I just spent a whole day with 45 high school students, eight college students, and eight colleagues, talking intensively about the causes of obesity in Prince George’s County, MD, and planning a map-making project that will take us all spring. I have overall responsibility for the project, and this first day felt like a constant crisis, starting at 7 am. The tables we ordered didn’t seem to be there; we didn’t have recorders for some of the focus groups; we thought we’d lost a kid; the pizzas didn’t show up; sleet began to fall while the kids were outside learning how to use Global Positioning devices; and on and on. Actually, all the problems were solved and no damage was done. Once we go over the audiotape, videotape, written notes, and the maps that the kids made, I think we’ll find that it was a rich and highly informative day–a window into the lives of these young people. (Or perhaps a better metaphor would be a mirror, to show the kids what they are like as a group.) But for today, I’m too tired to think straight.

Today, I rode with two colleagues up and down the streets of Hyattsville, Mount Rainier, and Riverdale, Maryland–communities northeast of the District of Columbia. We are planning a high school course for later this spring, in which students will make maps to show features of the local geography that might contribute to healthy or unhealthy living. This is a fairly complex and ambitious project, now involving six graduate students or colleagues from the university, one high school teacher, and a colleague from the Orton Foundation in Vermont. Today we were simply trying to decide what precise areas we should map. The landscape is largely suburban, with strip malls, big highways, and used car lots. There are also patches of older housing on urban grids, and some large apartment complexes. Although the topography is suburban (and sprawl is an issue), the population is stereotypically urban: most people are African American or Latino, with a low-to-moderate income level, and there is a sprinkling of mostly White graduate students and artists. Although I suspect that even most residents would not describe the setting as attractive, there is great cultural diversity. Planning to make maps of an area forces you to recognize the complexity and the wealth of human assets that it contains.

I spent this morning walking around Hyattsville, MD, with high school kids, who were entering data about each street segment into Palm Pilots. We want to collect information that will help us see what features of each block make it attractive or unattractive for walking. For example, are the sidewalks clear and continuous? How much vegetation is there? Are there curb cuts? Is there an incline? We will later collect information about (a) people’s eating and exercise habits; and (b) the availability of various types of food and recreation in the neighborhood. When we put everything together, we should be able to build a statistical model showing what features of the local environment influence people’s choices to walk and buy food. We’ll also be able to generate public maps showing where one can walk most safely and buy the healthiest food in the community.

Today was a day for thinking about civic education from several different angles. I participated in a Steering Committee meeting of the National Alliance for Civic Education; reviewed research grant proposals submitted to CIRCLE (on aspects of youth civic engagement); and worked on my own application to the National Endowment for the Humanities. This proposal is due next week, so I’m focusing a lot of my on budgetary and other practical details. (My colleagues and I are applying to replicate our high school students’ unusual oral history project in several sites, including Jackson, Mississippi and Miami, Florida. The proposed topic is segregation and desegregation in local school districts, during the period 1954-2004. Students will interview surviving witnesses, think of several alternative strategies that could have been adopted in 1954, and create interactive websites to help community members think about what should have been done. That’s not an easy question, since each strategy would involve different risks and tradeoffs.)

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We’ve made it past the first stage of a grant competition to provide

funds for our local mapping

work with high school kids. That’s great news, except that now

I have to write a full proposal on short notice. Among other questions,

I need to answer this: "What is unusual about your project?"

We intend to help high school students who are not college-bound to

play leading roles in original scholarly research on a matter of public

importance, and see whether that work increases both their academic

skills and their civic commitment. The topic, which I’ve discussed

here before, is healthy nutrition and exercise and the degree to which

these outcomes are affected by the physical environment.

The Orton Foundation provides a great collection of youth-generated

maps at communitymap.org.