terms of race, ethnicity and socioeconomic status.
“Cristo Rey is different from St. Thomas,” said Dr. Carol Bruess, the project’s co-leader, who team-taught the course with Connery and Drs. Wendy Wyatt and Kris Bunton. “Way different. That’s good – for our students and for their students. They learn from each other.
The planning team brainstormed projects and settled on three for the fall semester: a newspaper, a yearbook and a “campus connections” program to better inform Cristo Rey students about higher education opportunities. Fifteen groups typically made up of three St. Thomas and three Cristo Rey students worked on each of the three projects during the nine trips.
Read more about their progress online. This course is one example of the kinds of new courses St. Thomas hopes to continue to add through the efforts of the Opening Doors campaign.