Connecting Muncie Neighborhood partners and resources
Community-neighborhood projects
Ball State faculty, students, and community partners worked together this spring on a number of immersive learning projects in and around Muncie.
Anthony Northside Neighborhood Living Quality
Faculty Mentor: Jason Yang, Department of Geography
Community Partner: Muncie Action Plan, Anthony Northside Neighborhood Association
Brightfield to Bright Future
Faculty Mentor: Sanglim Yoo
Community Partner: Sierra Club Hoosier Chapter
More to come!
Students in PLAN 203: Regional Analysis and Design, conducted solar potential analysis for brownfields in Muncie. They applied Geographic Information Systems (GIS) to study the ownership of the brownfields, current land use and zoning ordinances, preexisting conditions, and then analyzed solar PV potentials using a publicly available PV watts tool developed by the US Department of Energy.
The project focused primarily on the reuse of brownfields for solar PV installation. Brownfields are previously developed land that former use, like the potential presence of hazardous substances, makes reuse complicated. PLAN 203 students identified six brownfield sites in Muncie for potential solar PV installation. Together with brownfields, students also analyzed the solar PV potentials for city-owned facilities including fire stations and Muncie Sanitary District facilities. Two fire stations and two of Muncie Sanitary District’s water treatment facility sites were selected.
Explore the story map created for the project.
Faculty Mentor: Sanglim Yoo
Department: Urban Planning
Community Partner: Sierra Club Hoosier Chapter
Students: Adam Coleson, Lauren Doppke, Michael Grossniklaus, Elise Jones, Kaelyn Leach, Enzo Lundy, Mattew Pytel, Kaylie Slate, Eric Snowden, and Christian Terrell
The goal of this project was to map the quality-of-life for Muncie neighborhoods, and specifically to map the living quality for the Anthony-Northside neighborhood using GIS and remote sensing techniques. Four general categories of living quality indicators were evaluated for each house in the neighborhood and fifteen maps were created in this project: one map for Home Insulation; two maps for Home value and Lot size; one map for Lot Greenness, ten maps for its adjacency to community amenities, and one Overall Living Quality Index map.
Home Insulation for each house was evaluated from a thermal infrared image collected by students using a FLIR One thermal camera. Home value and lot size were obtained from Zillow.com. Lot Greenness was assessed based the greenness percentage in each lot, which was derived from the USA NAIP NDVI (Normalized Difference Vegetation Index) imagery. Proximity to community amenities including Clinics, Schools, Libraries, Restaurants, USPS Mailboxes, Bus Stops, Parks, Bike Trails, Recreations, and Fire Stations were analyzed using Network Analysis in ArcGIS Pro and ArcGIS Online. The values of all indicators were scaled to categories of 1 to 5, with 1 being the lowest living quality and 5 being the highest. The Overall Living Quality Index was obtained by averaging all fourteen living quality indicators.
Explore some of the story maps created using the collected data.
Image Gallery
Faculty Mentor: Jason Yang
Department: Geography
Community Partner: Muncie Action Plan, Anthony-Northside Neighborhood Association
Course: Advance Remote Sensing – GEOG 437
Congratulations to the Whitely Community Council’s Ken Hudson and Frank Scott, as well as Ball State Associate Professor Kiesha Warren-Gordon (Criminal Justice) for their recently published article in the Journal of Community Engagement and Higher Education! “Voices of Partnership within the Critical Service-Learning Framework” discusses how community partners can be involved in all states of the critical service learning process, including course planning and collaborative research.
ABSTRACT:
Over the course of the past three decades, service learning has become a major component in higher education. Heretofore, however, there has been no published research that focuses on the community partner or that assesses the role of the community partner within the community-service-learning (CSL) model. This paper fills that gap by focusing on the community partner relationship as delineated by Mitchell (2008), the community partner’s position in CSL, and the authentic relationships between the community partner, class, and instructor. Specifically, we address the following question: How do community partners articulate their voices within the CSL framework? This paper argues that community partners may articulate their own voices and concerns through the use of autoethnography, as well as through involvement in all stages of the CSL process, including course-planning and subsequent collaborative scholarship.
In the Spring 2020 Semester, the Virginia Ball Center for Creative Inquiry hosted an amazing program allowing students with the BSU English Department in partnership with the Muncie Arts and Culture Council to explore the “makers” movement becoming increasingly popular in our cities. The investigation covered some of the cool makerspaces here in Muncie and culminated in a large enough collection of stories and data for 2 print books – a compilation of oral histories and a collection of photo essays featuring stories of Muncie makers. Learn more at the website for the project on the Virginia B. Ball Center for Creative Inquiry’s site, and check out these other awesome resources!
Project Website | Seminar Facebook Page | Interactive Map of Muncie & Surrounding Area Makerspaces
Faculty Mentor: Laura Romano
Department: English
Community Partner: Muncie Arts and Culture Council
Student Team: Stressca Nathaniel, Tamera Sims, Jack Satter, Elizabeth Baum, Mason Killebrew, Jessica Snow, Andrew (Drew) Catalano, Halie Wills, Sarah Morrow, Laura Romano, Darrin Sims, Elizabeth Riester, Hannah (Cali) Fehr
PHOTO provided by the Anthony Northside Neighborhood Association
The stone gateway at the entrance to the Wheeling Park Addition at Wheeling/Cowing and another remaining stone boundary post on Wheeling are the last standing structures in Muncie born of the generosity of Harriett B. Anthony.
In April 2019 the Anthony-Northside Neighborhood Association (ANNA) discovered these monuments were in the path of the city’s planned reconstruction of Wheeling Avenue. A mad scramble was made to find the funding and resources to save the historic gates. With the help of numerous state and local organizations including Ball State’s College of Architecture and Planning, Indiana Landmarks, the Muncie Board of Works, and the Federal Highway Administration funds were eventually allocated for the Indiana Department of Transportation to remove the iconic brickwork and return them to their original locations once the Wheeling project completes.
Read the whole story and see more photos of the project on ANNA’s website!