Making the city their living textbook

Arts & Sciences

Making the city their living textbook

Faculty in the Klingler College of Arts and Sciences engage Milwaukee as an immersive classroom, challenging students to learn from and wrestle with the city's past and present. It's part of an honored tradition in Jesuit higher education.

"At the beginning of the semester, I ask students to fully embrace Milwaukee as their new home," says Dr. Sergio Gonzalez, a Milwaukee native and assistant professor of history.

To facilitate that embrace, Gonzalez sends sophomores in his honors course, Engaging the City, onto the streets of Milwaukee to traverse their new home and take note of communities and histories that may be represented, or missing. As they pinpoint historical markers and signs of inequity in urban spaces, these students - Milwaukee's newest residents, in many cases - then tackle sociopolitical issues they've uncovered. They write papers and reflections, construct op-eds, engage in classroom discussion and much more.

As an educator in a Catholic, Jesuit institution, Gonzalez and fellow Arts and Sciences faculty members who teach courses embracing Milwaukee are working in a strong tradition. St. Ignatius of Loyola, founder of the Jesuits, called on his Jesuit colleagues to establish schools and colleges in the hearts of cities, where they'd engage urban life fully and educate students to serve the common good. To this day, most Jesuit universities in the U.S. are surrounded by urban neighborhoods.

"We want to open their eyes to the huge fabric that's all around them, so they really see Milwaukee and ask interesting questions on how to create justice here," says Dr. Amelia Zurcher, professor of English and director of Marquette's honors program.

"We knew if we could create a course where students actively went out into the city, it would prepare, inform and challenge them to be thoughtful, hungry and serious about their learning,"

Dr. Robert Smith, Harry G. John Professor of History, on the origins of the Marquette honors course, Engaging the City.

Students come to see Milwaukee as a tapestry of diverse peoples - a rich cultural backdrop for learning Indigenous and immigrant history. At the same time, their professors remind them it requires time, commitment and historical context to know the city well and to engage within these communities thoughtfully.

Engaging the City invites them into that deeper discovery. The concept for the course quickly drew faculty support. "We knew if we could create a course where students actively went out into the city, it would prepare, inform and challenge them to be thoughtful, hungry and serious about their learning," says Dr. Robert Smith, Harry G. John Professor of History and one of the architects and early teachers of Engaging the City.

Gathering in 2018 to expand student experiential learning opportunities, Zurcher, Smith and Gonzalez worked to bring the course to life, collaborating with colleagues Dr. Bryan Rindfleisch, associate professor of history, Dr. Theresa Tobin, associate professor of philosophy, Sam Harshner, teaching instructor in political science, and others. The resulting course model allowed professors to take turns teaching the course and customizing the urban engagement around their unique specialties - such as civil rights and mass incarceration, immigrant history and crisis narratives, and ethnography and placemaking (a new offering this fall by Erin Hastings, an adjunct lecturer).

The course has been offered every fall since 2019. "It was exciting to be on the ground floor of such a collaborative and iterative process," Gonzalez says. "We were really deliberate in constructing the learning objectives and engagement model to run across our courses."

As students venture into new neighborhoods and discover a monument or statue of interest, they reflect on why a given marker exists and what it conveys about a particular community.

Business student Abdullah Al-Bassam, now a junior, visited the Gen. Tadeusz Kościuszko monument last fall. "I was curious to know why there was a statue of a Polish general in Milwaukee's south side," he says. Kosciusko, an accomplished Polish military architect, led American troops against the British in the Revolutionary War.

"It turns out Kościuszko's triumphs sparked Polish immigrant appreciation for their freedom, equality and a sense of belonging in their community within Milwaukee," Al-Bassam says. Vast numbers of Polish immigrants moved to Milwaukee in the late 1800s and early 1900s, fleeing German rule and religious and cultural persecution - and their reverence for their military hero resulted in the Kościuszko statue erection in 1905, with 60,000 people attending the dedication.

Students in Gonzalez's class also study the Vel R. Phillips Plaza in downtown Milwaukee, honoring the trailblazing civil rights leader who was the first Black person and first woman elected to the Milwaukee Common Council, among other firsts; the Silver City welcome sign denoting the neighborhood southwest of campus named after the silver coin laborers received for their factory work in the late 1800s, now home to significant Latino and Hmong populations; the Vietnam Veterans Memorial; and the Marquette Interchange, among many others.

And one of these historically significant sites happens to be right next to campus. "We spend some time talking about the 16th Street Viaduct," says Gonzalez, referencing a site that became a centerpiece of Milwaukee's rair housing marches in 1967-68. For 200 consecutive nights, hundreds of civil rights marchers protested, walking across the 16th Street bridge from the north side to the south side to peacefully demonstrate against housing discrimination targeted at the Black community. They faced heavy, and violent, opposition.

Students today study the 16th Street Viaduct near Marquette's campus, the site of 200 consecutive nights of fair housing marches in Milwaukee. (Image courtesy of Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and Historic Photo Collection, Milwaukee Public Library.)

Exposing students to this history invites them to contextualize their environment, says Gonzalez, and envision how they would respond to similar movements now.

"This was an eye-opening experience for me, as someone not from Milwaukee," shares nursing student Meghan Eikens, in the same cohort with Al-Bassam. "I didn't know about Milwaukee's history when it came to protest movements. Professor Gonzalez challenged us to think about how we interact with the city and its racial past, and present," Eikens says.

"I learned most Marquette students did not participate in these fights for basic rights happening so close to campus. Yet we can have an impact while living here, if we stand up for these causes," says Eikens.

Whether through a historical marker, public space, data set, political cartoon or reading - or encounters with all of them - students walk away from the course better thinkers, readers and writers. "It's one of the most rewarding courses I've had a chance to be a part of at Marquette," says Gonzalez.

Midwest narratives
Engaging the City is far from the only course invested in boots-on-the-ground experiential learning. Material Cultures of the Midwest by Dr. Amy Blair, associate professor of English, invites students to take a closer look at the large historical and cultural forces that created present-day Milwaukee.

Going out on group or individual field trips, Blair has students visit four sites of their choice across Milwaukee in a semester. And while Gonzalez's class uses historical landmarks as keepers of time, Blair's class conducts close readings of scenes in the city. As they look at a neighborhood, students relate the sites to their companion readings by authors such as L. Frank Baum, Laura Ingalls Wilder, Louise Erdrich and Upton Sinclair.

"In the "The Wonderful Wizard of Oz," for example, there are moments where the yellow brick road falls apart infrastructurally. So, in turn, we look at Milwaukee's infrastructure - what is it, what is it supposed to do, and what existed in a space before it was built," explains Blair.

Although presented optimistically as a road to rescue, the yellow brick road winds, curves, loses bricks, contains potholes, stops abruptly and even runs into deadly poppies at the Munchkin border. As students compare Oz and Milwaukee, they consider expectations for Milwaukee's highways and the complicated reality that followed. Blair says they might discuss how federal "urban renewal" projects of the 1960s and '70s leveled swaths of homes and businesses (upwards of 20,000 homes) in the Bronzeville neighborhood, a prominent business and residential district of the Black community - in the name of faster-flowing commerce, commuter convenience and suburbanization. Or they may discuss how the elevated Park East Freeway was built, deemed unnecessary decades later and removed to make way for development, including the Deer District near Fiserv Forum.

Students learn how places are narrated and invested with cultural meaning. Generations may change, but the places and objects remain and can be a portal to understanding Milwaukee's past and present.

"We ask questions about what things are, their role, their base function, and defamiliarize ourselves from what we already know about something to more objectively see its significance," Blair says.

Students learn how places are narrated and invested with cultural meaning. Generations may change, but the places and objects remain and can be a portal to understanding Milwaukee's past and present. Blair adds, "Stories are laid over Milwaukee, and my students interrogate how a place has been written and conceived."

Student interns at Marquette visit the Milwaukee Historical Society to see the Living for the City Exhibit. (Photos courtesy of Lauren Instenes).

Called to engage
This vein of critical thinking and community involvement is cultivated in students across all classrooms, internships, service learning and service projects, and more. "Marquette has an express, mission-specific commitment to community engagement," says Smith. "And we have to continually do it the right way - to engage our neighbors - and approach our city engagement with humility and integrity," adds Smith.

"Our Engaging the City and similar courses are an example of this commitment. We're not just dropping students off in the city and saying that's that. We are intentionally connecting relevant historical knowledge to contemporary issues."

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