Moving the world: A celebration of writing and community

Parc de la Tête d'Or, Lyon, Sergio Canobbio

Last Wednesday, I was fortunate to attend a significant literary event, called Moving the World: A Celebration of Writing and Community.

Over a three-hour period, I heard essays, letters, poems, and collaborative writing, but also saw drawings and paintings. I got to meet with the artists and to ask them questions about their work. The intellectual and artistic quality as well as the variety of the works were outstanding. The program was beautifully organized by Patrick Berry and Cory Holding.

An event such as this one is not uncommon; what made this one special was that it was held in the chapel of the Danville Correctional Center, and the artists were all inmates. They showed off the work they’ve done through courses offered by the Education Justice Project (EJP), led by Rebecca Ginsburg. EJP is a response to the abundant evidence showing that

College-in-prison programs reduce arrest, conviction, and reincarceration rates among released prisoners. Evidence has also linked the presence of college-in-prison programs to fewer disciplinary incidents within prison, finding that such programs produce safer environments for prisoners and staff alike. College-prison programs also have benefits for inmates’ families and, hence, their communities.

Captured Potential, Larry Brent

The EJP is an outstanding effort to help young men who want to become better family and community members. If you had experienced Moving the World, you’d at least have seen inmate-students focusing their energies on reading and writing, on reflecting about their lives, families, and communities, and perhaps most significantly, engaged in how they can make positive contributions to the world both inside and outside the prison.

As I said, the quality of the writing and the oral performances was superb. I was impressed with nearly all of the works. One, entitled “Progressive tears: A prisoner’s retrospective cry for Dewey’s help,” asked the philosopher John Dewey whether his progressive vision was still relevant today. Do we as a people still believe in equality and justice? Do we still see education as a means for building a better society? One may wonder, since the use of Pell Grants for prisoners was eliminated in 1994, and most prison college programs have closed.

Another essay asserts “We all want the same things.” It shows that both prisoners and ordinary people on the outside want prisoners to turn from crime to productive citizenship. Other works included letters to family members, poems, reflections on life. The painting, “Captured potential,” and its accompanying text, express well both the tragedy of prison and the possibilities. I doubt whether anyone made it through the event with dry eyes.

You can see some of the writing itself in the National Gallery of Writing.

An event like Moving the World makes the drudgery and nonsense of many other parts of life much more bearable. I not only enjoyed it in the sense of savoring, rather than counting, the moments, I was also impressed by the obvious thoughtfulness, organization, and high standards that went into it. I now understand why one instructor said that her participation has raised the standards back at the university.

References

• CBC News (2009, December 17). Inmate deaths from unnatural causes rise.
• NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund. Dismantling the school-to-prison pipeline.

 

Community Informatics channel

The Community Informatics channel on YouTube hosts some videos produces by young people in our Youth Community Informatics project. We hope to add more soon.

 

Using photography for qualitative research

While lost amidst sorting through 30 boxes of my files, I’ve occasionally come across some gems. One is

English, Fenwick W. (1988, May). The utility of the camera in qualitative inquiry. Educational Researcher, 17, pp. 8 – 16.

As we do research, prepare proposals for conferences, and work with community members to document their own experiences, it’s worth thinking about alternative methods for doing and presenting research.

English’s article (available online through Sage or the UI Library) uses interesting photographs to discuss the role of the camera in inquiry. He also explores the metaphor of the photo as a way of thinking about different approaches to a research subject, foe example, the wide angle view that surveys a situation versus the telescopic that focuses in on a particular issue.

 

Elizabeth McMaster

Elizabeth McMaster lived a short life that was filled with music and art, and she brought two beautiful daughters into the world. She was born in Atlanta, Georgia cc. 1897 and died there in October, 1931. At the time of her death, her daughter Betty was 12 and her daughter Catherine was 10.

Elizabeth was a talented singer. Among her favorites were “Ah! Sweet Mystery of Life” and “Charmaine.” She also painted in oils (see first photo below).

In 1917(?), she married Charles Whitfield Holloway in Atlanta. He was two years younger. Betty was born while they lived there. The family then moved to Chattanooga, where Catherine was born. Charles’s sister Pauline and her mother lived with the family there after her father died. They then moved to Lakeland, Florida, and later to Richmond, Virginia, then back to Atlanta, where they first lived in an apartment on Ponce de Leon street. These moves were due to Charles’s work as a salesman for the B. F. Goodrich Rubber Co.

Elizabeth’s mother felt that Charles was too young and wouldn’t amount to much. Because of this, Charles and Elizabeth had eloped. Despite the estrangement of Charles and her mother, Elizabeth and her daughters kept in close touch with her. However, they didn’t hear from her again after Elizabeth’s funeral.

Elizabeth suffered from nocturnal epilepsy. It was her daughters who discovered her death. Catherine was asked to go outside while others removed the body. After her death, Betty and Catherine went to live with Charles’s brother Emmett and his wife in an apartment in Decatur, Georgia. After a few months they all moved to a house in Atlanta.

Charles then married Eva Lassiter (aka Sugy) and was chosen to manage a Goodrich store in Augusta, where the family moved next. Betty and Catherine were then in high school. He later proved his mother-in-law wrong with the building of the very successful Holloway Tire Co., which sold tires and recapped truck tires. He was also a partner with Ralph Snow in Southeastern Rubber Manufacturing Co. Near the end of the War or possibly shortly afterwards, they went to Washington and received an allotment of rubber and started a company to make camelback for tire recapping (or retreading). Eventually the Holloways built a house at 2727 Hillcrest Avenue and moved there for the remainder of the lives of Charles and Eva.

See more on the Hall and Holloway families.

Elizabeth’s painting

Elizabeth & her younger daughter, Catherine

Betty as a baby

Baby Catherine

Catherine entered in the Little Darling contest to recruit for the Our Gang movies

Charles Whitfield Holloway & two daughters

Betty crowned Queen of the May in RIchmond

Betty & Catherine sitting on a goat cart while in Richmond

Betty & Catherine

Catherine, with Capers Smith & Betty in New York cc. 1942

Holloway siblings: Emmett (3), Andrew (5), Charles (4), Julian (1), Pauline (6), John (2)

 

Visual literacy in the information age

Ching-Chiu Lin is a founding member of the Youth Community Informatics project. Her work with Timnah, Lisa, and Karen at the Urbana Middle School integrated art, music, story-telling, cultural heritage, and multimedia in an after-school program. That’s one of the models for our current work.

Ching-Chiu’s dissertation, A qualitative study of three secondary art teachers’ conceptualizations of visual literacy as manifested through their teaching with electronic technologies, analyzed similar arts and new media projects in three schools. I’ve learned a little while ago that it was awarded second place for the 2008 Eisner Doctoral Research award. This was officially announced at the National Art Education Association (NAEA) convention in Minneapolis this month.

Congratulations, Ching-Chiu!

 

Fondation Connaissance et Liberté (FOKAL)

I was very fortunate to hear Elizabeth Pierre-Louis speak yesterday.

Elizabeth was on campus to accept the 2008 Young Humanitarian Award. As Director of the Library Program at Fondasyon Konesans Ak Libète (FOKAL) in Haiti, she helped to set up 45 community libraries across the country. She coordinates the training and management of these libraries, which are improving the quality of live for the people there. Elizabeth described a wide variety of programs of FOKAL, including projects on supplying running water, developing basic literacy, supporting the visual arts, dance and music, debate, and economic education.

Throughout these many programs, there is an emphasis on participatory democracy, including organization and responsibility of citizens, leadership, financial and technical management, resolving conflicts, and collective decision making. Elizabeth’s work is just part of an amazing organization helping people work together toward common purposes.

The photo, of the Monique Calixte Library in FOKAL’s Cultural Center, and this text below are from the FOKAL site.

The Fondation Connaissance et Liberté / Fondasyon Konesans Ak Libète (FOKAL) Cultural Center, built in 2003 in the center of Port-au-Prince thanks to funding from the Open Society Institute (OSI) and support from George Soros, is designed for meetings, training, reading, debates, recreation and discovery.

The center is comprised of a public library, with a membership of over 5,000 where children and youths from the poor neighborhoods of Port-au-Prince have access to reading materials in optimal conditions, a small auditorium, a café-terrasse and a cybercafé. The UNESCO auditorium is a hall designed for conferences, debates, meetings, audio-visual presentations, films, concerts and theatre. The center also includes a large atrium where one can discover the works of both Haitian and foreign painters, writers, and sculptors; and a sound and video production studio, a training hall and gardens…

FOKAL’s cultural center offers a place, eminently rare in Haiti, where peasants, women, children and youths from poor neighborhoods have a chance to interact with each other and with representatives of all sectors of society on subjects which concern education, the environment, culture, and democracy…

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Arts and the cognitive life of the university

Harvard has issued a Report of the task force on the arts (2008, December), which argues that the arts are an integral part of the cognitive life of the university. Similar reports come out regularly from other institutions; this one is notable mostly because of Harvard’s stamp on the value of the arts, especially for inquiry in all fields. There is (belated) attention to a wide view of arts both in appreciation and in making, as well as the use of new technologies:

The use of new digital and media technologies—in virtually all forms of inquiry—provides an unprecedented opportunity for our students to take art-making seriously “for itself,” while seeing it as an enhancement of their own specific scholarly and professional interests. “Making” in the visual arts, for instance, is no longer restricted to the hand-held technologies of pencil, brush, chisel and camera…The availability of computer software for creative purposes allows for a range of artistic practices that may not “train the hand and eye” in the time-honored traditional sense, but whose imaginative and aesthetic possibilities provide the important cognitive and conceptual training of an “art-making” education. (pp. 8-9)

One side note is the recognition of Harvard’s “unusual, if not unique” relation to arts practice. The report notes for example that

By 1869, Yale had opened the doors to its School of Art . Yale now confers graduate degrees in arts practice from four separate professional schools—the School of Art, School of Drama, School of Music, and School of Architecture—and it provides as well profound opportunities for mentorship and instruction within the talented undergraduate population. (p. 6)

 

Teaching as bringing to life

During the time of the semester when grades are due, it’s difficult to ignore the aspects of the teaching job that involve judging, ranking, sorting, and critiquing in the sense of finding and documenting fault. But these aspects have little to do with teaching, and usually stand in the way. When one is learning, it can be helpful to know where one has gone wrong, but more often the wrong is painfully obvious and what we need even more is to know what of our fragile attempts can be brought to life. For that, we need critique in another sense, one that’s a friend to the new, brings ideas to life, and makes quality vivid.

Anton Ego, Michel Foucault, and Elliot Eisner speak to this issue:

We critics risk very little, yet enjoy a position over those who offer up their work and themselves to our judgment. We thrive on negative criticism for it’s fun to write and to read. But the bitter truth we critics must face is that in the grand scheme of things, the average piece of junk is probably more meaningful than our criticism designating it so. But there are times when a critic truly risks something, and that is in the discovery and defense of the new. The world is often unkind to new talent, new creations. The new needs friends. –the critic, Anton Ego, Disney/Pixar movie Ratatouille

I can’t help but dream about a kind of criticism that would not try to judge, but bring an oeuvre, a book, a sentence, an idea to life; it would light fires, watch the grass grow, listen to the wind, and catch the sea-foam in the breeze and scatter it. It would multiply, not judgments, but signs of existence; it would summon them, drag them from their sleep. Perhaps it would invent them sometimes – all the better. All the better. Criticism that hands down sentences sends me to sleep; I’d like a criticism of scintillating leaps of imagination. It would not be sovereign or dressed in red. It would bear the lightning of possible storms.–Michel Foucault

If connoisseurship is the art of appreciation, criticism is the art of disclosure. Criticism, as Dewey pointed out in Art as Experience, has at is end the re-education of perception… The task of the critic is to help us to see. Thus…connoisseurship provides criticism with its subject matter. Connoisseurship is private, but criticism is public. Connoisseurs simply need to appreciate what they encounter. Critics, however, must render these qualities vivid by the artful use of critical disclosure. –Elliot Eisner, 1985, pp. 92-93

References

Eisner, Elliot W. (1985). The art of educational evaluation: a personal view. London: Falmer.

Foucault, Michel (1980, April). The masked philosopher. Le Monde, interview by Christian Delacampagne.

Smith, Mark K. (2005). Elliot W. Eisner, connoisseurship, criticism and the art of education. The encyclopaedia of informal education.

Stake, Robert E., & Schwandt, Thomas (2006). On discerning quality in evaluation. In Ian Shaw, Jennifer C. Greene, & Melvin M. Mark (eds.), Handbook of evaluation: Policies, programs and practices. Sage.

 

Children’s House (Çocuklar Evi) in Çanakkale, Turkey

On Monday, I was invited by Ebru Aktan Kerem, an early childhood teacher/researcher at Çanakkale Onsekiz Mart Üniversitesi (in Turkey), to visit Çocuklar Evi, or Children’s House. Ebru’s innovative research contributes to a wonderful, university-based school for children, ages 3-6, and a site for learning for teachers and researchers.

The Principal, Derya Bedir, and the teachers use persona dolls to help develop understanding across differences. They promote art, music, science, and healthy interaction in the spirit of Reggio Emilia or the University (of Illinois) Primary School.

Some visitors apparently observe for an hour, have tea, and then leave. They come away with a rich picture of an outstanding school. But I was captivated by the children and the creative activities led by the teachers. I hope I didn’t overstay my welcome. I joined in on the Turkish songs and taught the children “Skidamarinkadinkadink.” They helped me with my Turkish. One activity led to another, then lunch, and then interesting art projects after lunch. I kept up reasonably well, but was reminded that preschool children can get up and down much faster than I can!

Click once on a photo to enlarge it; click again to enlarge it further.

 

first Youth Community Informatics Forum

In the Youth Community Informatics Forum held June 27-28, 2008, about 40 young people and youth leaders came to Champaign from a variety of economically disadvantaged, mostly minority communities throughout the state.

There was a youth media festival on Friday. Then on Saturday, participants spent the morning working in one of four small groups to investigate “information spaces” in the community. These included the Center for Children’s Books, Champaign Public Library, the Independent Media Center, Espresso Royale, Native House, Cafe Paradiso, Transit Plaza, Illini Union, and bronze plaques around campus. The group leader introduced a staff member from the center to the students for a small tour and helped them use a Flip video camera and a GPS receiver to record their observations.

At each site, the youth asked questions such as:

1. What do we see in this information center? How do we like it?
2. What is this center about?
3. What do we want people to know about the center?
4. How can we give others a clear idea about the center through watching/hearing our report?

In the afternoon, they created a Google map with their videos, text, and GPS coordinates. They also added music (an innovation we hadn’t planned on, but perfectly appropriate). They then shared their findings in a public presentation.

The activity was conceived in terms of an Inquiry Cycle:

Inquiry cycle

• Ask: What are the information spaces in the community?
• Investigate: Visit, listen, explore, video, determine geo-coordinates.
• Create: Make a GIS site with video, music, text.
• Discuss: Share the product and the findings with others.
• Reflect: Think about issues of journalism, democracy, careers, technologies, etc.

We found that the students learned technology skills, problem solving, cooperative work, writing, public presentation, specific information spaces, community journalism, university life, and much more.

Although the June activity made use of diverse new technologies, it is important to note that the focus was on learning about the community, asking questions, and sharing findings with others, not on the technologies per se. The most effective use of these technologies in libraries and similar settings would likely involve embedding that use in a larger, purposeful context. That context in turn could be a way to help connect youth with other resources, such as books and structured activities.

We’re now planning a similar activity in October with the Mortenson Center Associates, a group of visiting, international librarians. This will be the first day of a two- or three-day event. The longer time will allow for discussion about how the information spaces might differ in different countries, what technologies are available in different contexts, how valuable the activity would be for youth in their libraries, and so on. Students from the Community Informatics (LEEP) course would lead the investigation of the local-area information centers.

Both youth leaders and young people said they enjoyed the Forum, learned a lot, and hope for more. One youth leader said that next year he’d like to bring a much larger group. Another wrote,

I believe, in the not too distant future, that this conference will be seen as a landmark in developing a new perspective as part of the partnership between those marginalized sectors of civil society and the university in bridging the digital divide.

As Myles Horton might say, that’s a long haul, but at least there was good spirit of cooperation in learning, which I hope will carry over to continuing work in these communities.

[Cross-posted on social issues]