Alvernia teams up with the GoggleWorks Center for the Arts for Bachelor of Arts in Creativity program.
By Susan Shelly
To combat headwinds facing their industry, institutions of higher education are getting creative. In one of its newest ventures, Alvernia is taking that strategy literally.
An expanded partnership with the GoggleWorks Center for the Arts has led to the creation of the Bachelor of Arts in Creativity program. With the GoggleWorks and Alvernia’s John R. Post Center at Reading CollegeTowne located a few blocks from each other in downtown Reading, Alvernia believes the collaboration will provide significant benefits to the community.
The new major, which will launch in the fall, gives students access to GoggleWorks artists and studios, enabling them to work with materials such as wood, clay and hot glass as they gain practical skills to prepare them for jobs and careers. The program will be offered with concentrations in fine art, game arts, and digital music and sound.
“Research has shown that humans are becoming less and less creative,” said Nathan Thomas, professor and director of Alvernia’s theatre program. “But this program encourages increasing creativity in our students and gives them all kinds of opportunities to reach out and gain experience in arts and other endeavors.”
The creativity program, which is largely built on current courses, can easily be combined with other programs to create double majors. A creativity student in the fine arts specialization, for instance, could create a double major by adding digital media marketing.
The program, which will offer electives, was designed to be flexible in hopes of making it appealing to a wider population than traditional day students.
Levi Landis, GoggleWorks’ president and executive director, hopes the creativity major will bring about a new wave of artists who will remain in Berks County, contributing to the local economy while creating a more vibrant, thriving arts culture.
“At GoggleWorks, we often see people rise as artists, only to leave the area and go work and create somewhere else,” Landis said. “What we’re trying do is to build an arts economy here, and we need our artists to be present to make that happen.”
According to the National Endowment for the Arts, arts and culture is an area of the national economy that is on the rise, having added nearly $888 billion to the U.S. economy in 2017.
“The arts and cultural sector is growing much faster than the rate of the total economy,” Thomas said. “There are a lot of opportunities for students in this major.”
The expanded partnership between Alvernia and GoggleWorks also advances the work of the university’s O’Pake Institute for Economic Development and Entrepreneurship’s cultural coalition, a group organized in 2022 that is working toward improvements in the areas of arts and culture, community and neighborhood revitalization, and education and workforce development.
“This new program will certainly benefit our downtown revitalization as it results in enhanced opportunities for arts and culture,” Landis said. “The entire community will benefit from this.”
Thomas credited Alvernia’s administration for expanding arts opportunities when many institutions are minimizing their programs for economic reasons.
“I think Alvernia is doing everything it can to be extremely successful, and I think administrators realize that the arts play a big part in that,” Thomas said.
