CSUN Students Study Empathy Through Art

A 6-inch-tall elderly woman dressed in rags, her skin weathered and leathery, huddles over a shopping cart that holds her life’s possessions. A miniature clay Vietnam veteran shields himself in a cardboard hovel, holding a sign asking for spare change.

Both eerily lifelike sculptures--wedged with dozens more under the Halstead Houses trailers at Cal State Northridge--are part of an unusual art project designed by instructor Edie Pistolesi for students in five art classes, the vast majority of whom want to be elementary schoolteachers.

By having students research issues of homelessness and re-create the environments in which homeless people live, Pistolesi isn’t just educating future teachers or artists, she’s tutoring them in empathy.

The project began with the study of earthworks, inherently temporary sculptures created with natural materials--a ring of interlaced maple leaves floating on a creek, for example. The 100 or so students and teacher quickly decided that Los Angeles’ earthworks would be less bucolic and more urban. Thus the replica homeless encampments.

By carefully creating a replica cardboard shack for her doll, senior Mary Gilchrist-Brock said her understanding of homelessness has grown dramatically.

“If there’s anything I’ve taken from this project, it’s that I don’t know what it is to be homeless. I’m not homeless,” she said. “But I’m more aware, more sympathetic.”

On a more practical note, Gilchrist-Brock has already put her empathy into action at the Los Angeles County school where she is a teaching assistant. One of the students with whom she works is homeless.

According to Beverly Evans, the project coordinator of Los Angeles Unified School District’s Homeless Education Office, a fall 1995 survey found 1,103 homeless children in the district. She estimates that actual student homelessness could be much greater, perhaps 2% to 3% of the district’s 650,000 youngsters.