What I would like to focus on in this post is one of the most striking issues raised in Gravyland, the problem of teachers and educators getting in the way of student engagement in a designed project, specifically in relation to the project Urban Rhythms. Stephen Parks noted that his project was hindered by different conceptions of what Urban Rhythms was suppose to do. He found that public school teachers could and sometimes did push their students toward a nostalgic relationship to their racial and ethnic identities, or additionally toward a patriotic one. This worked against the aims of the project which saw itself as an entity that gave space to students to dwell in their non-academic communities, creating nuanced arguments about their urban environment and cultural identities. With that problem as a framing piece, I wonder to what degree we need to keep this in mind when designing a civic engagement project for our courses. Obviously, we fulfill the role of architect of the outcomes of a certain project and also as teacher in the classroom implementing those outcomes, but to what degree must we be aware of the bias that we bring to such a project? Does our dual role as architect and educator make it more difficult to see those bias and to allow projects to adapt productively to the arguments and visions of the students who participate? Parks himself notes that the teachers were not necessarily pushing ideologies at their students that could be directly construed as problematic. In the case of the student poem about the Irish lullaby, Parks points out that celebrating such a memory (of learning these lullabies) is not "bad" but that the poem in celebrating such put forth the argument that the urban space-- and the cultural productions associated with it-- were dangerous.

Another example. In the opening pages of an article on the  Crabby Creek Initiative, the writers explain,

that building strong partnerships depends on the mutual understanding of growth through a series of progressive stages that not only enhance the success of such undertakings, but also hones the skills needed to ensure collaborative, mutual democratic interactions-- in short, to sustain such partnerships that strive to include multiple voices at every stage with the aim to move toward public education, behavioral change, advocacy, and, eventually, policy change (Terlecki, Dunbar and others 41).

The Crabby Creek Initiative is a project that helps students at Cabrini College learn about stream chemistry and macroinvertabrates while also including local residents in the monitoring of Crabby Creek. The writers of the article explain that this project intends to model a program for effective watershed management which incorporates citizens, students and professionals. I bring up this example alongside Parks because I think that the way this project is posited--as a democratic interaction-- complicates the dynamics we see with the Urban Rhythms project. Here there is a sense that students are not the sole recipients of the knowledge of their educator, rather the citizens who live around Crabby Creek have something to learn, and quite frankly, many of the people involved in the administration of this project should be learning something. As a model for us, I think what this project has to offer is a way of thinking about mutuality in civic engagement as essential to effective projects. The participants come to an "understanding" that is produced both by content-oriented ideas (what is the best way to measure watershed health) and also by the cultivation of skills necessary to "ensure collaborative, mutual democratic interactions".

And yet, the second part of the quoted passage above, points to a specific aim that I don't think can be read as not pushing a certain ideology. They want to "change behavior" and policy, which, in this case, I fully agree with but all the same, it does raise the question of how to incorporate resistance into our civic engagement projects. On an abstract level, how can we allow for multiple behaviors and forms of public education? How can our project change with the needs of its students? This is not to say that I find fault in the Crabby Creek Initiative; it seems like a fantastic project. I simply want to point out what I see as inevitable when entering in civic engagement project, the favoring of certain ideas over others.

In terms of my own civic engagement project, I think this idea of including resistance will be essential to its success. I intend (if all goes well and there is not a long waiting list) to acquire a community garden plot over the summer, which I will use to teach my student about urban farming and local produce (I might teach this book alongside this project). The plot I am most interested in is located at the Wylde Center. Even without the plot, I would like my students to attend some of the talk given about sustainability (there are many and on a wide variety of topic including bee keeping and livestock rearing--bring on the chickens). The idea behind having them help me tend a plot would be to have them directly engage with what is involved in urban farming (the costly nature of dirt, how to do potted vegetables, what it would mean to cook around a harvest season, etc). This could manifest itself in recipe collection, writing about the benefits and pitfalls of working with one's own harvest, doing a manifesto type piece on why this might be an important (or not so important) way to change the urban landscape, or even even a biographical piece on the students' relationship to their food and to cooking.

That said, my bent is "growing stuff is awesome and you should do it too," which I need to be aware of as not every one's relationship to cooking will include this kind of orientation. I will have to think further about how exactly to allow space for resistance in this specific project. At the very least, this post gets the ball rolling.

For reference:

The Wylde Center

http://wyldecenter.org/

And the article:

Terlecki, Melissa, David Dunbar and others. "The Crabby Creek Initiative: Building and Sustaining an Interdisciplinary Community Partnership." Journal of Community Engagement & Scholarship. 3:1 (Spring 2010), pg 40-50.