Communities as Educators: A Report on the November 2007 Public and Public Education Workshop
By Connie Crockett
Introduction
Kettering’s research suggests that education thrives in communities where everyone, not just those in the schools, works to improve it. When myriad people harness their locally available resources for educational purposes, everyone wins.
Community educators, especially, see professionals and institutions as only a small part of a larger community-based educating network.
Some questions to consider as you read:
- How can a community come to recognize education as a shared, multifaceted challenge?
- How can expanding the definition of educator help more community members see that they too are responsible for educating young people?
- What story can you share of local work that illustrates that responsibility?
Article Text
For citizens, communities are purposeful civic relationships. They are formed to achieve basic goals: protection from threats to security, economic prosperity, and the education of future generations in the norms and skills essential to their survival. These relationships are and have always been what constitutes a “community.” Maintaining these relationships maintains the community. If people aren’t associated or assembled for these purposes, there is no community.
What follows from this basic idea is that a community is an educator. Schools are institutions created to support the community in that endeavor. However, the prevailing way of thinking treats a community as merely a source of support for schools, which is why Kettering has had difficulty over the years in trying to move the topic of conversation from schools to education. Last November, we convened a small workshop that was different in that schools did not become the magnet to which all thoughts were drawn. They were acknowledged, but merely so. Our guests were community organizers whose interests lay elsewhere. These were people and places harnessing locally available resources for educational purposes.
Our guests spoke to us about how those who don’t work in the schools can take responsibility for education. We were pleased to host community members from Albion, Michigan; Georgetown, Kentucky; and St. Louis Park, Minnesota; along with a group of scholars and retired superintendents. What distinguished this group was the democratic nature of their efforts, apparently diffuse leadership, and the work conducted as a way of life, rather than as a project.
We asked our guests how their communities came to emphasize education over schools; what made people move from concern to complementary, broad-range public acting; and how concerned citizens learn from their work together. We also wanted to better understand the ways school-to-public engagement can be aligned to relate to the work of citizen-to-citizen engagement. We found something worth studying in their stories of educational work as shared community endeavor.
Kettering looks to uncover the critical moments in stories of community action from thick descriptions of how large groups develop a consciousness about goals and plans to act. We have learned that there are moments or phases in a process when democratic practice either builds, or is halted, as when local institutions take over at the implementation phase. The danger at such moments is that if there is nothing for citizens to do, the work that builds community ends. Each group at our meeting noted experiencing these moments, but pressed on to enlarge their work, always seeking to make it more democratic. One of our visitors told us that they “put their resources on the table and back away” to allow shared decision making. These groups continue to work through the tensions between civic missions, egos, and scarce resources by reminding themselves of their shared concerns, their larger purposes.
The insight that all of the community needs to be involved as educators led St. Louis Park to adopt a community covenant to put children first. For residents like Bridget Gothberg, that meant that every decision would be filtered through the question, what is best for the young members of the community? Once the community decided to make itself the best place to raise a child, it moved away from a project mentality to a prevailing way of life. It’s a cultural shift that became the learned lesson of “How we do things here.” Leaders have come and gone without the work ending. New people accept the premise and add to it. Outcomes are generalized; solution wars are averted. St. Louis Park is a place that is working not to do something different, but rather to do the usual things differently.
When a school cook of 30 years accepted that lens, she began to see a role for herself beyond that of feeding many children in a short time frame. The Children First premise changed how she reacted when she noticed a harried young girl who had missed lunch. “Slow down, honey, I’ll fix you something to eat,” she told the youngster. Her kind attitude prompted tears and a hug from the child, who confided that she had never before been called “honey.” The cook’s caring attitude may have made a significant difference in that child’s academic life.
Our Kentucky educators told us that connecting young people with the real life of community is key to helping them find their place in the world. For them, scientific inquiry emerges in response to the need to solve problems born of a sense of place. So we were told that the restoration of the American chestnut tree, the blossoms of which once made the local mountains appear snow covered, motivates a grandparent group called Kids, Codgers and Crones in shared educational work. The old folk will not see the trees thrive in their lifetime, but the young people will carry the passion for the chestnut forward along with the recognition of a context for what they learn in classrooms.
When citizens educate, it is rooted in what they know and the problems they confront. Georgetown, Kentucky, has retired racehorses needing attention and care that have inspired responsibility from formerly withdrawn kids. Another local resource for educating is the bluegrass music found everywhere. Having learned to fiddle by being surrounded by fiddlers, 18-year-old Chloe Roberts organized a bluegrass camp for kids in a distant corner of the state. She says “The elders teach us that there is life beyond school, that there is a community to belong to. Now it is my job to pass what I’ve learned along to others.” The job of educating that connects kids to community can span generations.
Resources of urban communities differ, but the challenge of motivating kids does not. Bruce Mundy of the health department in Lexington, Kentucky, said, “I’ve got kids who can’t read. To me, that is a crisis.” There being a lot of trash around housing projects in north Lexington, his organization got young people hacking away at the 10-foot weeds around an old cemetery. They found the gravesites of native African poets and Kentucky Derby winners, researched those names, and got the (now pristine) site on the National Register of Historic Places. “’Scuse me while I teach history!” he joked. Like the backward looking Sankopa bird, Mundy believes kids need to know where they come from to find where they’re going. Painted trashcans share the history learned with the larger community; sculptures are formed from junk bicycles. Whatever they have, they use. “We do a lot of stuff. We love our kids; we have to.”
The third community group, Albion’s Promise in Albion, Michigan, was described as a “great experiment” in the politics of cultural change. “It’s not rocket science,” said Kevin Brown, “it’s harder.” Relationship building takes time, commitment, a willingness to allow others to take credit, allowing multiple pathways, drawing from the deepest well of community, and recognizing the unrecognized. When the initiative asked young people with whom they would want to share news of an accomplishment, they heard the same convenience store clerk listed by many. The result may have come as a revelation, but the clerk is a caring and consistent presence in those young lives. Once recognized, such community “educators” can become part of the community strategy for education.
Albion’s Promise doesn’t hold to a proscribed definition of what it means to be an educator. People are asked “What can you do?” rather than the more limiting “Help us to do this …” For the Albion community, professionals and institutions can facilitate the work, but the public must continuously evaluate priorities. The way they see it, education is improving in Albion because everyone who wants it to improve is working on it.
People decide something needs to be done and enlist others to help them take on the problem. That is commonplace. When they do the work democratically, we find something worth studying. There is no clean formula for how any of our visiting communities do what they do, because those we met with in November educate not as a program, but as way of life. What they do is how they live, with end results unknown, in an experimental mind-set of learning to be the best community they can be.
Kettering notes this finding: Recognizing education as a multifaceted challenge for communities is work we share in common. We are looking for more stories of educational work that is seen as a shared community endeavor. How do people where you live address the collective problem that is education? We would be pleased to hear from you on the topic.