Community Engagement and Education
by Steve Goodman

“We lie, as Emerson said, in the lap of an immense intelligence. But that intelligence is dormant and its communications are broken, inarticulate and faint until it possesses the local community as its medium.” -- John Dewey, The Public and Its Problems

A recent series of reports reveal how our nation’s schools are yet again failing low income, lower tracked, students of color. This time it isn’t about math, science, or literacy. It is about our democracy. But before we get to those depressing reports, here is some good news from the youth of EVC:

A few weeks ago , three EVC students gave speeches about youth engagement in voting at a youth arts and activism event in the South Bronx. They didn’t just talk off the top of their heads on this subject. They spoke from their experience being immersed in the subject for the past 10 months producing a documentary on youth and voting. In April, two EVC graduates spoke at a salon of the world renowned philosopher Dr. Maxine Greene. They presented their award-winning documentary on Katrina survivors to a room full of educators and participated in a discussion on how to teach about injustice while still promoting a sense of hope and possibility. A few weeks before that, four EVC graduates presented their documentary on violence against women to a packed college auditorium at SUNY Old Westbury in Long Island launching the campus women’s center’s sexual assault awareness month. The discussion that followed was both informative and moving.

This is all part of EVC’s Community Engagement program where students screen their work for public audiences in schools, libraries, community centers, conferences, colleges, and other community institutions and facilitate community dialogue, debate, and action on the social issues they explored. These screenings build on and extend the process of intensive social inquiry that the students conduct when they create their documentaries in the first place.

It seems such a natural and powerful step to take. That is, for the students who have learned so much from and about their community as emerging journalists and artists to now give back to the community as activists and teachers. But somehow, most schools don’t give students the opportunity to take that step. And so they do a rather poor job of teaching civic and community engagement.

A big part of the problem is that too often school designs and structures block students from learning in, about, and from their community. State mandated, standardized curriculum doesn’t test for learning about community and social issues or learning how to advocate for social change; forty-five minute periods don’t allow time for students to leave the school building and return in time; teachers are unfamiliar with the local community and anxious about teaching students to research issues that they aren’t the experts in. The result is that students are denied this rich source of knowledge, culture, history and activism. (Textbooks are estimated to provide 75-90 percent of instructional content and activities in schools across the nation. ) And in turn, the community is denied the possible uses and enrichment that the students have to offer as a result of their learning. Student school-based learning that is disconnected from place and purpose becomes empty learning. Students then end up experiencing the social problems that confront them daily in their schools, clinics, courts and street corners without being able to question and critically examine them.

This is not to say that students never have the opportunity to venture out of the school building into the community. Because there are. There is a growing trend in schools that make community service (not community inquiry or activism) a graduation requirement.

Now back to those reports: CIRCLE (Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning & Engagement) has published a few studies that paint a rather bleak picture about the state of civics education. They describe a national “civic opportunity gap” where white, affluent and more academically successful students received more classroom-based civic learning opportunities than those who are on the other end of the spectrum. Other researchers found those students who did participate in civic and community activities tended to be motivated by the personal need to enhance their chances of getting into college and not by political or ethical beliefs about justice or community development. (Minority and working-class youth were a significant, if partial, exception, showing concern for both their academic achievement and community development.)

Our schools’ poor performance in closing the civic opportunity gap will simply perpetuate into the next generation the vastly unequal political representation and clout, or what another report called the civic achievement gap that already exists between the poor, minority, and immigrant youth and adults, and the middle-class or wealthy, white native born population. Instead of helping, it seems our schools are making matters worse.

However, EVC’s educational approach (along with other colleagues in youth media) has an important contribution to make in turning things around. Here’s why:
1) First, EVC’s documentary workshops begin with the underlying assumption that we are not preparing low-income youth for civic participation later in life. We are not giving them mock or simulated situations. The students’ questions, problems being studied, and public audiences viewing and discussing their work are all real and authentic. They are in fact practicing participatory democracy now.

2) Our notion of civic engagement includes, but is not limited to the act of voting. It begins with a problem posing approach to social issues and ends with community dialogue and action. Through the documentaries they produce, students learn how to investigate the pressing social problems they experience at home, in school and in the streets of their community. And they learn to propose possible solutions, and through screenings they present them back to the community for discussion, debate, and action which might include protesting, contacting public officials, mobilizing others, contributing time or money to causes or campaigns, and participating in community groups.

3) The information doesn’t come from a textbook. Students conduct research from multiple sources, but most is gathered directly from the community. Students go out into the community to document conditions of life, and meet those everyday people who are directly impacted by the problems they are studying and also the grassroots community leaders and organizations that are working to make a change. Information comes both in the form of story telling and in from experts who give social and historical context on the subject at hand. For example, for their documentary Still Standing, they met and interviewed survivors of Hurricane Katrina who had been relocated to New York City as well as the leaders of the Solidarity Committee of New York ; for their documentary on recycling and environmental racism they interviewed housing projects residents and the director of the Green Worker Coop; and for their documentary on teen pregnancy they documented the daily life of the 15-year-old sister of one of the students and interviewed Dr. Carrera, the founder of The Children's Aid Society Carrera Adolescent Pregnancy Prevention Program.

4) The result is in an increased sense of civic engagement and political efficacy of previously disenfranchised students. As students conduct embedded throughout the entire process of producing and screening documentaries. interviews with school reform leaders, social workers, civil rights activists (depending on the topic of their project), they are inspired by their examples of courage, commitment and tenacity. In addition, they gain efficacy through the act of creating a work of art and social commentary which is affirmed and reified through the experience of presenting their work to the public and witnessing as it inspires dialogue and action among diverse audiences.

5) This approach to learning and civic engagement is indeed transformative for the community audience, the learner/producer, and the teacher facilitating the process. It becomes a lever for school reform; it changes the rules of traditional schooling by asserting that:
• students can have the authority to ask probing questions of peers and adults (as opposed to only teachers, principals, police officers, etc. asking questions of students);
• community members are a source of valuable knowledge and learning (as opposed to only teachers and text books);
• streets can be a site for civic discussion of public issues (as opposed to either being a place of potential violence, or a corridor of consumption from one store to the next);
• there are multiple perspectives on a complex problem (as opposed to only one right answer that students will be tested on);
• the documentary product of student learning serves a community purpose by informing, telling stories, provoking further dialogue, and moving audience members to action (as opposed to a paper written to be read only by the teacher for the private purpose of earning a grade).

Engaging students in authentic community inquiry and public dialogue requires a rethinking of how and where powerful learning takes place. When we can make the local community a natural and organic part of everyday schooling, then the collective social intelligence of our democracy will, as Dewey envisioned, have a chance of growing healthy, articulate, and strong.

1. Wendy Richardson, Judith Torney-Purta, and Britt Wilkenfeld. Improving Textbooks as a Way to Foster Civic Understanding and Engagement, Marilyn Chambliss, CIRCLE WORKING PAPER, 54, APRIL 2007, p. 2.
2. Joseph Kahne and Ellen Middaugh. Democracy for Some: Civic Opportunity Gap in High School. CIRCLE WORKING PAPER 59, FEBRUARY 2008, p. 5.
3. L. A. Friedland, and S. A. Morimoto (2004, Aug) "The Paradox of Youth Civic Engagement" Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association, Hilton San Francisco & Renaissance Parc 55 Hotel, San Francisco, CA, Online <.PDF> Retrieved 2008-04-22 from http://www.allacademic.com/meta/p110650_index.html
4. Joseph Kahne and Ellen Middaugh. Democracy for Some: Civic Opportunity Gap in High School. CIRCLE WORKING PAPER 59, FEBRUARY 2008, p. 8.
5. Meira Levinson, The Civic Achievement Gap, CIRCLE Working Paper 51: January 2007, p.