Fall 2024 NCHC Portz Grant Recipient

Johnson County Community College

"Material Use / Reuse: Visit of the Garden of Isis"

Students at Johnson County Community College are required to complete a capstone course, the Honors Forum, that revolves around central tenets of the Honors Program’s overall learning outcomes for students, namely interdisciplinarity, critical and creative thinking, and problem-solving skills.

Because we are at a community college, we always ensure that our focus is on the application of student’s learning to tangible outcomes. As such, all honors forum courses have traditionally focused on identifying a problem that the students take on as a group and offer solutions or contribute to finding solutions to. The course co-taught by Dr. Anne Dotter and Dr. Kristy Wittman-Howell on Material Culture and Sustainability does just that, and more.

Students in our class are led to consider the materials and built structures of their lives for the meaning they give them, the cultural meanings they acquire in different contexts, for the impact of racial and gender histories on these objects, and the responsibilities we have individually and collectively for lands we occupy and without which none of this would exist. As such, our course draws heavily from NCHC’s Shared Principles and Practices in that it is mindfully integrated in the program curriculum; our new project, the Visit to the Garden of Isis, seeks to further integrate the program's curricular focus with the co-curricular efforts, to stretch students’ horizons beyond the KC-metro area while developing a model for a high-impact practice fully integrated in a required course.

Since its inception, we have sought to contribute solutions to problems related to the use of materials on our campus. In fall 2024, we are collaborating with the Toy & Miniature Museum, to develop materials to support visitors in contextualizing objects included in a temporary exhibition on black dolls.

Students will be asked to visit several exhibits in fall 2024 to further their thinking about course materials. Here is the current assignment related to the local visits students on our class will be asked to complete:

• After you’ve completed at least the second week’s readings and discussion, visit the Nerman Museum on the JCCC campus.
  • Answer the following prompt: choose one installation that reuses an object obviously made to another end. What do you see? What do you think the artist meant by choosing this object in particular? If you were the artist, what other object would you have chosen instead?
• After we have discussed the readings by Mitchell and Smith, visit the exhibit Portraits of Childhood: Black Dolls from the Collection of Deborah Neff at the Toy & Miniature Museum, and the museum, on the UMKC campus (free to you, with your JCCC ID card)
  • Answer the following prompt: choose one doll from the Black dolls exhibit and one toy from the rest of the museum. What do you see? Why do you think this doll / toy was selected by the curator for inclusion in these exhibits? What do you think they mean? What has helped you determine the object’s meaning from the contextualization provided by the museum (card, guide, etc.)?

Day Excursion to Lucas, Kansas, to Visit The Garden of Isis

As part of the visit, the class will discuss ways toys have been reused by artists and folk-artists in the United States and beyond. Students will be accompanied by one of their professors as well as local artists well known for their integration of reused objects into their projects. Our goal for this day outing is for students to refine their critical and creative thinking about the many ways objects may be used, well beyond the ways they were originally intended to be used. We will also explore the fundamentally cultural nature of the use and reuse of objects.

In the process of engaging in conversation with the two Kansas City artists, students will have a chance to test the knowledge that they acquired in the class about the meaning and value of materials. It will also provide them with the unique opportunity to challenge any remaining assumptions about the ways that objects come to be imbued with meaning and value, and how this meaning and value may change depending on time, location, and use.