Monthly Archives: January 2005

kids’ voices

I spent today listening to kids–16 boisterous, funny adolescents from the nearby high school. We had recruited them to talk about their experiences as immigrants (or migrants), and how their eating habits had changed as they had moved to Maryland from West Africa, Central America, the West Indies, the Philippines, or Washington, DC. We taped the whole day so that a smaller group of volunteer students will be able to shape the best parts into an audio documentary on immigration and food. This is the latest stage of our National Geographic project on nutrition.

The parts of the discussion that will find their way into the documentary will be about recipes, memories of meals, shopping and cooking, and health concerns. For today’s blog, I’d like to report on a different topic, a digression. Most of the immigrant kids agreed with one who said: “Living in St. Lucia, I thought [the US] was the great land of opportunity. I never thought it was heaven, like some people do; but if you work hard, you can achieve anything.” (This is a close paraphrase, not a precise quote). When an adult asked if the kids thought that poverty came from laziness, they resisted that thesis, but they kept coming back to it. “If you really want to get something, you can do it. There was a homeless person who went to Harvard.” They acknowledged that there were insurmountable barriers to economic success back in their home countries–for example, the tuition required to attend elementary school. But in the US, success “depends on a person’s drive.”

The same theme of self-reliance and personal responsibility returned when they discussed fast food. “It’s your responsibility what you eat. After all that healthy food back home, you see a big hunk of meat [at McDonalds], you know it’s gotta be bad for you.” One young woman said that advertising could influence people to eat fast food. “Yeah, but that’s your fault cause you can’t control yourself.”

A student from Cote D’Ivoire said that back home, people viewed African Americans as lazy, and white Americans as “slave-drivers.” She said, “I don’t think America is that great of a place, but I do think freedom of speech and freedom of religion–a lot of places don’t have that.”

what should we expect from local work?

When students frame, study, and address local problems, they are likely to acquire local knowledge. For example, if a high school class studies a nearby watershed, develops a restoration plan, and presents it to the local government, the students will surely learn more about the watershed itself. I see three ways of assessing such learning.

1) Maybe the only point of education is to develop knowledge, skills, and dispositions that would apply anywhere. Thus students in the imaginary watershed project should understand science better (thus scoring higher on instruments like the NAEP Science Assessment) and also perform better on CIRCLE’s “Indicators of Civic Engagement,” which measures behaviors like voting, following the news, and attending meetings. We might also expect them to stay in school longer and have fewer disciplinary problems.

2) Maybe we should expect students to improve along dimensions that aren’t well measured by existing standardized tests and surveys–but that could be so measured. For example, engagement with local problems over time could increase students’ teamwork skills, capacity for public speaking, etc. These are generalized outcomes that we may not value sufficiently; but we could assess them.

3) Or maybe we should be glad that students have learned about the watershed itself. After all, nowhere is it written that the proper unit of analysis is always the nation. Just as we would like Americans to understand the Bill of Rights, so we might like residents of a county to understand the source of their own water–not because this knowledge will apply elsewhere or lead students to acquire generalized knowledge later on, but because it is valuable in itself.

If the third option holds any appeal, then it raises new questions about standardized tests. Almost by definition, they cannot adequately value local knowledge.

“community as text”

Last night and today, I’m attending a meeting organized by the Coalition for Community Schools. The Coalition has convened representatives of six movements:

  • service learning: community service combined with academic work and reflection
  • environmental education: studying environmental science and applying the knowledge to understand local ecosystems
  • place-based education: studying local communities in order to increase appreciation (as well as knowledge) of disparaged places, such as poor rural areas
  • civic education, which should include the study of local issues and structures of government
  • work-based learning, as defined in the School to Work Opportunities Act of 1990, which supports programs that place students in job settings for academic study.
  • community youth development: which treats young people as assets in community development, and trains and supports them to participate in local organizations and networks.

    • Each of these movements or philosophies of education treats the local community as a “text” for students to interpret–and, to some degree, “rewrite.” There are many examples and stories of truly exciting results. For example, students in a Texas border school district conducted oral histories of their elderly, immigrant relatives, translated the results into English, and used the resulting English/Spanish narratives as textbooks in their schools. On the other hand, using “community-as-text” is hard and often frustrating work, especially when communities do not embrace the participation of students.

    In the end, I think that using the “community as text” is one of several strategies that can bring coherence, purpose, and passion to education. It is not better than an arts focus, a global-cultures focus, a history focus, a tech focus, or various other choices. I do believe, however, that it implies its own set of principles and values, which can be particularly attractive in certain settings. For example, we are motivated to use the community as text in Prince George’s County, MD, because the students are growing up in a fascinating jurisdiction–diverse and rapidly changing–yet people of all ages tend to overlook or discount it as a community. Thus studying the county and disseminating the results is a means of (much needed) community organizing.

    is policy just too complicated?

    Some people think that it’s harder for citizens to participate in politics today than it was 50 years ago, because issues have simply grown more complex. The G.I. bill was relatively simple legislation, so it was easy to organize members of veterans’ groups and others to support it. But health care reform in the 21st century is enormously complex. No one really knows what should be done. Some people argue that public engagement has declined as a result.

    I think there must be something to this theory. Between 1952 and 1992, the National Election Study (NES) asked people whether they agreed with the following statement: “Sometimes politics and government seem so complicated that a person like me can’t really understand what’s going on.” Generally, people have found politics too complicated–or at least, have doubted their own capacity to understand it. However, the results do not show a lot of decline in Americans’ sense that politics is too complicated for them. The trend is pretty flat. Unfortunately, the question was dropped in 1996, and it changed a bit in 1988, when people were offered the option of refusing both choices (“too complicated” and “not too complicated”). If we assume that the people who chose “neither” would otherwise have said “too complicated,” then there was an erosion of confidence after 1984. But that’s a big assumption.

    By the way, people’s impression of complexity is not the only thing that might affect their participation. Regardless of their subjective beliefs, the actual complexity of policy issues might block their engagement. And perhaps we should be a little disappointed that people haven’t gained confidence in their understanding of politics. Before World War II, the mean level of educational attainment of the US population was elementary school; by 2000, it was two years of college. Yet we feel no more capable of understanding policy–perhaps somewhat less.

    a map of civic renewal

    Here’s a map of the civic renewal network. I made it in the following way. I visited TouchGraph’s amazing GoogleBrowser, which generates diagrams of the links among websites, as recognized by Google. I entered three URLs that to me represent important nodes in the real (not merely virtual) network for civic renewal in America:

  • The Civic Practices Network, a gateway to such fields as asset-based community development, public journalism (i.e., news that tries to support citizen participation), and civic environmentalism (efforts to protect nature collaboratively).
  • CIRCLE, where I work. We try to cover the fields of civic education and youth politics, since it’s critical to prepare the next generation of citizens.
  • Common Cause, an organization that seeks to reform government and make it more responsive to citizens.

    • TouchGraph generates a dynamic map that moves and expands as you adjust it. It’s great to watch. The map that you can view on my site is static, because I pasted it into a graphic file. Nevertheless, it neatly shows the relationships among such fields as neighborhood activism, civic engagement on college campuses, public deliberation, national service, and public journalism. It is evidence of a robust and fairly tight network of organizations that are improving the quality and power of citizens’ public work.

    This is a map of civic renewal, not the map. It has at least three major limitations: (1) I chose the three initial nodes–not arbitrarily, but guided by my personal experience; (2) Google’s database of links is imperfect and incomplete; and (3) links among websites are not always meaningful. One site can link to another without having anything to do with it; or two groups can work closely together but neglect to exchange links on their sites. (They might not even have websites.) In short, I find my own map fascinating, but my main advice is to use TouchGraph to make your own.