A year ago, as the ‘methods’ person, I joined a team of doctoral students and faculty engaged in social action projects with high school students at a school that has social action as part of the curriculum. That semester, we read and analyzed the groups’ notes on success and failure, surprise and disillusionment. Drawn in by the reading, I decided to jump in and facilitate a group myself. Last semester 6 groups (comprising 8-10 high school students and one facilitator in each) met at the school every week, and my group examined truancy.
The students at the school were used to having ‘volunteer coaches’ come in and facilitate projects. However, the ‘coach’ role as I experienced it was a combination of facilitation, teaching, researching, and advising on a wide variety of issues and concerns besides the project itself. The more I interacted with students, the more I felt I needed to learn about what they were thinking and feeling and how they were interpreting their roles in these projects. Were they ‘doing school’ – only a different type of school? How sustained was their interest? Did that matter? How were we defining success? To what degree were we, volunteer coaches in the school, thinking about the ethical ramifications of student activism both in and out of school.
One point that became clearer to me at the end of the semester was that students were not naïve about structural causes of oppression, but they did seek to distance themselves from the links between their personal and societal problems partially because of the ways in which this knowledge might serve to ‘place’ and ‘name’ them. The power of their personal experiences was at times denied by students because such experiences have also served to ‘name’ and ‘place’ them within status hierarchies. Such links need to be drawn out carefully and with sensitivity so that they serve to empower while providing solidarity. By the end of the semester the group had certainly done something and there was a relationship that was growing between the students and myself, and yet, a lot was missing.
After the semester ended, I went to India, attended an Education conference and met with grassroots activists in the field of education. There I found renewed inspiration for the work that I am trying to do here in the United States. I met Bunker Roy, the founder of Barefoot Colleges in India. Barefoot College (after the Barefoot doctors of China) does not credential anybody. But the college serves as the ground for social action all over India. Participants learn and train to solve immediate problems in their communities – barefoot architects build eco-friendly houses, barefoot solar engineers solve the problem of electricity and so on. I asked Bunker Roy if I could visit and learn. His reply was characteristic of the philosophy of the Barefoot Colleges– “Come,” he said, and “unlearn.” I plan on doing that this year.
Saturday, February 24, 2007
Friday, February 23, 2007
Community Organizing and Urban Education VII: In Youth Action, Power Precedes Engagement, Learning, and Understanding
[To read the entire series, go here.]
[To see our full presentation on our youth action project at AERA in messy MS Word Format on GoogleDocs go here.]
People don’t do anything unless they are motivated to action first. As Saul Alinsky stated,
This creates some real challenges when one tries to engage inner-city students in social action projects, as we are trying to do in a project in Milwaukee. You can run into a catch-22: they don’t want to do anything because they don’t think they can accomplish anything, and they don’t think they can accomplish anything because they haven’t done anything.
In Milwaukee, we are working with students who are required to partipate in a social action project in school. In contrast with most youth action efforts, then, these youth don’t necessarily arrive with any particular desire to act or with any sense of their own power.
We are beginning to learn that one of the answers to the catch-22 may be just to have students “do something” related to an issue they have expressed some interest in. If they are interested in the police, have them tour a police station, or have them visit a children’s court. Such visits allow them to ask questions and engage with people in power, it gives them some voice, however small. And this voice may become a small kernel of accomplishment that we may be able to hang some interest in action on.
This “just do it approach” is not one that we understood at the beginning of this year, but we are planning to make it a central aspect of our methodology next year.
At the same time, we have learned that we should start only with topics around which we can imagine students taking some coherent action. The point is not to force students to do what we want them to, but to give them a sense, from the beginning, that this topic is linked directly to action—even if they want to change what that action is.
For example, last year some groups expressed interest in antagonistic police relations with young people—something all of them had some experience in. These groups stumbled around for weeks, unable to find anything that seemed to engage them and that seemed realistically achievable. We spent a lot of time sitting in small rooms having dialogues that didn’t really go anywhere.
This year, we started police relations groups linked to a planned action—that they would develop a curriculum to teach younger kids how to engage with the police. And we believe that it is in part because these students had a sense of a goal from the beginning that they began much more quickly to start actually doing something (distributing a survey, for example) than had the groups the year before.
Both of these techniques—getting youth “out there” to engage with the realities of the situations they want to affect, and defining some achievable goal from the first place—relate to Alinsky’s principle of power and learning. Only when youth have a concrete sense that they can affect some aspect of their community that they dislike is there much chance that they will begin to take ownership of a project that is otherwise just another school requirement.
It’s not rocket science. In retrospect, it seems obvious. But engaging youth in social action projects in school—however limited—is not something we usually do. And learning how to do this successfully will demand that a willingness to face up to our own ignorance.
[To see our full presentation on our youth action project at AERA in messy MS Word Format on GoogleDocs go here.]
People don’t do anything unless they are motivated to action first. As Saul Alinsky stated,
If people feel they don’t have the power to change a bad situation, then they do not think about it. Why start figuring out how you are going to spend a million dollars if you do not have a million dollars, or are ever going to have a million dollars—unless you want to engage in fantasy? (p. 105)Alinsky argued that it is only when people sense they have some power to make some changes in their world that “they begin to think and ask questions about how to make the changes.” “It is,” he noted, “the creation of the instrument or the circumstances of power that provides the reason and makes knowledge essential.”
This creates some real challenges when one tries to engage inner-city students in social action projects, as we are trying to do in a project in Milwaukee. You can run into a catch-22: they don’t want to do anything because they don’t think they can accomplish anything, and they don’t think they can accomplish anything because they haven’t done anything.
In Milwaukee, we are working with students who are required to partipate in a social action project in school. In contrast with most youth action efforts, then, these youth don’t necessarily arrive with any particular desire to act or with any sense of their own power.
We are beginning to learn that one of the answers to the catch-22 may be just to have students “do something” related to an issue they have expressed some interest in. If they are interested in the police, have them tour a police station, or have them visit a children’s court. Such visits allow them to ask questions and engage with people in power, it gives them some voice, however small. And this voice may become a small kernel of accomplishment that we may be able to hang some interest in action on.
This “just do it approach” is not one that we understood at the beginning of this year, but we are planning to make it a central aspect of our methodology next year.
At the same time, we have learned that we should start only with topics around which we can imagine students taking some coherent action. The point is not to force students to do what we want them to, but to give them a sense, from the beginning, that this topic is linked directly to action—even if they want to change what that action is.
For example, last year some groups expressed interest in antagonistic police relations with young people—something all of them had some experience in. These groups stumbled around for weeks, unable to find anything that seemed to engage them and that seemed realistically achievable. We spent a lot of time sitting in small rooms having dialogues that didn’t really go anywhere.
This year, we started police relations groups linked to a planned action—that they would develop a curriculum to teach younger kids how to engage with the police. And we believe that it is in part because these students had a sense of a goal from the beginning that they began much more quickly to start actually doing something (distributing a survey, for example) than had the groups the year before.
Both of these techniques—getting youth “out there” to engage with the realities of the situations they want to affect, and defining some achievable goal from the first place—relate to Alinsky’s principle of power and learning. Only when youth have a concrete sense that they can affect some aspect of their community that they dislike is there much chance that they will begin to take ownership of a project that is otherwise just another school requirement.
It’s not rocket science. In retrospect, it seems obvious. But engaging youth in social action projects in school—however limited—is not something we usually do. And learning how to do this successfully will demand that a willingness to face up to our own ignorance.
Thursday, February 22, 2007
A suggestion for content on AESA’s new website
A suggestion for content on AESA’s new website to support the teaching of social foundations courses.
This posting is prompted by my reading a very nice review, at the Education Review, of a recent reissue of Peter McLaren’s Life in Schools, which has become a social foundations textbook of sorts.
I have argued for a while that AESA should develop a resource site that compiles comments, reviews, synopses, and basic information (e.g., table of contents) of a wide range of textbooks for social foundations coursework (including sub-disciplines such as philosophy of education, history of education, etc.). The reasoning is twofold:
1) Almost half of all instructors who teach foundations-type introductory courses are not trained in the social foundations field (see Christine Shea and Carol Henry, "Who's Teaching the Social Foundations Courses?", Journal of Teacher Education, (1986), pp. 10-15. and
Christine Shea, Peter Sola and Alan Jones, "Examining the Crisis in the Social Foundations", Educational Foundations, 2, (1987); this data, by the way, is over 20 years old! Can’t anybody get a doctoral student to do a survey to update this information!?!).
2) More than 75% of all foundations-type introductory courses use standard textbooks (as opposed to individually-created readers) as the primary reading in their course (see my article, Butin, 2004, “The Foundations of Preparing Teachers: Are Education Schools Really ‘Intellectually Barren’ and Ideological?” in Teachers College Record and Butin, under review [send me an email if you want to see the data]).
There is thus an obvious and unmet need to provide good information for new instructors by which they can decide amongst a wide range of textbooks. Such a site would thus allow for comparisons, allow instructors to read about how others have used the texts, potentially provide sample syllabi from instructors who have used the texts, and reviews that help the instructor realize the limits and potential of particular texts. AESA could send out a call to all members asking for their suggestions for textbooks to include. A nice component of this is that any and all authors of foundations-type textbooks would of course (and legitimately) want to self-promote their own work and would most likely have a large amount of resource information that AESA could then post.
An obvious follow-up aspect of this, for a forthcoming post, is that AESA should then also create a resource site for instructors wanting to develop their own course reader…
This posting is prompted by my reading a very nice review, at the Education Review, of a recent reissue of Peter McLaren’s Life in Schools, which has become a social foundations textbook of sorts.
I have argued for a while that AESA should develop a resource site that compiles comments, reviews, synopses, and basic information (e.g., table of contents) of a wide range of textbooks for social foundations coursework (including sub-disciplines such as philosophy of education, history of education, etc.). The reasoning is twofold:
1) Almost half of all instructors who teach foundations-type introductory courses are not trained in the social foundations field (see Christine Shea and Carol Henry, "Who's Teaching the Social Foundations Courses?", Journal of Teacher Education, (1986), pp. 10-15. and
Christine Shea, Peter Sola and Alan Jones, "Examining the Crisis in the Social Foundations", Educational Foundations, 2, (1987); this data, by the way, is over 20 years old! Can’t anybody get a doctoral student to do a survey to update this information!?!).
2) More than 75% of all foundations-type introductory courses use standard textbooks (as opposed to individually-created readers) as the primary reading in their course (see my article, Butin, 2004, “The Foundations of Preparing Teachers: Are Education Schools Really ‘Intellectually Barren’ and Ideological?” in Teachers College Record and Butin, under review [send me an email if you want to see the data]).
There is thus an obvious and unmet need to provide good information for new instructors by which they can decide amongst a wide range of textbooks. Such a site would thus allow for comparisons, allow instructors to read about how others have used the texts, potentially provide sample syllabi from instructors who have used the texts, and reviews that help the instructor realize the limits and potential of particular texts. AESA could send out a call to all members asking for their suggestions for textbooks to include. A nice component of this is that any and all authors of foundations-type textbooks would of course (and legitimately) want to self-promote their own work and would most likely have a large amount of resource information that AESA could then post.
An obvious follow-up aspect of this, for a forthcoming post, is that AESA should then also create a resource site for instructors wanting to develop their own course reader…
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