Integrating words and images, arts and academics, school and community: Columbia College Chicago, and the Chicago Public School students and teachers who partner with it, have their eyes on the big picture.

It's a striking image: a gritty Chicago intersection, seen through a car windshield, itself framed by two men, the driver peering forward, the passenger turning back as if in reflection. The view is from the inside—inside the car, inside the neighborhood. Flip it over and you have an invitation to come see what the photographer and a group of other young Chicagoans see in their city and their communities at the annual "Talkin' Back: Chicago Youth Respond" exhibit at the Museum of Contemporary Photography at Columbia College.

The exhibit, which features works that combine text and image, is held in spring of each year. It is a joint project of the Museum and Project AIM (Arts Integration Mentorship) of the Center for Community Arts Partnerships at Columbia College. The 2009 exhibit featured the work of 150 students from six Chicago schools, including Itzel Guadarramma, who took the photo printed on the invitation. Many of the pieces were the work of students who, like Guadarramma, participated in the Museum's "Picture Me" program funded by the Fry Foundation. It is a program that sets high expectations for students, takes both their photographic efforts and their life experiences seriously —and then gives them the exhilarating reward of having their work shown in a downtown gallery.

"Picture Me" students attend one of three large Chicago public high schools: Marie Sklodowska Curie Metropolitan High School, Benito Juarez Community Academy High School, and Nicholas Senn High School. Participants learn the basics of analogue and digital photography, view masterworks from the Museum's collection, and are encouraged to develop visual literacy, critical thinking, and their own artistic voice and style. Teachers are drawn from Columbia College adjunct photography instructors and graduate students; the work includes field trips to examine images in the Museum with a view to understanding technical and thematic choices made by master photographers. Despite some who protest that there's "nothing interesting in my neighborhood— I have to go downtown to make photos," students learn to turn their cameras on their own families and communities. The end results offer some intimate and often revealing views of their world.

The fledgling photographers are often academically so-so students, says Museum education manager Corinne Rose. "A lot of them feel disconnected from school. We treat them with respect, we set high expectations—and they meet them." In making work they care about, students often become more engaged in school. Participating in the after-school program is conditional on maintaining acceptable school performance. For some students that provides the motivation to get serious about classes; for others, the challenge of developing skills and communicating ideas takes their engagement to a different level. "So many kids are drawn to the arts because they need to express themselves and want to talk about their community," says Rose. "If they didn't have this opportunity some of them might fall through the cracks."

"Talkin' Back" also includes student work from Project AIM, which brings teaching artists together with school faculty at nine Chicago-area elementary schools to explore ways to integrate arts into the curriculum. That goes way beyond making sure there is room for arts in the class schedule. According to project manager Cynthia Weiss, "It's about how arts can help promote literacy but also the other way around, how what students read can inform their art, or how the equations and rules of algebra can connect with the rules of poetry." The 2009 exhibit featured a collaborative installation called "1000 Words/ 1000 Pictures," in which students explored relationships between photography and writing.

Like the two men in Guadarramma's photo, the students who seize the opportunities presented by the two Columbia programs are facing two ways: reflecting on their everyday lives and their communities today, but also looking to the future. Heriberto Quiroz's work attracted the attention of Chicago Tribune photographer Antonio Perez, who has since become his mentor; Quiroz has received a scholarship at Columbia and is majoring in photography. "The class has given me good opportunities, it's opened doors for me," he says. Juan Torres, another student photographer, had a similar reaction: "This whole experience with photography is incredible," he wrote to Rose in a thank-you note. "It's taken me to places I never thought of going." Comments like theirs help reinforce the Fry Foundation's long-held conviction, at the heart of its grantmaking, that engagement in the arts can be a transformative experience.