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    Living Democracy: Communities as Classrooms, Students as Citizens
    Living Democracy: Communities as Classrooms, Students as Citizens
    Living Democracy: Communities as Classrooms, Students as Citizens
    Ebook174 pages2 hours

    Living Democracy: Communities as Classrooms, Students as Citizens

    By Nan Fairley and Mark Wilson

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    At Auburn University, in Alabama, students may take part in a summer-long embedded community experience called “Living Democracy.” This project has its roots in higher education's long history of civic engagement, but it takes a different perspective than traditional service learning programs. Rather than pose the question, “What does your community need?” the project organizers asked, “What could a student learn about democratic civic engagement while living in your community for ten weeks over the summer?”

    In Living Democracy: Communities as Classrooms, Students as Citizens, authors Mark Wilson, Director of Civic Learning Initiatives in the College of Liberal Arts at Auburn, and Nan Fairley, Associate Professor of Journalism, describe the inception of the Living Democracy program and the work of students and community members who have made, and continue to make, the Living Democracy journey with them. Chapter One provides context for higher education. Chapter Two summarizes the project, including the opportunities and expectations of students as they participate. Chapter Three looks at the importance of relationships, both harmonious and contentious. Chapter Four illustrates the real-world challenges citizens face, and the ways in which students have an opportunity to experience the tension of tough decisions. Chapter Five discusses what students report as the benefits of the living-learning experience in communities.

    In concluding the book, an alumna of the program reflects on her experience in Living Democracy: “Life in real time makes one of the best classrooms. Sending young, eager college students to poke around in a community allows for self-reflection on the part of communities. This allows for conversation and collaboration in new and creative ways. Students, in turn, learn the power (and messiness) of community residents working together as they build projects with others.”

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherKettering Foundation
    Release dateDec 8, 2017
    ISBN9781945577239
    Living Democracy: Communities as Classrooms, Students as Citizens

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      Book preview

      Living Democracy - Nan Fairley

      LIVING

      DEMOCRACY

      Communities as Classrooms,

      Students as Citizens

      Nan Fairley and Mark Wilson

      Editor: Mindy LaBreck

      Managing Editor: Joey Easton

      Copy Editors: Joey Easton and Jared Namenson

      Proofreader: Lisa Boone-Berry

      Design and Production: Longs Graphic Design, Inc.

      © 2017 by the Kettering Foundation

      ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

      Living Democracy: Communities as Classrooms, Students as Citizens is published by Kettering Foundation Press. The interpretations and conclusions contained in this book represent the views of the authors. They do not necessarily reflect the views of the Charles F. Kettering Foundation, its directors, or its officers.

      For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to: Permissions

      Kettering Foundation Press

      200 Commons Road

      Dayton, Ohio 45459

      This book is printed on acid-free paper

      First edition, 2017

      Manufactured in the United States of America

      ISBN: (print) 978-1-945577-21-5

      ISBN: (ePDF) 978-1-945577-22-2

      ISBN: (ePUB) 978-1-945577-23-9

      Library of Congress Control Number: 2017940451

      INTRODUCTION by Mark Wilson

      CHAPTER ONE: From Service to Something Else

      CHAPTER TWO: Summary of an Experiment

      CHAPTER THREE: Community Is Connections and Connectivity

      CHAPTER FOUR: The Problems Are Wicked, but the Hope Is Real

      CHAPTER FIVE: Earning a Good Grade in Life

      CONCLUSION by Nan Fairley

      APPENDICES

      APPENDIX A: Living Democracy Four Years Later by Marian Royston

      APPENDIX B: Co-Treading the Relational Pathways of Living Democracy: An institutional Perspective by Ralph Foster

      APPENDIX C: Immersive Civic Learning Opportunities Can Help Improve Civic Health by Cristin Foster Brawner

      NOTES

      BIBLIOGRAPHY

      "Education must come into its own. It must

      become the conscious agent for building a better world.

      It must be true to its high mission."

      —Marietta Johnson

      IN THE SUMMER OF 1907, Marietta Johnson, a teacher from St. Paul, Minnesota, accepted an invitation to start a school on the eastern shore of Mobile Bay in the town of Fairhope, Alabama. Having lived in the town earlier in the decade, locals recognized her for her progressive vision for education, and the Comings family offered her 25 dollars per month to establish and lead a school. Johnson was a proponent of the child development theories espoused by pediatrician Nathaniel Oppenheim and education reformer John Dewey, and the offer to start a school was her chance to test new ways of relating and acting with children. Six children came the first day, she wrote later, and I did not know what to do.¹

      Fairhope was the perfect place for an educational experiment, since the entire town was an experiment in economics and community. In 1894, a group of citizens from Des Moines, Iowa—followers of the economic theories of Henry George—founded a colony based on cooperative individualism and a single-tax, which prevented land speculation and allowed individuals to become shareholders of the corporation that owned and managed the land. After looking all over the United States for a destination, they chose Alabama’s eastern shore because they saw a fair hope of success. The Comings chose Marietta Johnson to begin a new school for the very same reason. Both the single-tax corporation of Fairhope and the Organic School of Education still remain.

      Johnson built the school’s philosophy and practice around some commitments and concerns that she felt were missing from traditional forms of education. She felt traditional education focused on acquiring knowledge and developing skills at the expense of children’s cognitive and emotional development. The system of rewards and punishment defied a proper understanding of human development, in her opinion, and she preferred an organic method, one that assumed children were born to learn and that the teacher facilitates individual learning through creative experiences. There would be no tests or grades. Classes would be small. Experience would be primary. John and Evelyn Dewey highlighted the school in 1915 in their book Schools of Tomorrow,² even using a photo of students taking a test with books open for the frontispiece.

      Living Democracy is an experiment born out of the same concerns for education held valuable by Marietta Johnson and countless others who have sought new and different ways of getting the work of education done. Many people in the United States and around the world, for example, lament the fact that higher education seems to focus more and more on skills education, which prepares students for a job, but reduces the opportunity for students to become well-rounded individuals. Others are concerned that the cult of professionalism has crowded out opportunities and expectations related to active citizenship by developing narrowly focused majors for fields that offer the most financially rewarding careers. Some folks at big research universities complain that the tenure-track profession rewards those who contribute to a field of scholarship while neglecting those who contribute in substantial ways to the lives and careers of students and the communities that prepared them. Living Democracy is, in part, a response to these concerns.

      The chapters that follow outline and describe our journey over the last several years and, hopefully, honor the work of students and community members who have made, and continue to make, the journey with us. Chapter One, From Service to Something Else, provides context for higher education, the fountain of ideas and experiences within which this project has been situated. Chapter Two, Summary of an Experiment, provides the nuts and bolts of the project to date, including the opportunities and expectations of students as they participate. Chapter Three, ‘Community’ Is Connections and Connectivity, looks at the importance of relationships, both harmonious and contentious. Chapter Four, The Problems Are Wicked, but the Hope Is Real, illustrates the real-world challenges citizens face, and the ways in which students have an opportunity to experience the tension of tough decisions. Chapter Five, Earning a Good Grade in Life, discusses what students report as the benefits of the living-learning experience in communities.

      All human effort—no matter how objective and scientific it claims to be—is part autobiography. My colleague Nan Fairley, associate professor of journalism at Auburn University, and I are reluctant to include our own stories in this book, not because we claim the writing to be objective or scientific, but because university work already has enough hubris and contrived self-importance without a contribution from the two of us. But the journey with students and communities has affected us in professional and personal ways, and since we require critical self-reflection of our students, we seem obliged to do the same. I offer my thoughts as introduction; Nan provides hers as conclusion.

      I am a twelve-month employee in the College of Liberal Arts at Auburn University, a land-grant university in Alabama. For nearly ten years, I have worked in an outreach capacity, organizing public programs in the arts and humanities with partners from around the state. I am not a tenure-track faculty in a department, but I teach classes in a minor program for community and civic engagement.

      As a doctoral student in history at Auburn University in 2001, I found myself in need of something productive to do over the summer, since graduate assistantships were few during those months, and because I wanted to gain some valuable experience somewhere, in some way. I landed in rural Alabama that summer—Perry County—working as the first intern for a new, small nonprofit organization called Sowing Seeds of Hope. Some progressive Baptists and others founded the organization to make a long-term commitment to the county, which happened to be where several Baptist institutions were born, and where population decline and persistent poverty are the narratives that shape the county and region.

      The organization had a grant for work related to literacy, and my job was to hold as many conversations as possible, with as many people as possible, and spend the money in the best way possible. It was a dream assignment and summer. The whirlwind of activity culminated in the renovation of an abandoned bank building into a new home for the public library in Uniontown, a project that brought together a state agency, city and council governments, private funders, and the hands of many people inside and outside of the community. There was no script for the summer, only conversations that led to stops and starts and the gathering together of people who identified assets that might reach their full potential with a little cooperation and a lot of sweat.

      I learned much about myself that summer, and about the people of the state where I was born and have lived the majority of my life. Despite the things that often separate us as humans—race, class, gender, and so forth—honest conversation can reveal some things we all hold valuable, such as freedom, security, and commitment to the future while respecting the past. But sometimes the things we hold valuable are in tension with each other, and we have to work through the trade-offs and consequences that are present in order to make a sound decision. This is the work of democracy, which means it’s the work of citizens.

      Marietta Johnson hoped education would come into its own by becoming a conscious agent for building a better world.³ Most universities seek to do that through technological or human research, or by producing graduates who will compete and work as professionals in a discipline or field. But professionals cannot build a better world on their own—some might say, not at all. Private citizens who become public actors through shared experiences will make a better world. College students deserve and benefit from a chance to live and learn democracy in real places and spaces, especially among the Marietta Johnsons in towns across the state of Alabama.

      IN APRIL 2005, several hundred faculty, administrators, service-learning office personnel, and community partners met in Cocoa Beach, Florida, for the Gulf-South Summit on Service-Learning and Civic Engagement in Higher Education. In its third year, the consortium of universities was a cooperative venture. It had no staff or budget or physical home; it arose out of a need for a regional gathering of theorists and practitioners to network, discuss institutional cultures, and make sense of what many participants hoped would be a permanent shift toward more robust and creative ways higher education would fulfill its public mission. To Fish or Not to Fish was the theme of the meeting, but it had nothing to do with the Atlantic Ocean just outside the conference hotel. Most conference themes are

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