New
England
Writings about
Civics
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Civic Participation & Citizenship Collection
Digging Deeper???
Rick Boyle, Central Vermont ABE, Bradford, VT
Program/Area Description
Bradford, Vermont is located in the central
part of the state near the New Hampshire border. Both it and the surrounding
towns are extremely rural and a lack of childcare and transportation present
difficulties for many adult students. As a teacher for Central Vermont
Adult Basic Education I work primarily with students at a small learning
center but also meet with them in their homes and at libraries, schools
and churches. In addition to providing direct literacy services, my work
focuses on coordinating a base of volunteer teachers from the community.
The Challenges
Perhaps the most explicit challenge I found in using the
Civic Participation and Community Action Sourcebook was that I
usually taught, like most of the other rural team members, in a one-on-one
setting. Moreover, my lessons were typically provided only a couple of
hours a week. Yet, most of the activities and readings and narrative examples
in the Sourcebook involved a class or small group of learners, for the
most part meeting more regularly than my students. Without the benefit
of the group dynamics and investment in time, I wondered if the Sourcebook
would prove useful to the individual learner with limited time. Could
a truly community based project like those in the sourcebook be undertaken?
How, I wondered, could we address civic involvement while also attending to students' academic goals? How could we consider community participation if a student, correctly perceiving that the GED test simply does not necessitate such civic skills, plainly states, "I just want to know what's on the test."? After all, in my program, the student is the final director, setting the goals where they see fit.
So I began, and found myself faced with the challenge of helping my student recognize that civic awareness and participation are not superfluous to her educational goals, but imminently important and of lasting value in the larger context of her world.
Sourcebook Use
Amy, a 29-year-old mother of two, has been working towards her GED, on
and off, for years. She recently switched gears, however, dropping the
GED goal to instead work on getting her high school diploma through Vermont's
Adult Diploma Program (ADP). The academic requirements are similar and,
for the most part, this switch didn't change our course of study. Amy's
reading disabilities have kept our pace slow, but we make progress. We
have averaged 5-6 hours a month of one-on-one work, with Amy doing fairly
consistent homework between sessions. Thankfully, transportation is not
a barrier, and Amy drives to our center on her own. Often, her children
accompany her to our meetings. During our work with the Sourcebook, Amy
happened to find herself busier than she's been in years. She enrolled
in both a Getting Ready to Work program and a local vocational training
program for women in non-traditional jobs.
Our center has always tried to work in the context of the student's interests,
so I began by investigating, with Amy, what her current civic interests
might be. And, while I thought I'd be talking about such ideas in the
context of the Social Studies GED test, Amy made it easier by switching
to the ADP, which focuses on the application of life skills. It offers
a high school degree after students complete some testing and a series
of tasks designed to explore the real world - many being local civic awareness
activities. As a student of mine she was to prepare for the testing and
the tasks.
We started with a Sourcebook activity called, "Ways in to Thinking about Connections to Community" (p.21). There we began with the question, "What does community mean to you?". I wanted our discussion to be fluid and light, simply hoping to orient our minds towards community as well as generate some thoughts that could play out into reading/writing opportunities. But Amy's take was anything but light. Right away it was clear that she held some strong opinions, and this discussion drew out her frustrations. On public assistance for years, she has seen agency, eligibility and other participant requirements come and go. She's been around many service agencies and she clearly isn't happy with how society creates opportunities for struggling individuals. Many of her comments were generalized, angry and heavy, such as "the welfare system just sucks."
Happy as I was to see such forthright and spirited engagement, it seemed that we needed to examine this fatalism in order to get beyond it. This, it seems, is the very strength and nature of the Sourcebook. I asked her about her vision of a healthy community, and to identify some of the positive aspects of the many communities in which she had lived. But even then she came back to her frustrations about basic community support systems.
There was no denying the squeaky wheel its oil, and so I encouraged her to more deeply question why things were bad. She quickly brought forth constructive and thoughtful insights. She feels that the public isn't aware enough of the many services that are in the community. As she put it, "you have to be on welfare before you learn of all the opportunities." This comment led me to recall a meeting with local service providers in which they talked about developing a brochure to list all of our local services. I shared this idea with Amy and she thought it was something our community could surely use. We then read the account, in the Sourcebook, of a group of women who sought to educate the public about AIDS and decided to create a community education brochure. We took a critical look at the brochure and did more of our own reading and writing.
I checked in regularly to determine if my student found the work we were doing relevant to her reading and writing goals. She always understood the connection, and I believe that this is because the work was interesting and valuable to thinking and learning about her world. When we read about the developers of the AIDS brochure, she smiled and noted that we could use a similar process to put together a multi-agency brochure.
I had initially hoped that Amy would develop this brochure. But at the time the resource group met again, it was clear that Amy wasn't yet ready for such an extensive project. In fact, given some new personal challenges, I wasn't sure when she would be ready. I only knew that I wasn't looking to push something prematurely; rather, I wanted to provide good learning opportunities and support Amy in making informed choices about which she wants to pursue. Our studies continue.
Teaching Reflections
In all, my experiences using the Sourcebook varied a great deal. There
were a few other students that I attempted to engage in conversation about
community issues, but these amounted only to "false starts".
It wasn't until I settled in with Amy that I found ways to use the Sourcebook
as an effective tool. But such is the nature of adult education in general.
Each student's context, interests, and purposes are different.
I can't say that I found great solutions in ensuring that students find meaning and motivation for pursuing civic studies, but some clear lessons have been learned. Beginning with what I perceived was the most interesting and beneficial use of the Sourcebook was the change that the project had on me as a teacher. In looking to identify students who would be interested in exploring civic participation, I found myself going deeper in getting to know them. I now routinely ask students more about their lives and what's important to them on the civic level. This interpersonal dynamic now offers more relevancy and meaning in studies for both the student and me.
In addition, I couldn't help but feel liberated to a degree as the Sourcebook reminds me to move away from studies and text that simply "teach to the test." It puts the learner and educator on the threshold of discovery of what's important to the world we live in. To be sure, GED prep texts will still be necessary and valuable, but the Sourcebook helps take the student's academic world into dimensions of the real world. As an effective teacher, I need to see this happen as much as the student.
I realize that my discussions with Amy could have
gone any number of ways in developing and assessing ideas of community.
Surely any path would have been valid. My task was simply to help her
express her passions, whether they were lofty dreams or gripes with a
system, and then to dig deeper, encouraging her to envision the changes
she wanted to see as we practiced the skills that could take her there.
Thinking about community is natural; we all have some thoughts. And bringing
these to the surface only taps a student's inherent interest in their
world. As a teacher, I need to help my students name their community interests
and concerns and use these topics of study to illustrate that we can practice
academic skills as we also develop the capacity to understand and act
in the world around us.
New
England Literacy Resource Center
World Education
Boston, MA
(617) 482-9485
