Community Walls: Curriculum

Creating community pride through artistic expression

Our world is a dynamic network of social, political, and economic connections that extends far beyond the traditional borders of the local community. With each new generation comes the ever more critical need for intercultural understanding and respect, along with the desire to protect and nurture commonly held values and experiences that enrich each community and culture.

Community Walls is a fun and educational program that connects youth to community through art. Groups of youth in grades 2-12 work collaboratively to explore, discover, and artistically express life within their community, in order to gain:

• Cultural understanding
• A working concept of community
• A personal vision of their own community
• A meaningful sense of self
• A powerful voice for self-expression within the community

"The Back of the Yards can be a violent community with the threat of gangs and drugs, but we realize that there is a better way of life. Our community is full of fun activities that are safe and healthy. While working on the Community Walls project, we learned that everyone needs to support each other to be strong and withstand the threat of violence. We realize a group of individuals can make a difference in a community. Together we can do lots in the world and our individual potential is as big as we want it to be."

--Girl Scout Troop 1047 (Chicago)

Community Walls mural projects consist of four two-hour sessions led by trained facilitators, culminating with an overnight trip to a Hostelling International hostel. Students and youth from schools and community-based organizations work collaboratively to explore the concept of community, and create a work of art that expresses their unique visions of their own local community.

Completed art pieces are displayed at Hostelling International hostels in order to give world travelers a youth perspective of life in Northern California. In this way, Hostelling International gives youth a voice, and projects this voice to an international audience of travelers, who are able to view a unique expression of the local community. When they return to their homes across the globe, they take back impressions made by American youth.

"As I met these different people from all these different places I learned how much we are all alike. I learned that we may be from opposite sides of the world but we all have something in common. We all come from different backgrounds and different communities, but when you take time out to get to know someone, you sort of become a part of their community."

--student from Kelvyn Park High School (Chicago)

The Community Walls program inspires each participant to take pride in his/her unique heritage, asking them: What is community to you? Working with HI staff and community volunteers, and with curriculum-based investigative materials at their disposal, youth are challenged to explore and analyze community and culture from their own unique perspective.

This youth-focused approach encourages participants to engage their community. By exploring the rich complexity of a community and its cultures, youth discover both themselves as important and integral members of the community, and their own voices, which have the power to contribute to the culture and to express unique viewpoints to the world at large.

The curriculum design is the result of a collaborative effort by educators of Hostelling International USA, HI-Washington DC, HI-Chicago, and HI-USA Golden Gate Council.