School desegregation is a public issue that involves

and affects youth. It’s a vital contemporary matter that requires

historical background to understand. It continues to provoke debates

among reasonable and well-intentioned people, who disagree about both

goals and solutions. In all these respects, it is an ideal topic for

sustained work in schools as a key component of civic education.

Last fall, we worked with students at a local high school in Maryland

to create an interactive, deliberative website

about the epic history of desegregation in their own district. ("We"

means the Democracy

Collaborative and the Institute

for Philosophy & Public Policy, both at the University of

Maryland.) We have now collaborated with NABRE, the Network of Alliances

Bridging Race and Ethnicity (pronounced “neighbor”), to

develop a plan for a replicating the same project in many school districts.

This year is the 50th anniversary of Brown v Board of Education,

the first of a series of 50th anniversaries of events in the Civil

Rights Era. Coming to understand the difficult choices made in one’s

own community seems both a good way to commemorate this history and

an excellent foundation for making choices today.

I came across a quote today by Myles

Horton, the great founder of the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee,

which trained Rosa Parks and so many other heroes of the labor and civil

rights movements. Horton said that he had learned from decades of nonviolent

struggle against injustice that "the way to do something

was to start doing it and learn from it."

I recognize the limitations to this approach. It’s good to have a "strategic

plan" with goals and methods all arranged in proper order. Yet

often in civic work, improvisation is both a necessity and an inspiration.

As long as you keep your mind open, listen to others, and try to learn

from everything you do, it’s sometimes wise to start working even before

you know exactly what you are doing.

I write this as I continue to read articles about local geography and

its effects on nutrition—all because I want to obtain a grant

that can support our local work with kids.

I don’t know where that work will take us, but it seems important to

sustain a nascent institution by grasping the opportunities that come

along. (I don’t mean to compare myself and my colleagues to Miles Horton,

because we’re not struggling against injustice as he did. But we do

have a similarly cavalier attitude toward planning.)

This is the latest plan for a grant proposal that would allow us to

work with high school kids, doing research in the community and generating

public products for the website that they have been building at www.princegeorges.org.

It is important for people to consume healthy food: products that are

low-fat, high-fiber, varied, and cooked with fresh ingredients. It is

also important for people to walk to work or to school and to complete

routine errands such as food shopping on foot—if the local streets

are safe. This is because regular activity plus healthy nutrition decreases

the risk of cardiovascular disease and diabetes and may relieve depression

and obesity.

Promoting healthy nutrition and walking is especially important today,

since obesity is increasing at an alarming rate, above all among adolescents.

Also, physical activity is lower among minorities and people with lower

education levels and less income.

A standard approach is to educate people to live more active

lifestyles, but such efforts tend to be disappointing. Changes in the

environment are more promising. To find out what environmental factors

influence whether people walk, consume healthy food, and (specifically)

walk to purchase healthy food, we will first survey a large sample of

students about their own nutrition and exercise within the preceding

24 hours. They will be asked exactly where they walked during that period

(i.e., the addresses or names of the places they visited). The respondents’

home addresses will also be collected, along with some demographic information.

This survey will allow us to estimate the distance that each student

walked using GIS methods, without relying on their own approximations.

Under our direction, a smaller group of high school and college students

will then collect data on the walkability of local streets; the danger

of crime on those streets; and the availability, cultural characteristics,

and price of healthy food in the community. To collect some of these

data, students will walk around the neighborhood with Palm Pilots, filling

in a field survey. The data that they collect will be layered onto a

GIS map. The most useful parts of this map (for example, the locations

of healthy food sources) will be made public on the website.

By combining these two sets of data—on student behaviors and

home addresses; and on local physical features—we hope to develop

a mathematical model that shows the relationships between active lifestyles

and specific aspects of the local environment

We hypothesize that it is not only the proximity of healthy food sources

that increases the chance that people will walk to these sources and

consume healthy food. It also matters how safe the streets are between

the person’s home and the store or restaurant; the price and cultural

attractiveness of food at that establishment; the concentration of stores

near the destination; and other variables that have never been studied

together in projects of this kind.

I’m busy trying to raise money for the Prince

George’s Information Commons, our project that helps local kids

use the Internet for civic purposes. There’s one specific grant opportunity

that I want to go after, and it has a Sept. 2 deadline.

Given the terms of the grant opportunity ("research in active

living"), I can imagine us doing these three things:

1. We could help kids to map the walkable streets, parks, and healthy

food sources of the r community, so that we can investigate whether

that kind of research makes adolescents more aware of health issues,

more prone to healthy behavior, and more civically engaged. Our method

would be to give them (and a control group) questionnaires both before

and after the course, and measure the change.

2. We could help kids to produce public documents—such as maps,

brochures, website materials—that advertise the health assets

in the community, and investigate whether these materials lead to positive

health outcomes in the school or community. Our method would be to give

students in a set of classes a questionnaire, then expose them to the

materials that our kids create, and then survey them again.

3. We could use the data that the kids collect to generate genuine

research findings of value to other communities.

I’m convinced that the funder actually wants #3, and it’s the hardest

item for me to conceive. We could say that we will collect baseline

data on walkability, nutritional quality, and crime, and use these data

for research purposes—but I doubt that that’s specific enough.

We could say that we will investigate whether proximity to healthy assets

correlates with good health, controlling for lots of stuff, but I’m

not sure that kind of correlational research is rigorous enough. We

could say that we will resurvey the neighborhood periodically to establish

how much change occurs in walkability and other health variables. But

I’m not sure how interesting the mere rate of change would be. Or we

could say that we will use specific changes in the community as "natural

experiments." But then I think we need to describe one likely change

that we will be able to investigate. I haven’t thought of one yet.

At

several meetings that I have attended recently, I’ve heard about young people

or poor people who have "documented" some asset, problem, or activity.

It occurs to me that academics and other professional researchers "document"

things only as a first stage in research (if they do it at all). Their real interests

are comparing, assessing, and explaining phenomena, not merely listing or portraying

them. I understand why disdavantaged people stick to documentation; it requires

fewer skills and resources. But much more power comes with assessment and explanation.

I’m starting to think that the rich do research while the poor get "documentation."

The solution is to try to involve young people, poor people, and other disadvantaged

folks in real research, whenever possible.

In this connection: a colleague

of mine has Palm Pilots with database software installed. We’re going to lend

them to high school kids, whom we’ll train to walk around the neighborhood conducting

surveys of physical assets. The data they collect can then be used to generate

maps, which we will post for public use on the Prince

Georges Information Commons site. Later, we’ll help the kids use the data

they collect for genuine research.

The topic that we’re planning to study

is "healthy living," which includes:

1. exercise and "walkability"
2.

security from crime, and
3. nutrition

All of these factors can be placed

on the same maps, so that it’s possible to see, for example, where there are sources

of healthy food that are also safe and walkable.

We’re going to start with walkability and crime. Walkability is relatively

easy because there is a standard survey instrument that kids can easily

use to determine whether each street segment is walkable. It’s very

straightforward for the kids to create a map with the walkable streets

colored in and the unwalkable ones left white (or something like that).

They just walk down a street and fill out a checklist on a Palm Pilot.

We can simultaneously work on crime. One idea would be to try to get

actual crime statistics from the police and add them to the map. Apparently,

police departments do not like to release these data—although maybe

we could overcome that problem. Another option would look like this:

The kids would take digital photos of places that they consider very

dangerous, and very safe. They would compare and discuss their pictures.

They would then show their collected pictures of safe and unsafe places

to experts, such as police officers and criminologists, who would offer

their opinions. Once the kids had reflected on their choices, they would

declare certain areas to be relatively safe and unsafe, and mark the

map accordingly.