Minerva Santos is featured in the photo display.

An innovative collaboration between students in an English 101 class at Calvin College and residents of the Burton Heights community in Grand Rapids is being celebrated through early April at the college’s Center Art Gallery.

“The Good City: Burton Heights in Image and Word,” or “La Buena Ciudad: Burton Heights en Imagen y Palabra,” brings together both images and text, in Spanish and English, to paint a picture of one of the city’s most interesting neighborhoods.

The exhibit opened with a community reception on Feb. 27 and is on display at Calvin until April 8.

Calvin professor Debra Rienstra led the English 101 class, an introductory offering that is required for all Calvin students. She saw the writing project as a way to enliven and enrich a course students often dread taking.

Calvin professor Lissa Schwander and sons view the photo project.

“The standard English 101 paper,” she said, “is an academic exercise read only by the instructor and perhaps a few fellow students. This project, on the other hand, asked students to do writing with an immediate, real-world use and a potentially large audience.”

Calvin senior photography major Melissa Keeley of Midland Park, N.J., took the exhibit’s 27 photographs.

Keeley photographed residents in their homes. “The setting of their home,” she said, “is integral because it creates an intimacy between the viewer and the subject.”

The project was inspiring for Keeley.

Melissa Keeley

“I met so many great people,” she said, “and really experienced the beauty of the community in Burton Heights.”

Rienstra’s students feel the same way. Prior to their interviews, they read up on cities, studying everything from the New Urbanism movement to Scripture for insight on what makes a city great. Then they went to Burton Heights, site of a major Calvin community partnership (funded by a three-year HUD Office of University Partnerships grant), to talk to residents about “their lives, jobs, families, hopes, dreams, fears, insecurities and what they envisioned to be important in the good city,” said Rienstra. “The people challenged our abstract ideals with concrete, living examples.”

The quotes that Rienstra’s students drew from the interviews are telling:

“People in greater Grand Rapids ignore it (Burton Heights).”

“Good people, diversity and neighborhood associations are three positive qualities about my neighborhood.”

“I had heard of the American dream, and I discovered it here in Grand Rapids.”