Civic Participation and Community Action Sourcebook

Section One

Finding the Moment

by Michael Blackwell and Anita Armbrister

In this GED class, in the Appalachian town of Ivanhoe, Virginia, we had struggled for a long time to find a structure and a practice that would enable us and the students to use topics from the outside world. It seems that, from a community education perspective, people working in places with a clear and well-defined crisis (bad water, hazardous materials, etc.) actually might have an easier time educating around the given issue. In a place like Ivanhoe, where the crisis is slow-burning and hard to point a finger at, it can be hard to engage people in using community issues.

We had not been able to interest students in departing much from a prescribed course of learning, one particularly geared towards the students’ attainment of their GED. We had some success in getting topics and beefs on the table, but we couldn’t do two things: 1) convert concern on the part of students and teachers over an issue into a solid chance to acquire skills, and 2) sustain interest in a topic for the amount of time it took to begin to make meaning and sense.

“Topic of the Month” seemed to help this out a lot. We figured that if we had one three hour class per week, and spent one hour on math and one hour on another focused GED topic (science, social studies, etc.), then we could spend the third hour of each week on a new topic, and use that topic to really utilize the chance to develop people’s literacy skills in the broadest sense of learning how to make meaning and take action on issues of importance to the learner.

One thing we had found was that people had difficulty in handling a broad question like “What do you want to learn about now?” We also knew that the really crucial element for student input and determination of these topics was for them to feel confident that their concerns would be taken seriously. So we took an opportunity to utilize an experience that was fast approaching, and gave them the chance to get involved. Then, after they expressed interest and approval, we took great pains to join with them to define what we wanted to learn and how we wanted to do it.

The event that we prepared for was a week-long visit by a group of community practitioners from Mali, Africa. The beauty of it was that the experience was of a type that people were very skilled at: the receiving of guests. Anita and I broke the whole issue into two basic parts and our group of seven students took it from there. We asked, “What do you want these people to learn about you?” and “What do you want to learn about them?” We spent the next five weeks inductively learning what culture is through exploring our own history. By trying to figure out what would be important to them, we discovered what was important to us, and why. What different aspects of our culture did we want them to know about? Did we want them to see everything, warts and all? What are some of those warts anyway? What are our strengths, what are we proud of? These are the questions we asked ourselves. By having the students pose their own questions, they were able to take a good, critical, analytic view of things, without prodding and in a way that we had never heard before.

Briefly let us describe the things the students did. The morning class decided on a tour of the Ivanhoe area. We sat down and brainstormed what places in Ivanhoe were important and why. We asked some of the older people in the community to go around with us and tell us what they knew. The students themselves also had a lot to say about their town.

The tour was a huge success, and the morning students and the old folks all came back that evening for a community potluck supper. We ended up talking till the Malians were ready to drop. We had the first public dialogue about culture and racism heard here in years. We talked about ways of life, families, women’s issues, everything, and much of the conversation grew from the questions and short presentations that the evening class had formulated themselves. The students were enraptured, and it stimulated topics for a month.

Each person wrote up their opinions and reflections of the event. The writing went through several rounds of peer editing and revision, so that by the time the program’s pieces made it into the newsletter, they were strong.

When this experience began winding down, we asked if there were any topics on our minds that we might want to get into and learn a little about. One of the women who had taken the lead in the Mali experience thought about five seconds and said, “I want to learn about NAFTA.” This was three weeks before the vote. We asked everyone if that was ok, they agreed, and off we went. The students ventured what aspects they wanted to know about, and we brainstormed ways that we could gather the information we desired. The students went out and gathered the information from newspapers, TV, friends, family and co-workers and studied the issue. We didn’t have quite enough time to take action on the issue before the vote, unfortunately, but the project helped us begin a tradition of student-initiated topics and methods. This is something we’ve struggled to do for years, and it’s tremendously exciting to see it finally happening.

Excerpted with permission from Community in the Classroom Project: Final Report to the Association for Community Based Education (ACBE), 1993.

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