The Hamer Center has partnered with Cooperative Extension and Outreach to create a youth-based program focusing on Pennsylvania's urban communities. Youthscapes is an innovative program that aims to provide Pennsylvania's urban youth a forum through which they can study and learn about the history, ecology, and social aspects of their cities and neighborhoods, while developing the civic and leadership skills they will need to become active members of their communities. The initiative aims to meet the needs and challenges of today's inner-city youth by emphasizing place-based, interdisciplinary, experiential learning. Coupled with service learning and specialized community-based design projects, the curriculum will provide a means for students to take responsibility for, and invest themselves in, their urban neighborhood.
In a typical Youthscapes course middle and high school classes will probe into their community’s past by digging through historic photographs, newspaper articles, and conducting interviews with senior citizens to create a web-based time-line of their local history. In successive classes, students will use their local landscape as a research tool to study historic and contemporary relationships between built and natural environments using cutting-edge scientific research methodologies, advanced technologies (including GIS mapping), or creative expressions such as cinematography. Students will then use these historic, cultural, and ecological studies to identify key community assets and issues facing their communities. From this research, students would begin discussing ways to address these issues and present them to local organizations and government officials. In the following year, students take hands-on, experiential learning to the next level by identifying, designing, and implementing a community-service project based on their own assessments. Overall, the program will empower youth to express themselves through their actions and provide a means to invest themselves directly in the enhancement of their communities.

Youthscapes draws upon a number of emerging educational enhancement strategies including place-based experiential education, multidisciplinary problem solving, civic involvement and community investment (including service learning), and university-school-community partnerships. What it brings to the table in regards to current trends in youth programs and educational reform is a unique approach to learning that integrates the above educational approaches in a framework developed through community-based design education.

What is Community-based Design Education?

What are the Benefits of Design Education for Urban Youth?

YOUTHSCAPES PROGRAM GOALS