Social Capital

“Using the festival as a starting point, I address, in this chapter, the social isolation  of the residents, their inability to generate ties to the middle class and to further their external social capital” (92). This sentence caught my attention for a couple of reasons. First, I’ve heard of cultural capital and economic capital, but I don’t think I’ve had much exposure to social capital. Second, I was intrigued that Small was drawing attention to the exclusivity of a neighborhood—the “social isolation” of people rather than their factors for inclusion.  I found both of these concepts to be noteworthy since my recent community engagement projects have focused on those who have been excluded from the dominant (or often privileged) discourse: those outside of academia, those who may not speak Standard Written English, women, the homeless, and domestic abuse victims. These are large categories, to be sure, but in some way or another, they are all marginalized categories. And they have all suffered—or continue to do so—from a form of isolation.

Small uses the concept of social isolation to describe what is, at least to me, a very perplexing—though not unusual trend—when a group of people (with a seemingly strong sense of community)are excluded from the surroundings with less identifiable characteristics. For instance, while there is a strong sense of pride within the Villa, described through Small’s festival experience, this community stays secluded and seemingly overpowered by the other—though often less community-oriented—group. Indeed, as Small writes, this process of making differences known between groups of people incites a type of “boundary work” where “symbolic lines” come between these people (103). These symbolic lines though are often met with physical boundaries caused by spatial configuration. It’s easier for me to understand physical boundaries: a gate or fence to connote exclusion; a wall to force separation. It’s when we get to the symbolic boundaries that I start to have questions. It’s easy to knock down a wall or fence, but how do you break down barriers that you can’t even see—or that people choose not to see?

Small’s chapter made me think about my own neighborhood in Jamaica Plain. Just a few months ago, the largely Latin-based area of Hyde Square became the new home to a Whole Foods. Being fairly new to the area, I didn’t pay much attention when I found out the small, but popular, Hi-Lo foods was closing; however, I soon realized that the community was in an uproar about an affordable grocer, with ties to the Latin community, being closed for the popular and pricey Whole Foods. Gentrification came up a time or two. And while I didn’t think about it a couple months ago, I realize that the people I saw at Hi-Lo foods are not shopping at Whole Foods. Hell, I’ve only been there a couple times since I can barely afford it! But, even in the few times I have been, it’s easy to see who’s shopping there…and who is not. The outside of the store remained uniquely cultured—with murals on the outside walls rather than the typical Whole Foods branding. Whole foods did not create a physical boundary, but there surely is a symbolic one.  I don’t want to speak for the Latin community around me, but I sense a bit of social isolation going on…maybe even toward the poor college kids that I live with/near. This got me thinking: what is the point being made about the social capital right here in my own neighborhood?

Gleaning Boston

 As I said the first day of class, I don’t have much of a connection to Boston. I came to Northeastern after visiting Boston just for a few days, and, even now, I’m not too aware of my surroundings (though I am trying to get better). With this in mind, de Certeau’s chapter made me think about how I interact, with my walking, to the city around me.  It also made me think back to a French film by Agnes Varda called Les glaneurs et la glaneuse (The Gleaners and I).  In this documentary, Varda films people in France who are “gleaners”—she looks to the people around her and films them on everyday activities that most people never really notice. For instance, one main part of the film is after a market wraps up and the vendors are closing down. A group of people come into the space and “glean” whatever they can from the leftover produce. Fruit is often dropped or left because there is a bad spot on it or doesn’t look as perfect as most people want it. However, for the “gleaners”—who range in age, gender, race, etc.—it is wasted food that could be easily enjoyed for free. What Varda’s film points out is that we often see what we want to see. And we ignore what we don’t want to. As de Certeau writes, “the ordinary practitioners of the city live ‘down below’, below the thresholds at which visibility begins” (128).  Many of these people look odd; the stigma of picking up “trash” follows them, even though they live their lives, saving money on food, feeling better about not wasting good resources, and also experiencing the city in a way that is unlike anyone else.   

So, the reason I mention Varda’s film is because I have been trying to be a gleaner of sorts myself lately, when I walk around the city. I am trying to see what I usually miss, what de Certeau calls the “everyday” experiences and those same experiences that are usually rendered invisible in a way. For instance, it’s easy to be walking among many people and pass by the person with a Dunkin Donuts cup, asking for money. It’s quite easy to pass by the man sifting through the garbage, though he neither looks as if he is in need of anything nor frantically searching for a lost item. I think that all of this will be important for picking a space for project 2. And just as Varda considers herself the filmmaker, she, too, is someone to be observed, someone whose actions change the city around her. Her film asks us to notice them, and I think that de Certeau is making that argument in many ways: that we should take note of our place in the structure of the city. In any case, I have a lot to think about for the next couple weeks, and now I just need to focus on the double sided way of gleaning: first, as looking at others around me and, second, as a way of looking at myself. It is in this type of activity that I think my own interest in community engagement comes in, as we seek to understand our own place within the world around us—whether that is in Boston in general or the immediacy of the coffee shop I do homework in each week. 

Learning through doing

Jazmin:  “what does c*** mean?”

Me: … what?

Jazmin: “c***”

Me: huh? Wait. What? (thinking to myself I must have heard wrong)

Jazmin: “c***!”

It wasn’t a conversation I prepared for. And it certainly was not a conversation I anticipated having, but it came up nonetheless.

***

Tajonna: “I have a job.”

Me: “Oh yeah?”

Tajonna: “I am a speaker.”

Me: “What do you speak about?”

Tajonna: “How I used to be homeless”

***

Throughout our sessions at MHS, I’ve tutored three very different students. There was Andy, who never made eye contact with me. Jazmin, who was a bit quiet but also really pushed me to help her keep focus and prompted me to guide outside her outside of academic conversations. And, finally, Tajonna, who taught me what a 13 year old can really accomplish. Looking back on my first post from MHS, I was a bit worried with how I interacted with Andy because we literally—and I guess figuratively as well—didn’t see eye to eye. However, when I started working with Jazmin, she challenged me in both my tutoring and how I viewed my role within this experience. In the above conversation, Jazmin came to me for more than just tutoring advice, and while I was uncomfortable talking to her about this word, I wanted to because she kept asking me about something she didn’t know. And she found me approachable enough to ask this question. It may not have been a tutoring question, but what I got out of it was a feeling that somehow I connected with Jazmin enough for her to listen to my response and hear me out.

In our final day of tutoring, I worked with Tajonna since Jazmin wasn’t there.  While I helped Tajonna on grammar and revision, she taught me how much confidence and drive a 13 year old has to use.  In our revising, we talked about how her subject (a model) had to go through so much work in order to get to where she was. Tajonna wanted to add that part into her narrative because she said that that’s a goal of her own—to show people how hard work can help you get to a better place and that you have to overcome difficult things for resolutions. I only worked with Tajonna once, but in our hour together, Tajonna and I did accomplish something: we read through her narrative, added transitions, talked about grammar, and made sure that the main point that she wanted to come across did. And she finished her narrative. That, to me, is an accomplishment.

 Each of my students was difficult in various ways, but overall I feel as if I accomplished something personally: I learned to relax a bit more in my tutoring, to not try and overpower the sessions. And I connected with my students and learned from them. I was a little concerned, going into this, how 13 and 14 year olds would react to me, but I enjoyed chatting with them, and I liked how they kept challenging me in my tutoring and in my personal interactions with them. 

Doing what we can do

                I was really interested in class discussion this week because, like you, I’m still trying to figure out how community engagement plays out in a course. On the one hand, I’m thrilled at any opportunity we have to get involved with a community outside of the walls of Holmes hall! On the other hand, I’m cautious of thinking that I will change huge issues tutoring for a couple hours. But here’s where the optimist in me is going to come out. I think that we need to be cognizant of Herzberg and Deans’ critiques and hesitations about involvement in the community, but we also need to start somewhere! Start small and build up, right?

                I understand the critiques that we can’t do much in a couple tutoring sessions. And I get why Deans especially cautions against being involved in the community and then almost immediately leaving it. BUT, we are working with 826 Boston and MHS throughout their project. The goal of our interaction is to help them complete their book. So, if we stay throughout that process, I don’t think that the quantity of time spent with them should be looked at negatively. In theory (if things go as planned), we will have helped them with the goal we all set out with. This seems to me to parallel Chris’s ideas (drawing on de Certeau) of tactical projects. Sometimes you do what you can do, in the time given and with the resources available. Then, you build on it!

                Another thing that I was contemplating throughout our discussion also had to do with the question of how much time is enough to have a meaningful relationship with someone. For instance, in the different writing centers I’ve worked in, I’ve had very productive sessions in just 30 minutes! And other times an hour allows us to accomplish the goal of revising an essay or brainstorming an assignment. I know I’m not changing the world when I tutor, but I do think that that hour or half hour can make a difference—even if it’s just helping someone understand an assignment better. Understandably, there seems to be a disconnect between helping someone with an essay and drawing attention to larger systemic issues that we’ve talked about, but I wouldn’t say that’s always the case. For instance, I have students come in with essays about race, homelessness, sexism, poverty, etc. and we talk through ideas. And we work on writing an essay or doing a project that, in turn, will also talk about these ideas. So, I guess I do think that if I can help guide someone through their ideas, while also learning about them myself, a difference can be made. Maybe it was by me, maybe it was by them; but most importantly, maybe it was through (or encouraged by) our interaction.

Rethinking service

I’m a service-learning junkie.  For the past year and a half I’ve been figuring out what service-learning is and what it means to me. And, with that, I’ve realized that I’m not too keen on the actual term service-learning. I write this as I am now wearing a specially designated service-learning TA shirt (yes, I got free clothing). The shirt says, “I am the hyphen.” So, if we take the shirt for what it’s worth, I (as a Service-learning TA) am the hyphen between service and learning? The one who connects these two words? I like the idea of that, but the word service bothers me.  

One of Deans’ questions states, “When and how do service-learning pedagogies reproduce rather than disrupt dominant ideologies?” I have a difficult time with this question because of what I think about service-learning: I like to think of community work as engagement more than anything, focusing on reciprocity of learning, the moving between genres of writing and sites of action (classroom and community sites), and the intersectionality of factors such as race, gender, class, sexuality, language, etc. To me, these ideas are important because they necessitate a dialectical approach—something that is not just one sided “us serving them” or “us imparting our wisdom.” It’s active and engaged; I don’t see it as service.  I never really thought much about the definition of service-learning until last semester when Chris got me to think about what it would mean to say “community engagement.”  The more I think of it though, it’s an important move. For me, service-learning can very well perpetuate oppressive roles in community interaction, though Deans’ definition cautions us not to fall into these roles. It’s so easy to “reproduce” ideological assumptions, even when we try to “do good.” So, I guess that’s where this question leaves me: my goal isn’t “to serve.”  My goal is to engage with a community and learn about it, with it, and from it. To do this, we have to be able to notice the multiplicity of perspectives that comprise the community, and that create our own ideologies.  And somewhere in all of this, the community MUST come into play: what do they want? What are they learning? What do they need? I’m not saying that this removes ethical questions; once we think all ethical questions are solved, we have a major problem. But I do think that going about service-learning as community engagement highlights different ideals.

Thinking back to last week, I think part of the problem with my session was that I went into it thinking I had to “help” my student. Yes, I would like him to do as well as he can on his writing. But, I think what matters more is that he gets what he needs out of the session. I try not to fall into the “server/served” binary that Deans cautions, but I think it takes a constant reminder that this is a difficult mindset to break. And again I keep coming back to the idea of engaging in conversation may make a difference. I’m not there to serve, but to engage and work alongside.

Tutoring without eye contact...

When Andy and I paired off, we went into a corner of the room and sat on one of the benches. With so many people in the classroom, I anticipated it would be difficult to keep his attention; however, this was not really ever an issue. Andy was very attentive, listening to me each time I spoke, nodding, or shrugging. It was what Andy didn’t do that made unsettled me in our time together: he ignored making eye contact.

I asked Andy to tell me about the person he interviewed and why he picked that profession. Andy decided to interview Eddy, a bouncer for a nightclub. I assumed that Andy would be filled with things to tell me about Eddy. Nope. Actually, when I planned for a couple minute discussion about the bouncer, Andy said, “I don’t remember our interview.” Next plan. I asked, “Why did you want to interview a bouncer in the first place?”  Andy shrugged.  This was going to be a long session.

I decided to dive into the text since I wasn’t getting any real responses from Andy about his own project. We started by looking through the rubric, talking about voice, organization, and flow more than anything. After realizing that the rubric seemed a bit too abstract without writing to critique, I decided to have us read the actual narrative first. I’m not really sure I would do that again—maybe the transcription was a better place to start--but Andy did respond more to my questions about the jazz singer. Reading aloud was slow, but we stopped after each paragraph and I asked Andy about what he liked in the writing, how well it was done (did it flow? Was it organized?). His answers were always short and still he did not look at me when he responded.

It was a bit unsettling because I didn’t want to be the one talking the whole time. I wasn’t really able to find questions that engaged him enough to get to that point. I started pointing out some of the stuff I had hoped Andy would see and asked him if he thought the same thing or saw it a different way. It was at this point that Andy actually started giving me longer responses, talking about how he may want to tell about a specific day in the bouncer’s life rather than the broad narrative of the jazz singer. He asked me where Russia was, and we chatted about that for a little while, but things started to die down again.

So, rather than me talking the whole time, I decided to abandon ship: I decided to move away from academics and ask Andy what kind of profession he is interested in.  “I want to be a football player. I like football. I’m good at it. Either that or boxing. That’s my back up. Oh, I’m good at rap too. I like to make songs and write them down.” Andy finally started to talk. So, we talked about what he wanted. And after he told me that he was a Green Bay Packers fan, and I called him a “cheese head” he actually looked me in the eye and said, “Yeah, well, I don’t wear that though.” I don’t know if I would really do things differently, but I do think that it was a good idea overall to get Andy talking on other subjects. It was good to see Andy come to life with his responses, but I need to figure out how to make that happen sooner, and with the assignment. 

Ways of Engagement

I guess I’ll start by saying why I actually wrote this prompt. As I said in class, I came to service-learning in a slightly unusual way: I never had a course on experiential education; I never did service-learning; I never even participated in a co-op or internship. Instead, when I was in Chris’ class my first semester of grad school, we read a piece by Paula Mathieu and Diana George about homelessness and public advocacy. Right here in Boston, people were paying money to see homeless people hurt each other. Videos were being sold of these “bum fights” and money was being made because some people were desperate enough to endure physical pain to earn money. I remember reading the article and thinking how crazy it was that I had never thought of using composition as engaging with the public (the community both within and outside of the university) in order to change things, make things known, draw attention to important issues. I liked the article because it shocked me. It scared me that people did this but it inspired (yeah, I’ll go with that word though it sounds cheesy) to research something that I never thought much about before: using writing to do something.

Now, before I go off on how much I love service-learning (which I agree with Chris is a very problematic term), I do have to say that I still see immense value in courses that are not experiential in this way. Indeed, theorizing and learning inside the context of the classroom is something I enjoy and value; otherwise, why am I in grad school? In any case, I did my first S-L project on what it would mean for S-L to be a feminist pedagogy. My main reason for thinking about S-L with a feminist lens is so that it could account for the flexibility and reflexivity (not just being reflective, but constantly “bending back on” and re-seeing, revisiting, your ideas and actions and how they affect others) that I think good teaching depends on. Not many people will say that they consciously use a “feminist pedagogy,” but my goal with this project was to figure out ways in which feminist principles could make service-learning less of a “we are trying to save the community” project. Instead, it should be reciprocal! We can learn from the community, and they can learn from us! And, to top that off, why do we even separate ourselves from the community? As Chris pointed out, universities are often blocked off from interacting with the surroundings and it creates a tension and even a hierarchy when we talk about the “university” as being higher than or better than the “community”. That is not true, and the point of feminist scholarship is to deconstruct or destabilize hierarchies such as these.

The next project I did on S-L became the essay which you will all read in a couple weeks. It’s a working-through of my ideas about translingualism (quite literally “going between” languages) within a classroom. Here, I’ve taken up a new approach and decided to move into the “community engagement” definition that I think is more realistic and appropriate to what I am envisioning. ENGAGEMENT is huge in my mind. When I think about the word “engage,” that’s what I want to do: I want to be a part of something; do something; make something happen. It’s active. In my mind, it’s also something that involves multiple people and multiple languages. You engage in discussion—not a one sided conversation. To engage in the community, then, is to be a part of it—and the many languages it involves.

So, in many ways, I’m a beginner like some of you may be. This is my first experiential education course. I know that my research and the texts I’ve read and written have not completely prepared me for the things that will happen. But I’m ready to figure that out.