The Crucial Role of the Broader Community in the Co-Creation of Learning Communities

Why We Need the Community

This blog follows up on the previous two posts on the crucial roles of youth and teachers in the co-creation of powerful learning communities. Here we focus on the necessary leadership role of indigenous members of the broader community. These often unsung s/heroes are crucial if student/teacher learning communities are to be actually effective. Students and their teachers can accomplish incredible things together, but without the support of wise and savvy individuals and committed groups deeply embedded in the surrounding community, students and teachers, alone, lack the capacity to deal with the devastating conditions and overwhelming obstacles that often block student growth and learning.

Indigenous Community Resources

One of the vital roles of students and teachers is to get to know the community in intimate detail and discover these indigenous resources upon whom they can count when life becomes unbearable and creative breakthroughs are necessary. Beyond these emergency crisis supports, it is also important to seek out groups that are working toward fundamental change over the long term and become part of such efforts as it feels right to do so. In addition, the learning process itself can be revitalized and enriched daily, by community members with a treasure trove of experience in a wide variety of arenas and callings.

Community-Based Crisis Supports

In the novel, In a Silent Way, students and teachers discover the resources they need right under their noses, in the most natural and organic of ways. Many of these resources are ones that conventional school authorities and social service professionals might never perceive as valuable, or actually wish to suppress as too threatening to the status quo. For example, when young Cat, an impoverished, hyper, barely surviving youngster, shares his horrific home situation with Lonnie, a fellow member of Project Group Survive, Lonnie asks Guff, his savvy go-to community elder for help. As mentioned in an earlier post, Guff goes up to see Cat’s father in prison, where he has been transformed with the help of the Black Muslims, who finds a way to resolve Cat’s home situation. Simultaneously, Jeanna visits the local chapter of the Black Panthers to connect her hungriest students with their free breakfast program, and in the process meets Clayton James, a medic fresh from the Vietnam War, who connects Cat and other students not only to the breakfast program, but with a men’s support group, health clinic, tutoring program, and a future occupation as EMT’s.

When Jeanna, the teacher, is at her wits’ end in trying to engage Jam, a hardened gang member, in his own growth and development, she searches out Nate Smith, a local auto mechanic, who takes Jam on as an apprentice and gives him a reason to live and a chance to fulfill his dreams. When young Meta has to become the mother for her siblings as a result of her father’s abuse of her mother and her forced institutionalization in a mental hospital, Jeanna finds an internship for Meta in a newly emerging feminist women’s health center. There Meta gains the support, knowledge and empowerment necessary to survive and thrive in a virtually impossible situation.

Community Enrichment of the Learning Process

When Karima and Felice find themselves at opposing ends of the social change spectrum in their project group focusing on the struggle for racial justice, they ask Felice’s grandmother, who was deeply involved in southern civil rights movement, to shed light on their bitter disagreements. In the process they are introduced to Ella Baker’s leadership principles and practice that the students have never heard of, which opens up a new world of possibility for all members of the group, black and white, women and men.  

Community-Based Social Transformation

Matt, the school’s principal, invites Jeanna to join “the Group,” a multi-issue, cross-race, cross- class, grassroots movement organization, which succeeds in generating local jobs & training opportunities for unemployed members of the community (including key students’ parents) in building cooperative, affordable housing, among an array of other projects. Over time, several of her students also join the Group, which provides an education in the contradictory dynamics of social movement politics for all involved, as well as the promise of practical solutions to their problems. For Lonnie, this involves overcoming the racist exclusion of black workers in the lucrative construction trades. Jeanna, the main character, ultimately finds her source of self-liberation in: her students such as Lonnie, Cassius, and Valledonia; Lillian, a parent and co-activist; Guff, a savvy community elder and former "race man"; and Ma Carrington, Chair of the movement Group, a black elder of incisive insight.

Our Sacred Opportunity

Thus, the resources within the community and the possibilities for mutual growth and liberation--while fraught with contradictions and tensions-- are endless. It is our great opportunity and sacred responsibility to open to this abundance of indigenous leadership treasures hidden away and deeply embedded in the community beneath the level of “appropriate professionals and mainstream political leaders," where the roots of transformation interconnect, ground and sustain us.  

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Join the Dialogue

Can you name unsung indigenous leaders in the community that have made a difference in the lives of students and teachers in your own school’s learning community and describe some of these contributions? Please share your stories here in the comment box so we can honor the hidden s/heroes of our own communities and schools. Have you noticed the powerful roles of the very young and the very old in the process of community building and social transformation?

The Co-Creation of Learning Communities and the Role of the Teacher

In my last post I focused on the crucial role of youth in building effective learning communities. Here I focus on the role of the teacher; yet it is still the young people who remain front and center, while the most powerfully effective teachers tend to fade into the background -- the greater their finesse, the more invisible they are. Teachers such as young Jeanna, from the novel, In a Silent Way, are criticized from virtually every quarter for this approach. Indeed, even her most challenging students, themselves, discount her efficacy, yet nevertheless flourish under this method without fully understanding why.

In a scene from my original manuscript that had to be cut due to word count limits, Jeanna’s professional practice prof rips into her after visiting her Project Inquiry and Basic Skills class. When she asks him what he thought of the class, he responds, “What class? It was utter chaos, Miss Kendall, a free-for-all. It looked more like a wild jazz set than a real class; why it was impossible to tell who was in charge, certainly not you, and if any learning was taking place at all. How you ever expect to test them is beyond me.” He was right. Jeanna’s class is an interconnected circle of jazz ensembles: a student throws out a question, suggestion, feeling, proposal, or critique to his project partners, while they provide back-up support, respond in counter-point, deepen the emotion, complicate the issue, clarify the question. The test lies in the quality of the music, the learning, in which new insights, greater clarity, and deeper questions emerge out of the chaos and confusion.

Real learning cannot be dictated by a teacher, or curricular expert, planned in carefully predetermined “goals & objectives,” covering vast amounts of information, and micro-managed by careful teacher surveillance and continuous testing of content material to then determine who is more or less “academically successful” on a range from A to F. What is success for Lonnie who enters Jeanna’s 9th & 10th grade class with no literacy skills at all because his previous schools criminalized and discarded him, and who now feels like “dirt?” What is success for the highly literate Karima who lives in a constant state of rage, furious at a world that has killed her brother in Vietnam and reduced her father from a revolutionary book dealer to a hotdog vender in the street? How about Valledonia, the extraordinary gospel singer who works by night in a nursing home and whose wisdom far exceeds Jeanna’s- who will decide her learning goals, the trajectory of her life, and the skills and resources she will need to get there?

In this learning community, the teacher needs to have enough inner security and respect for her students to be able to hold the space for them to freely explore and express themselves in all dimensions: physically, emotionally, intellectually, spiritually, politically, and creatively; to help them identify their unique passions, gifts, purposes & goals, deepest concerns and interests, and the real life issues they struggle with. She needs to encourage them to support each other in developing these great gifts and working through these issues. She also practically responds to their needs as they pursue their projects and goals by: acknowledging both the oppressive, painful realities they confront, as well as their great gifts, capacities and dreams; by sharing specific skills, assisting in finding relevant resources, creating authentic learning opportunities, and discovering mentors embedded in the community to support their growth and learning.

As teachers support rather than control the learning process, students learn to positively and creatively direct their own lives, growth and learning rather than reacting to the system’s goals and “behavioral controls” imposed from above, ones generally intended to maintain an unjust status-quo that is destroying them. Thus, within a genuine learning community, mutual self-development and liberation is the goal, often in the face of extreme adversity and injustice. Without a mutually liberating learning community, “success” in the face of such challenging odds would be impossible. Indeed, even this powerful student/teacher based learning community is still not sufficient for students and teachers to grow and flourish. This requires the active support of the broader community, our topic for the next blog post.

Please share your own learning or teaching experiences. Have you ever experienced an actual learning community or helped to create one? Do you wish you could? What dilemmas have you faced and what questions do you have?

The Co-Creation of Learning Communities and the Vital Role of Young People

One of the keys to transforming urban education is the creation of powerful and loving learning communities facilitated by the young people themselves, their teachers, elders indigenous to the community, and a variety of community-based organizations. In this blog post we start with the indispensable role of youth by drawing out just one character from the novel, In a Silent Way: Lonnie. We first meet Lonnie when Jeanna, the teacher, is asking students to choose topics they are passionate about to explore as group projects. Tommie Lee, a natural leader in the class, and his fellow athlete, Big Blue, choose “What makes for a winning basketball team,” while the rebel, Karima, and the sleek Felice focus on “the struggle for racial justice,” and so forth.

However, when it comes to Lonnie, he says, “I can’t touch the likes of Tommie Lee and them all...I’m just trying to get from one day to the next, you know, survive?” Several other students who feel like failures throw their lot in with him and what becomes project “Group Survive.” Born into the bleakest poverty in the toughest part of the city, completely illiterate, and filled with shame and anger at being targeted as a “bad” kid by teachers in his previous schools, Lonnie is actually an extraordinarily resourceful, courageous, and creative young man. We discover that at age nine he becomes a newsboy, and puts food on his starving family’s table.

A few years later he becomes the newsboys crew leader, up at 4 a.m. and out into the darkness, running his crew and protecting his boys from gang violence. We see Lonnie and his buddy, Chefman who is self-educated, holding up Group Survive, and supporting each others’ literacy growth by leaps and bounds, both during and after school; the group becomes their lifeline.

Cat, another illiterate, barely surviving member of the group, confides in Lonnie about the horrific abuse he’s experiencing at home. Lonnie, in turn, asks his savvy elder mentor, Guff, for help. Guff goes up to the prison where Cat’s father has been transformed by black Muslims, and asks him to rectify the situation at home, which he does. Lonnie shares Cat’s situation with Jeanna, and she in turn visits the Black Panthers at a nearby church where she finds a mentor for Cat, free breakfast every morning, a health clinic, a men’s support group, and, ultimately, a future occupation as an EMT. Within Group Survive, Lonnie and his buddies begin to find ways to help other students with needs similar to their own, by setting up a student council to gain the necessary resources to help students obtain needed school supplies, food, clothing, escorts through gang territory, additional tutoring and mentors.

By the end of the novel, it is Lonnie and Group Survive to whom the great Tommie Lee turns when in the midst of his own life crisis, and who support him in breaking through to his own self-liberation, which in turn, may portend the transformation of a great community leader, his father.

Thus, Lonnie, one student, seemingly without resources and least likely to have something to offer, is key to his own transformation and liberation, his family’s, his fellow students, and the leadership of the broader community. Yet all this happens in the most organic and natural of ways, his power and effectiveness probably passing unnoticed by everyone, including himself. He is simply living his everyday life, doing what feels right to him, building relationships, creating community, learning as he goes, and changing absolutely everything.

On Humility

For my 2nd blog post that follows my first on the great value and grave danger of silence, I’d like to focus on something we rarely hear mentioned these days in the realms of teaching and community organizing -- the value of humility.

In a society that is organized around hierarchical relationships of power and oppression at all levels, it is crucial for those of us located higher on the scale to cultivate an attitude and practice of humility in our lives and work. Teachers of urban students often come from middle class, white backgrounds, and know very little about the harsh realities their students face every day of their lives, and even less about their communities’ histories of racial, class and cultural struggle. Therefore we tend to underestimate, discount or ignore the ongoing significance and impact of the decades of injustice that pervade our students lives at all levels and in all ways. In so doing we tend to perceive our students and their communities as deficient and in need of our help, uplift, guidance, and often control to “get them back on track, turn their lives around, mold them into productive, law-abiding citizens, increase their competence,” while slighting root causes and sources of these students’ extreme life dilemmas and difficulties.

Humility serves as a valuable guide because it reminds us that we don’t know all we need to know about our students, what they’re up against, who they are, what matters to them, what they need, and what it is about the current educational system that is failing them, even further harming them. Humility will guide us to learn to ask our students and their families and communities what kind of learning matters most to them so they can identify their gifts and passions and get the necessary support to nurture the development of those gifts, which can then enhance the quality of life of the community.

We can support and join the struggles to confront and overcome the decades of injustice with which our students and their communities have had to deal. In the process we discover that we, too, have forms of oppression we need to overcome as well, and that we have become more empowered as a result of what we learn from the communities we serve. In all humility, we as teachers and activists learn that we who assumed that were supposed to set the agenda to “empower our students, families and communities," have been, in fact, empowered by them; and that the way forward is through a deep-felt process of mutual empowerment and mutual learning.

This awareness changes everything about urban education today from the teacher imposing curricular and testing regimens from above that are irrelevant to students’ lives, to facilitating the co-creation of genuine learning communities in which the student’s gifts, passions, and needs are at the center of the educational process, supported and nurtured by fellow students and members of the broader community.

I welcome your stories about and insights into these issues -- please add your comments!

Why I Chose the Title, In a Silent Way

For my first blog post, I thought I would explain why I entitled my novel, In a Silent Way, (about a young teacher activist in urban America) since this is a question that is often raised. In fact, my publisher was understandably concerned that it would come off as too flat and not powerful enough. This was a real concern, so friends and I explored a range of viable alternative titles, most of which, it turned out, had already been taken.

But if truth be told, In a Silent Way remained my first choice because I felt it was the one most closely aligned with the spirit of the novel. The novel reveals the great value of silence and the importance of subduing one’s controlling ego in teaching and grassroots politics in order to bring out the marginalized voices of both students and the community. Yet it also uncovers the grave danger of silence in matters of the heart, how involvement with powerful movement men often submerges activist women, young and old, black and white, into silence and isolation, at times almost destroying them. Silence, then, is a two-edged sword.

Music is also important to the the lead character, Jeanna, and In a Silent Way is a breakthrough album of that time played by Miles Davis that she receives as a gift from the only person who truly understands her, her grandmother. The novel's essence is embedded in the following passage spoken by her grandmother, when they were talking about why she had never formally pursued her music.  

     “......And, my dear, you never were one to push yourself forward.”
     “Is that what I should do? Push myself forward? My students have been telling me the same thing.” She thought there was some truth in the criticism, but doing such things also felt like a transgression of her very being.
     Her grandmother stopped for a long moment and beheld her.
     “Like everything else you do, I think your music will speak for itself someday. As for now, I like, I love, the understated you. You’ll never make a big splash, but in your own silent way, you’ll cut to the core.”     

In this sense I think the title reflects the reality of many young women who are struggling to find their way in a world that that does not honor their quieter way of being as they seek to learn and grow, yet is busy silencing them when they are, hesitantly, moved to try to express themselves.

We live in a culture in which scoring points in caustic debate, rather than mutually respectful dialogue, is the accepted mode of communication. Listening attentively and respectfully, empathizing with and appreciating what another human being has to offer are qualities often seen as signs of weakness and disempowerment. It’s far more important to show how much we know, how right we are, and how effectively we can control the agenda, than it is to truly share differing perspectives-- which could hold the promise of arriving at a higher level synthesis, a better outcome for all.

New teachers who want to create a genuine learning community are told to “control their classroom and show the students who’s the boss”, while managers and leaders are celebrated when they declare their own uniquely inspired vision, exude the charisma to get others to ‘buy in’, then forge ahead to make it happen, rather than facilitating the wisdom of the whole. In love, one seeks to learn how to love and support the other, while the other simply expects and accepts that love and support as their due.

These differing ways of being, one tending toward well intentioned, often benevolent dominance and control, the other towards mutual respect and collaboration, unfold in the novel as they unfold in our lives today. Which way we lean may determine the future of our world, the world we all help to make and remake every day of our lives.