With offerings for every age group from toddlers to senior citizens, the Herberger Institute Community School is aiming to integrate ASU into the community with classes in the arts and digital media.
The courses, taught by graduate students from Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts, are held on the Tempe and Polytechnic campuses.
Some of the teen and adult classes have already started, and the kids’ program, which lasts about six weeks, is slated to begin this weekend.
The courses cost about $100 each and most have class sizes of 15-20. University students and faculty are eligible for a 10 percent discount.
Subjects include arts like dance, music and theater and digital media and design,
“We have two main goals,” said Catherine Fletcher, director of the program. “The first is for community outreach … and our other goal is to provide these laboratory experiences for Herberger graduate students.”
Both instructors and students benefit from the program, she added. The graduate students get classroom experience and salary and the students get to take courses in subjects they are interested in.
The classes are intended to teach skills that students can use in their everyday lives and professional careers, she said.
“They are all hands-on,” Fletcher said. “We don’t have any lecture-based classes at all … these are studio classes, really hands-on, skill set learning experiences.”
Program coordinator Melissa McGurgan said students are there solely to learn.
“Since we’re non-credit, there’s no grade,” she said. “There is no intense pressure to complete things on a certain deadline. It’s just for your own personal enrichment.”
McGurgan emphasized the community relations aspect of the school as its most important component.
“The overarching goal of our program is to expose the community to the opportunities and resources that are here within the Herberger,” she said. “We want community members of not only ASU but of the Phoenix area to know that they can come to ASU and experience our classes and facilities.”
McGurgan said this program could only work at the University, where the technology is available to support classes in the digital arts.
“The No. 1 benefit [for students] is the access to facilities and the quality of our instructors,” she said.
Herberger uses the Community School to expose community members to the facilities available at the University. A program called Arts Lab involves busing 60 students from Garfield Elementary in Phoenix to the Tempe campus every Saturday.
The students are given full scholarships for the kids’ classes that they otherwise likely couldn’t afford, McGurgan said.
The program can also be helpful for older teens and adults looking into enrolling in a degree program at ASU.
“You don’t have to commit to a degree program or a full semester,” she said. “You can take a six-week course so you can sample it and see if it’s right for you.”
Reach the reporter at dana.sheaff@asu.edu
