Jane Addams School and the research university
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:
- An environment in which graduate and professional students can learn a craft-based approach to their profession
- A laboratory for studies of second-language acquisition
- A setting for studies of how people and communities develop the skills and motivations for active citizenship
- Opportunities for study of immigration history, sociology, and psychology
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.