Cool Cities: Teaching Civic Engagement
through Ancient Carthage

Anne E. Haeckl (Kalamazoo College)
and Elizabeth A. Manwell (Kalamazoo College)

The inspiration for our Classics service-learning course came from our State Governor, whose Cool Cities Initiative awards competitive grants to community projects aimed at making rust-belt towns more attractive places for energetic, idealistic and educated young people to settle, contributing their vigor and vision to reversing trends toward urban decline.  Our course, “Cool Cities Ancient and Modern:  Carthage and Kalamazoo,” essentially combined a lecture and discussion-based “ancient cities” model with small-group assignments, in which students were paired with community partners actively involved in projects designed to make our own city cooler.  These groups partnered with the arts community, a neighborhood association, non-profit service providers and city agencies in Kalamazoo, resulting in plans for neighborhood lighting, a community arts market, a youth advisory group to the planning commission, as well as a conference on public sculpture and an event to raise awareness about poverty.

One teaching challenge for us was to learn how to give up gracefully the pose of authoritative professors, as class material extended into areas far beyond our academic expertise, such as urban planning, the sociology of poverty in the 21^st-century USA, the ethics of philanthropy, and the theory and practices of public art commissions in American cities.  The other major challenge was to find ways meaningfully to relate our classroom study of ancient Carthage to the local community projects through which students learned experientially.  The most successful strategy in this regard was reflective class discussion, followed by individual reflective essays.   Several themes emerged that seemed legitimately to connect learning about urban life in the ancient multicultural metropolis of Carthage with student service to their contemporary home in a less than vibrant Midwestern college town:  the invisibility of poor and socially disadvantaged residents in both the archaeological record and in modern town/gown relations; the importance of public art in creating a “cool” urban ambience; the role of euergetism and patronage by civically-minded private citizens in raising the cultural profile and quality of life in ancient and modern cities.