South Philly’s Indonesian community as a focus for service learning
The first assignment for students in this spring’s Folklore 321 course was simple: Visit an Indonesian store in South Philadelphia, find something under $5 that you know nothing about. Find out about it, purchase it, write about your experience and bring the item to class.
The item could be anything from a bag of cassava chips to a can of jackfruit. The point, according to Mary Hufford, who teaches the course and directs Penn’s Center for Folklore and Ethnography, is to get students out of the academy and into the community to listen to the voices of the people.
Fieldwork and an interest in the culture of the vernacular has always been integral to the study of folklore. So when Rebecca Bushnell, Dean of the College at the time, suggested six years ago that Hufford talk with the Center for Community Partnerships’ Ira Harkavy about creating a service-learning course, it seemed like a natural fit. “For me, it’s just public folklore,” she says.
Early on, Hufford and her class explored a corner of North Philadelphia, a community that had lost its sense of place—through blight and abandonment—and was trying to regenerate it. More recently, Hufford’s students have been working with recent immigrant populations—Liberians in West Philadelphia and Indonesians in South Philadelphia. “There, the problem is generating place,” says Hufford. “We’re looking for how people are shaping culture out of their experiences in America, how they are using tradition and memory and what the response of Philadelphia is to that.”
Hufford’s concept of service learning is a little different from the typical tutoring, teaching and mentoring programs where, as she puts it, “people of privilege share what they have with a neighbor of the University.” When she was working in North Philadelphia, local artist and community activist Lily Yeh told her that the University needed her neighborhood as much as they needed Penn.
“I’ve been asking myself,” says Hufford, “how does the University need North Philadelphia, Liberian elders who speak Liberian English, which is very hard to understand? How does the University need Indonesian immigrants who are having difficulty getting green cards?” The answer, she says, is that her students can learn valuable lessons about community, how people create it and how people regenerate it.
For her Folklore 321 class, Hufford, along with co-teacher and visiting scholar Yoonhee Kang, is partnering with the Folk Arts and Cultural Treasures School (FACTS), a new charter school in Chinatown. The goal is to work with community members to identify cultural resources that FACTS can draw on to support the many Indonesian children who have recently enrolled in the school.
The students in the course have made frequent forays into South Philadelphia to find out where the cultural centers are, be they churches, stores, markets, hair salons or laundromats.
Next, Hufford’s students will meet with high school students in South Philly to learn about the food, music and verbal arts in the community. Being the children of immigrants can be challenging, says Hufford: “At this very difficult time of their lives, they’re conscripted into being the translator for their families.” Together, the high schoolers and students will develop a guide for teachers on cultural and linguistic maintenance.
For Hufford this kind of fieldwork always yields more than just a printed document. “It supports the idea that a healthy democratic public sphere is one that enables the largest number of people to get out there and communicate with each other.”
Originally published on March 1, 2007.
