Taking a break
I'll be traveling for the next couple of weeks, so no more postings until after June 10. Thanks for reading
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I'll be traveling for the next couple of weeks, so no more postings until after June 10. Thanks for reading
Harry Boyte and Dennis Donovan teach Public Affairs 1401: "Community Organizing Skills for Public Action" in the Humphrey Institute at the University of Minnesota. The course description reads
This is a hands-on introduction for undergraduate students wanting to develop skills, confidence, and knowledge to make positive change in public affairs. It shows how to get past the culture of critique and pessimism that often dominates in higher education. It acquaints students with hopeful examples of successful citizen organizers and organizations working to tackle tough public problems, from racism to teen pregnancy, failing schools to environmental degradation. The course will educate students about a new, broad movement for civic revitalization beginning to stir in Minnesota, and how students can make contributions to it. In PA 1401, students will gain concepts and practical skills such as thinking politically, forming partnerships across lines of difference, understanding diverse self-interests, mapping power, and knowing about the culture, history and social networks needed to make change.
Harry gave me copies of some of the Final Reflection papers, and I present excerpts here, with the permission of the students.
Before enrolling in your class I did not consider myself to be very political. This is not because I did not have any interest in politics, which I did; it was more because I was always taught that politics were not something to be concerned with. Through this class and our discussions I have come to find that politics are not a taboo subject. Politics affect society and our everyday lives and to not be concerned with, or participate in them is detrimental to our society and our personal lives. In a way I am kind of agitated by this class - but agitation is good, right? I am agitated because now I find myself interested in participating in my community. I feel that because of this class my lifestyle and attitudes have changed. I know that this may sound drastic, but I do feel very affected by this course. Maybe it will be most helpful if I discuss what I have found to be the most influential aspects to me.
I must agree with you when you told us about people feeling powerless. I remember feeling saddened and maybe even a bit offended when you said this, but after further consideration, I found it to be painfully true. I did not want to think of myself as powerless, but reflecting on my life I realized that I would make excuses and find contentment in my everyday mediocrity. Now I find myself as shockingly quite competent. I feel not only like I can have a say in my community, but I also feel as though it is my responsibility to do so.
Honestly, the most important and blatantly obvious aspect that I took away from this course is the power and possibilities of people working together. I have never been in a class with such interesting and talented young people. Obviously you both can relate to what I am saying. It was a moving experience just to see people of my own age with so much potential and so much passion for changing our world. Like I stated in class, this course has given me a sense of pride in my generation. I no longer look in history books longing to have been a part of something meaningful and worthwhile because now I realize that I am a part of something meaningful and worthwhile. — Maggie Kalda
===== Last semester I took a course in global studies; I had to do a research assignment on shanty towns in Lima, Peru. It was one of the most depressing things I have learned about. When I studied slavery in junior high or the Holocaust in high school they were problems of the past…so as tormenting as they were to hear about, it was something I did not have to live with. But now in the present, billions of children are living in shacks and are drinking out of contaminated water. And if I were a pessimist, I would list the other thousands of problems in the world. In history books a hundred years from now children will be reading about these conditions and probably be appalled that people allowed their fellow mankind to suffer. I left my global cities class at the end of the semester with a heavy heart, feeling that the most I could do is sponsor a child and send them twenty-five dollars a month—because hey, saving one life is better than saving none.
I've always felt like making a difference in the world could only be done if you were Oprah, Brad Pitt, or the President. Like a lot of people, I always felt powerless, I always waited for a super hero to be elected and change things. …
I think something is stirring. I think there is a lot of energy—both positive and negative—out there, but I think eventually this huge movement is going to take off. I can feel it. And I hear you guys say all the time that we are making history, and that gives me chills too because I know you're right. — Kelly Heskett
===== When this class began, I had no idea what I was getting myself into. Someone simply told me about a class called "Organizing for the Public Good," and told me that it would be amazing. I had no idea. I came into the class with the mentality that what I was about to experience was going to be challenging coursework, a lot of reading, and a lot of writing. What I actually experienced was a complete shift in the way I see the world and the way I live my life.
As a person, I had to reevaluate my beliefs. I had thought of power as something that was built through relationships, but I don't think I really believed it. As this class rolled onward, I began to truly believe it and it changed the way I see everything. … Instead of trying to gain power through control, we can gain power by sharing it and sharing responsibility.
When I realized that power wasn't what I thought it was, I also realized that I was a powerful person. For the first time, sitting in a position of power with a title didn't define powerful for me. For the first time in my life, I feel like I can really change things and really have an effect on the decisions that are made around me. For the first time I don't feel powerless to change the problems I see in the world around me.
What does it mean then to be a student and a citizen? I know it doesn't mean that I should go vote. It doesn't mean that I need to choose a political party and rally behind their flag. It doesn't even mean that I have to choose a political issue like abortion or gay rights and fight for it with all my energy.
What it does mean is that I am the expert and I am the activist. I am not waiting for other people to fix the problems I see, I can fix them myself and with those around me. As a student, I realize that I have agency and that I can work with others to get things done. It means that I can take power back for myself and return power to those around me. There is no "expert" who will take care of me; I am perfectly capable of taking care of myself. …
What does it mean to be citizen-students? It means we are going to change the world. — Alexander Fink
I'll bet we all wish we could have such impacts on the students in our classes. Perhaps if we put public engagement into what we teach, we would.
I've been dipping into Voices of Hope: The Story of the Jane Addams School for Democracy, the lovely book edited by Nan Kari and Nan Skelton, about which I wrote on May 1. The last chapter, by Kari, is entitled "Shaping Connections with Higher Education". It is a thoughtful account of how the Jane Addams School experience has broken down the distinctions between the roles and allegiances of people in the community and in college, how it connects college students with real life, and how it provides great service-learning and work-study experiences.
I began to wonder, however, how the Jane Addams School experience is relevant to the distinctive role of a research university like the University of Minnesota: to train graduate students to do cutting-edge research and develop their skills and insights about issues important to both scholarship and the broader society. Harry Boyte and I talked about this recently, and came up with a few ideas of what the JAS could provide:
Doing such research would require great skill and sensitivity so as not to reestablish the power differentials and class distinctions between community and higher education that the Jane Addams School community has so successfully broken down. That's the challenge—and the opportunity—of engaged scholarship.
A supplement to the May 2007 issue of TheScientist that just landed in my mailbox deals with "Autoimmunity: Diseases, Mechanisms, and Therapies". The scientific and medical challenges associated with autoimmune diseases (roughly 80 have been identified) are enormous, and it's asserted in the leading editorial that "the overall price tag for treating autoimmune diseases approximates that of cancer and heart disease. What is more, the chronic nature of autoimmune diseases drags whole families into crisis."
Perhaps it's this last factor---the devastating effects on families---that leads to the remarkable number of organizations for specific autoimmune diseases. The last two pages of the supplement list 24 such organizations---a "sampling of international associations, foundations, and societies"---largely organized and funded by patients and their families, that fund research, disseminate information, advocate for services, and even publish medical journals. A sampling of the sampling's web sites
shows the scope and influence of these organizations on the research and treatment of these diseases. Much of the research, and a good deal of the treatment, is done in university medical centers; but it is clear that these activities are strongly influenced by these public patient advocacy groups.
It's an important---if not always recognized---example of public engagement as defined by the CIC Committee on Engagement (2005): "Engagement is the partnership of university knowledge and resources with those of the public and private sectors to enrich scholarship, research, …"
I just got the program for the 9th Annual MCH (Maternal and Child Health) Summer Institute on Addressing Health Disparities: Culture, Communications and Health, to be held July 24-25, 2007 at the Humphrey Center, University of Minnesota West Bank. According to the program,
This Summer Institute will focus on the role of health communications in reducing health disparities affecting women, children, families and communities. Exciting keynote speakers and in-depth breakout sessions will focus on issues of culture and health literacy; the implications of communications inequality; the health communication needs of specific communities of color; and new strategies to increase communication effectiveness. A special feature of the Institute is a sneak preview of the upcoming PBS documentary: “Unnatural Causes: Is Health Inequality Making Us Sick?"
The Institute objectives are listed as
This strikes me as very important, both practically and conceptually. Everything we have learned about working with communities tells us that clear, honest, culturally-appropriate communication is essential to effective public health efforts.
Harry Boyte (personal communication, 2007) argues convincingly that civic engagement is not just "an array of good deeds that can be simply enumerated, without qualitative differentiations", but instead that it is "a field of expanding research that needs to be employed in assessing the nature, quality, and impact of various forms of 'service' or 'voluntarism.' He continues
The most important point to make is that there is, in fact, an interdisciplinary field of public engagement, with parallels to other emergent fields in the past such as environmental studies or women’s studies. This makes “civic” or “public” engagement much richer and more intellectually rigorous than is suggested by simply a listing of voluntary and service activities. Indeed, advances in scholarship and research allow a good many distinctions and judgments. We know, for instance, a great deal about what kinds of experiential learning, pedagogies, and content make for robust, lasting civic and political engagements, knowledge, and inclinations. We also know a lot about what makes for effective deliberative processes in local communities and institutions, or sustained local civic culture change, or effective civic practice by professionals. Since the coin of the realm at research universities is the quality of research and knowledge generation and since special distinction goes to those who are seen as key innovators in important areas of human discovery, it would seem especially important to make the case that there is an important emergent field here…
I'm very much in sync with these sentiments (though I wouldn't totally dismiss well-done volunteering) and would like to see them taken even further. For example, practitioners of community-based participatory research should document their claims that it yields better results (better-designed studies, better subject recruitment, better compliance, more honest responses) than standard community-based research. Practitioners of engaged agricultural research might document—quantitatively rather than anecdotally—that it yields better crops, happier farm families, higher farm income per hour worked, less soil erosion, etc., than traditional agricultural extension work.
Evidence-based demonstrations of effective methodologies and outcomes are rightly expected in medicine, science, and other fields of research. Should publicly-engaged scholarship be held to lower standards?
The Ginsberg Center at the University of Michigan is one of higher education's preeminent centers for civic engagement. Itts mission "is to engage students, faculty, and community members in learning together through community service and civic participation in a diverse democratic society."
One of the Ginsburg Center's most prominent activities is the sponsorship of the John Dewey Lectures. Although Dewey is generally identified with the University of Chicago and Columbia University, he began his academic career as an assistant professor at the University of Michigan in 1884, and left for Chicago ten years later.
The Dewey lectures, begun in 2001 when Nancy Cantor was provost at Michigan, have featured some of the most prominent university voices in public engagement: Ira Harkavy (Penn), Judith Ramaly (Vermont), Barbara Holland (Indiana), George Sanchez (USC), Charles Payne (Duke), and the University of Minnesota's own Harry Boyte. Remarkably, Boyte has been the John Dewey lecturer twice, in 2003 and again in 2007.
The seven Dewey lectures are now online, at http://www.umich.edu/~mserve/faculty/lectures.html. They make rich reading.
Jim Kakalios, my colleague in the Physics Department at the University of Minnesota, has made a great name for himself as the author of The Physics of Superheroes, in which he discusses the possibilities (and impossibilities) of the physics seen in superhero comics and movies.
In an op-ed piece in today's New York Times, Jim writes about Spider-Man's nemesis, Sandman, in the latest hit movie "Spider-Man 3". He explains that, once you get past the villain’s mutation into living sand, the properties of sand that he exhibits are generally correct — and often counterintuitive.
I won’t attempt to summarize the discussion: read the piece, and see the movie. What I do want to point out is that this is a good (if unorthodox) example of engaged scholarship, in the sense of Boyer’s "scholarship of application". It takes a popular phenomenon, applies cutting-edge physics (yes, understanding the behavior of sand-piles, or marginally stable piles of granular material generally, is cutting-edge physics), and returns something educational and accessible. A nice partnership of popular and academic culture.
Kathy Draeger, Statewide Director of the Regional Sustainable Development Partnerships, sent me a copy of a report, “Community vs. Corporate Wind: Does it Matter Who Develops the Wind in Big Stone County, MN?”, authored by Arne Kildegaard and Josephine Myers-Kuykindall in the Department of Economics, University of Minnesota-Morris. Some excerpts from the report’s Introduction set the stage:
Big Stone County on the western extreme of west-central Minnesota is in many ways emblematic of the challenges facing rural America in general, and the Great Plains in particular. Aging, declining population and stagnant agricultural incomes in many cases directly threaten the sustainability of communities. Often it is the high fixed-cost rural schools and other government and community institutions that feel the pinch first.
One of the few promising opportunities in the region is the possibility of commercial development of the wind resource—and in fact, in Big Stone County, there are presently several projects in various stages of development. …
Recently, a number of researchers have focused on how the development of wind takes place, and what consequences this has for local incomes and economic development. Wind developments can be categorized as either corporate- or community- owned. …
An increasing body of empirical research indicates that corporate and community wind development structures are not equal in terms of their local economic impacts, not limited to the owners themselves. In particular, mounting evidence points to the idea that community wind has greater economic impacts on local economies during the operational phase of the project, due to local spending multiplier effects associated with the higher income streams.
The study concludes
Our simple scenario analysis for a 10.5 MW project suggests that community wind has 5 times the economic impact on local value added, and 3.4 times the impact on local job creation, relative to a corporate-owned development. These numbers should probably be considered an upper bound on the differential impacts, since most projects in practice will involve an outside-the-region equity partner, or at the very least a discounted sale of the PTC.
The report is online at http://cda.mrs.umn.edu/~kildegac/CV/Papers/IREE.pdf. It was supported by IREE (Institute for Renewable Energy and the Environment) and the West Central Regional Sustainable Development Partnership. As Kathy Draeger says, “It is a wonderful example of University research supporting and empowering community owned renewable energy.”
Chip Peterson, a geographer in the University of Minnesota's Learning Abroad Center and a member of our Council on Public Engagement, sent me an interesting Op-Ed piece entitled “Community Geography” from the March 2007 issue of the AAG (Association of American Geographers) Newsletter. The article was authored by Don Mitchell from Syracuse University.
The article describes how the Executive Director of a hot food program in downtown Syracuse contacted the Geography Department to ask whether the department could help to create a “Syracuse Hunger Project” (SHP) to “map the face of hunger in the city”. He suspected that the locus of hunger in the city had shifted over time, but that the social services needed to respond had not followed that shift. The piece goes on to describe how a GIS course was reoriented to make the issue a class project, and how, when
… the students’ maps were presented to SHP meetings, the whole tenor of the conversation changed. Those who had been working on hunger forever began to look at the problem in a new way. They saw that indeed thee were large-scale shifts in the geography of poverty … without a similar shift in service provisions. But even more importantly, they began to apprehend the importance of finer-scale geographies… This resulted in … a raising of critical questions about how entitlement programs like food stamps intersect with the social geographies of the city. … In instance after instance, the maps grounded what had heretofore been quite abstract discussions, providing a specific focus for discussion and debate.
The article goes on to describe how this project led to broader initiatives, including the establishment of a “Community Geographer” , “someone with both social-geographic and GIS/spatial analysis skills, who would have full access to departmental and university facilities, students and courses, and the support of the university’s Center for Community and Public Service, but who would be paid by the community. But then, alas, adequate continuing funding could not be found, unless for narrow purposes, because foundations were unwilling to fund something that is open-ended rather than project-based, and town-gown issues made full university funding impractical. Mitchell writes
This conundrum is doubly frustrating because both the Syracuse Hunger Project and the Community Geographer have significantly transformed our department: how we approach our work, how we interact with students, and what our position is in the city and university. Faculty in other departments urge their students to take our classes and to consider geography as a dual major, students report that they have sought out our classes after hearing about SHP and CG work, student evaluations in classes linked to, or that draw from, the work of the SHP and CG indicate a genuine excitement about geographical learning and thinking that is strikingly different from a half dozen years ago. One of the things students report is that geography is becoming known as a place where “real work” gets done …
One can hardly imagine more eloquent or persuasive testimony that public engagement is not only valuable for its own sake, but that it enriches teaching and scholarship.
I spent late yesterday afternoon passing out certificates and medallions to recognize twenty students who have completed the University of Minnesota's Community Engagement Scholars Program.
According to its web site, the Community Engagement Scholars Program
The requirements of the Program are substantial:
One important reward of completing the Program is a Community Engagement Scholar notation on the official academic transcript, something that many colleges and universities have not been able to arrange.
Some of the projects that the students described briefly but movingly at yesterday’s event:
As Jerry Rinehart, our Vice Provost for Student Affairs, said in his closing remarks, it’s from these engagements with real-world, important issues that students truly learn.
I’ve been reading “Pursuing the Endless Frontier”, a collection of essays by Charles M. Vest written during his tenure as president of MIT from 1991-2004 (MIT Press, 2005). Those years were eventful ones for higher education in general and MIT—with its heavy focus on the STEM disciplines and research agendas strongly shaped by industry as well as federal funding—in particular. Vest’s ruminations on those events, and the underlying principles by which they should be understood and managed, are well worth reading.
In the public engagement/technology transfer context, I was particularly interested in Vest’s reflections from 1993-94 on the changing relations between industry, government, and research universities. In this period, he writes (pp. 75-76), such relations were rapidly changing.
As the cold war faded into history, military security as a dominant motivation for federal support of university-based research and advanced education faded with it. The challenge of the highly competitive global marketplace drove fundamental transformation of the R&D function in U.S.-based corporations. Industry generally ceased to do research with moderate or long time-frames and absorbed R&D directly into its product-development process to accelerate product cycle times and improve manufacturing quality and efficiency. Various federal policymakers and appropriators sought to focus more university research on near-term application and commercialization; policy debates raged about the relative merits of “applied research” versus “basic research”.
This turmoil gave universities a rare opportunity to respond to changing national needs and to sort out and clarify the relative roles of industry, government, and universities in funding and performing research and development. We needed to form a broad consensus that it is a necessary function of government to support the conduct of research of a fundamental and/or a long time-horizon to potential application, and to seek recommitment to the U.S. system in which universities are the primary performers of such research. The elegant system in which federal dollars do double duty—supporting the research and creating the next generation of researchers and scientific and engineering leaders—needed to be reaffirmed. Modern industry, fast-paced, innovation-driven, and globally connected, presented fascinating new intellectual challenges to engineering and management researchers. Industry and universities needed to find new ways of working in partnership, ways that would add value to each other, enhancing education and filling the developing national void in research that has medium time-horizons. While doing so, universities needed to reaffirm and adhere to basic academic values, and to establish sound and effective policies for avoiding conflicts of interest.
It’s interesting to read these paragraphs in the context of the critique by Jennifer Washburn that I wrote about a few weeks ago. Vest clearly believes that universities have a responsibility to work for the betterment of this country, and one important way of doing so is to work with industry. This is so not primarily for economic reasons, but rather because the research problems—if properly chosen—are basic and important; new areas of research and teaching are opened up; and students are given an education about the real-world issues that they’ll face when the leave the university.
In later essays Vest recurs to this topic and presents some ideas that would deal with Washburn’s worst criticisms. First, that applications of intellectual property rights should be flexible, so as not to impede basic research. Second, that more than one company from an industrial sector should be involved in university-industry collaborations. This would help to mitigate some of the biggest concerns with the deals that UC Berkeley has made, with Novartis some years ago and with British Petroleum just recently.
Most engaged teaching, learning, and discovery in higher education tends to originate on campus and connect outward. However, in the arts the direction is frequently reversed. A notable example is the 13th annual international conference of Pedagogy and Theatre of the Oppressed (PTO), May 31-June 3, 2007, at the Rarig Center on the University of Minnesota West Bank campus. Information about the conference, which features Augusto Boal, the cofounder of PTO, is available here.
According to its web site,
PTO is a not-for-profit (IRS 501C3) organization with the following mission: To challenge oppressive systems by promoting critical thinking and social justice. We organize an annual meeting that focuses on the work of liberatory educators, activists, and artists; and community organizers.
This organization developed from a series of four conferences held in Omaha, Nebraska from 1995-1998. The conference was based on the ideologies and works of Paulo Freire and Augusto Boal. Using pedagogy and theatre, they each worked with oppressed peoples of the world to develop critical literacies and actions to overcome social systems of oppression.
Biographies of Augusto Boal and Paulo Freire are on the PTO web site. They provide striking examples of how critical social thinking, and art that exemplifies and dramatizes that thinking and moves it forward, can arise out of dire sociopolitical circumstances.
Another noteworthy aspect of the conference—and of engaged scholarship generally—is that it brings together educational institutions that don't often connect with each other: The Department of Theatre Arts and Dance at the University of Minnesota hosts the conference with Metropolitan State University Urban Teacher Program and St. Paul Central High School. Sponsorship is provided by the Institute for Advanced Study and the College of Liberal Arts Scholarly Events Fund at the University of Minnesota, and Macalester College. The media co-sponsor is KFAI Fresh Air Radio.
Today's e-newsletter from the University of Minnesota's Academic Health Center contains an item that reminds us of an eventuality we hope won't happen, but had better be prepared for if it does.
The University's Center for Bioethics has joined with Minnesota Department of Health and the Minnesota Center for Health Care Ethics to develop an ethical framework for allocating essential health care resources during a severe influenza pandemic. To accomplish the goal, the coalition will recruit a broad-based panel of experts and stakeholders to outline the framework and develop recommendations for its implementation. The proposed framework will balance the competing priorities of caring for the sick, preventing spread of the illness, and maintaining critical social systems and economic activities. Jeff Kahn (Center for Bioethics) said, "These are not easy issues, and we appreciate the investment of the Department of Health in efforts to address some of the critical and pressing ethical questions that will arise in the event of a pandemic flu outbreak. We look forward to working with a diverse group of experts and stakeholders on these issues.
This points out how important it is for university, government, and private organizations to work together on crucial societal issues. The university contribution takes a wide variety of forms, and is rarely the whole story.
Today I was shown an article by Brian Rosenberg, President of Macalester College, in the Spring 2007 issue of Macalester Today. I was struck by a passage on p. 17, in which Dr. Rosenberg says
Of the three chief purposes of higher education—career training, self-enlightenment, and preparation for citizenship—it may ultimately be the third that is both the most difficult and the most important. It is the most difficult because it is the one goal of education that is not chiefly about the betterment of the self, to which we might naturally be inclined, but about the betterment of and service to others, toward which we might need to be encouraged and around which advanced civilizations must be built; it is the most important for precisely that same reason.
This connects remarkably with a new position statement on the web site of the November 5th Coalition, which "calls for new federal policies to encourage serious public participation in public education." In particular, note the second of their nine "basic premises":
The purpose of education is not just generating outcomes (such as test scores) that are determined by experts. Education is the process by which a whole community chooses and transmits values, skills, knowledge, and culture to the next generation. Communities must discuss what values they wish to transmit.
Two different but eloquent ways of saying the same important thing.
I've begun reading Voices of Hope: The Story of the Jane Addams School for Democracy, edited by Nan Kari and Nan Skelton (Kettering Foundation Press, 2007, 144 pp., ISBN 978-0-923993-19-1), a fine book that celebrates the 10th anniversary of the founding of this important "school" in Saint Paul, Minnesota. As the jacket copy makes clear, the JAS is different from, and much more than, a traditional school:
The Jane Addams School for Democracy (JAS) was founded in 1996 to create a space for democratic education and practice for new immigrant families, college students, and faculty. It was conceived as a democratic organization—one with minimal, non-hierarchical structures that would allow participants to shape its agenda. Ten years later, more than 1500 participants at JAS—Hmong, East Africans, and Latin Americans—have become U.S. citizens. This book tells the story of the Jane Addams School in many ways through many voices, including those of nonnative English speakers.
The JAS is one of the key exemplars of public engagement at the University of Minnesota (the College of St. Catherine and other colleges have also been involved) and arguably one of the most important and influential experiments in civic education. As Peter Levine wrote in his Civic Renewal blog on March 18, 2004
The Jane Addams School in St. Paul, MN is important to me. In the summer of 2001 (when it was 102 degrees in the Twin Cities), I visited the school. As on most nights, there were scores if not hundreds of people present: mostly college students and neighborhood residents. The majority of people who live in St. Paul's West Side are new immigrants and refugees (Somalis, Hmong, and Latin Americans). I observed a staff meeting and then participated in a project, the "Hmong Circle." We tutored Hmong immigrants to take the Federal citizenship test, and in return they told us about Hmong culture. I was so impressed with the buoyant, democratic, creative spirit of the place that I decided I wanted to start something similar in Maryland. When I found partners with similar motivations, we created the Prince George's Information Commons.
I hope to write more about the Jane Addams School for Democracy as I read further in Kari's and Skelton's book. However, I urge all of you to get hold of a copy. It's an attractive, reasonably priced ($19.95) paperback with lots of charming photos and eloquent text. It's not a textbook, but I can't think of a better place to learn about both the practical realities and the spirit of public engagement.