Civic Participation and Community Action Sourcebook

Section One

First Lay the Groundwork

by Margaret Anderson

In the spring of 1998, I participated in the Voter Education, Registration, and Action (VERA) Teacher Inquiry Project, a project of New England Literacy Resource Center. The goal of the inquiry project was to support teachers who were doing civic participation projects that integrated adult education with community action. The VERA teachers kept journals of what happened in the classroom and met once a month to talk about what we were seeing.

I taught a mixed level (ABE/GED) reading and writing class at the Northampton classroom of The Literacy Project, an adult basic education program in western Massachusetts. We met twice a week for 2 ½ hours per class. On the first day of class, we started with a brainstorm about the community issues that members of the class were concerned about. I was impressed by the broad range of issues that these learners were interested in, and their consciousness of how interconnected the issues are. The conversation was exciting to me because they listed many of the issues that I care most about: poverty and the rising cost of living, housing and homelessness, sanity and insanity (and who decides which is which), the growing prison population, crime and violence, laws and who makes them, racism, power and powerlessness. The topics were rich and important; the challenge was going to be to narrow it down to something manageable – and create some kind of action project around it!

Since the class already saw these issues as interconnected, I was reluctant to ask them to vote or simply choose one theme to cover. I really wanted to capture that sense of interconnection, so I tried the technique of “affinity grouping.” I wrote the themes they had identified on index cards and asked the students to group the cards into categories. They came up with four themes: the distribution of wealth, mental health, crime and violence, and social action and protest. One student saw a way to link them all together: “You grow up poor. You can’t afford to go to school. So, you don’t have any options for jobs. You can’t make enough money, so you lose your housing. Then, you have a choice. Either you go insane, turn to crime, or you take some kind of action.” It made perfect sense to me, and better yet, it set the stage for taking action.

Besides the clever analysis of that one student, what held these themes together was the Northampton State Hospital. Like other state mental hospitals, its gothic buildings and stately grounds stand on a hill above town, dark and silent. It held significance for everyone in the class; everyone knew someone who had either worked there or been a patient there, and many of us had a powerful curiosity about what had happened behind those walls. It had closed down just a few years before, and the town was debating what to do with the buildings and property. A group of activists for the homeless were advocating for using the buildings for affordable housing and additional shelter space, and some had recently been arrested for occupying a building. There were numerous articles in the paper about the State Hospital, and public forums were planned for the near future. The curriculum was forming in my head: we’d focus on the history and current debates around the State Hospital, pulling in the themes the class had identified, and work up to attending the public forums, where hopefully some of the class would voice their concerns or opinions. I felt lucky that we had come across such an ideal opportunity to integrate the classroom and the community.

That’s when it got complicated. I had set out to find topics that the students really cared about, the things that affected their real lives, and I had found them. But instead of seeing the interest and motivation build, I felt the energy drain away. As we started to explore the history of the Hospital, I realized the topics were extremely personal; all of the students had some kind of history with mental illness or addiction. The question of who defines “sanity” and “insanity” wasn’t “intriguing” to a group that had been locked up, institutionalized, medicated: it was painful. They knew the power that lies with those who create the definitions, because they had been labeled as outsiders in so many ways. The students in my class could think critically about these issues, but they didn’t care to do it for weeks on end.

So, we backed off. Rather than focus on the State Hospital, that physical representation of so much pain and suffering, we took each of the themes individually. Moving through each of the four themes, we read and wrote and discussed ideas, invited in guest speakers, interviewed our city councilor, created a poem-book about what it would mean to live in a healthy environment, charted the ways in which we felt we had power or lacked it, created an 8-foot timeline to chart the developments of the Civil Rights Movement, and discussed the demographics of who votes and why it is that people don’t vote, among many other things. We continuously linked our conversations back to our own lived experiences, and I continued to be impressed with the insight of the group.

Despite the rich and productive discussions, I wondered constantly whether I was doing “participatory education” the “right” way. Half way through the project, we didn’t seem any closer to the goal of taking action than when we started. I wrote in my class journal, “I don’t know whether I am doing this whole VERA thing right. We are working on great questions that have to do with civic participation, history, how to get involved and take action, understanding some of the societal forces that affect our lives. But what is the project? What is the action? How do we define action?” I felt like I should be moving the group towards some concrete action. And yet, the group didn’t seem ready to get out into the community. We needed to develop our capacity for taking action. At the very least, we needed to be able to listen to each other and disagree about important topics without getting angry. We needed to be able to function as a group without spontaneously self-destructing.

We also needed to have the faith that change is possible. Our conversations about the problems in society would often conclude with someone saying, “Yeah, but that will never change.” I realized how deep was their sense of disempowerment when the most optimistic member of the class tried to convince the others that change really could happen in our small town – but only if President Clinton came and saw what needed to be done. I was astounded to realize how centralized their view of power was. “Apparently, the only person who could effect change in Northampton is the single most powerful person in the world,” I wrote in my journal. “So what does that say about the rest of us? That we really have no power. If I have a personal goal for this class, it’s to get people to start believing that they can change things, or at least that people like them have changed things.”

I set about introducing stories of “regular” people who got together to make positive social change. One of the readings that seemed to have the most impact was a story of a high school football team that was upset because their fans would shout racial slurs at the Hispanic players, particularly if those players missed a play. The teens got together, despite a lack of support from some school officials, and addressed their fans during half-time at the next game, telling them that they wouldn’t play if the racial slurs continued. The teens were successful, and the hurtful comments ceased. It’s a powerful story, and the class was really moved. (See Appendix H for story).

Despite my worries about not taking “action,” I think we accomplished a great deal in this class. In a group statement the students wrote for other VERA students, they described what they had learned and how they had changed. One student wrote, “I’ve become something that I’m not used to by being in this classroom. We have to become humble here and listen to what everyone has to say. …Now I can hear other people’s ideas, which is not me at all. I’m more open-minded now.” I learned a lot as well, especially to let go of my preconceived ideas of what is “real” or legitimate social action. In our classroom, the “action” took place inside all of us.

Margaret Anderson is a teacher and volunteer coordinator at the Northampton, MA site of The Literacy Project. She participated in the VERA teacher inquiry project in 1998.

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