Return to Compass Features for December 10, 1996
Partnerships between universities and community schools can bring benefits to all parties involved. University faculty can gain valuable research information, teachers receive help with their classes, school children get educational enrichment, and university students get a chance to learn about and serve new communities.
If only it were that simple. Before any of these things can happen, there are a number of bridges to cross, and some of them are harder to negotiate than they appear.
At a panel discussion on Nov. 7, professors, teachers and students involved in community-school partnership programs met at University City High School to discuss "Managing Issues of Cultural, Status and Power Disparity in University-Community School Partnerships." The discussion was part of the second annual National Conference on University-Community School Partnerships, organized by the WEPIC Replication Project at Penn.
James Lytle, University City High principal and host for the panel discussion, began by noting that while the physical distance between his school and Penn is a mere three blocks, a cultural and attitudinal "moat" separates the two. Creating successful university-assisted programs within the school, he said, requires an understanding of the problems posed by the assumptions all parties bring with them and sustained effort to remove them.
One problem, as he described it, is that students and faculty often come into city schools expecting to act upon rather than with the people there. "People want to come study here, or do good here, but a lot of people here do not want to have good done to them," he stated.
Another problem is that school staff are often skeptical about the motives of academic researchers and students who arrive at a school seemingly out of nowhere with grand ideas for transformation but no idea of the environment they are about to enter.
Paula Blevins, a teacher at Cincinnati's Bloom Middle School, noted that two high hurdles had to be cleared to make Bloom's WEPIC Replication Project partnership with Miami University run smoothly. Miami University is the reason the town of Oxford, roughly 50 miles east of Cincinnati, exists, and the people there have no routine exposure to inner-city neighborhoods like Cincinnati's West End.
And while the Miami people were excited at the prospect of working at Bloom, she said, the teachers at Bloom were a bit more skeptical: Many wanted to know what Miami's purpose was in coming there, and some wanted no part of these academic interlopers. To help bridge the experience gap, Blevins arranged sessions to orient the Miami people to the Bloom environment and to what they might expect from students and others there.
The sort of well-meaning but ill-informed enthusiasm Blevins found in the students she worked with from Miami is a problem common to students from relatively privileged backgrounds who engage in volunteer service.
Another example came from Stanford University, whose Haas Center for Public Service helps run a community-school program at the Green Oaks Academy in neighboring East Palo Alto, a poor, largely-Hispanic city separated from campus by a major highway. Anne Takamoto, a Stanford undergraduate who coordinates the program, noted that "we [Stanford students] came from a wide variety of places, but similar backgrounds." This, combined with unfamiliarity with poorer communities, tends to produce what she called "the savior mentality" that many students who offer to work in the program display.
Takamoto explained that program staff work hard to discourage such thinking: "We're not educating people to get out of the neighborhood, but to turn the neighborhood around to where people want to move in," she said.
Lisa Kelly, a teacher at University City High who works with Penn undergraduates regularly, noted a similar attitude among her charges -- "They come in with an attitude that they will do a lot more than they actually do," she said -- but added that insufficient time represents a more serious obstacle to student effectiveness in a school setting.
"You can't build the needed trust between pupils and teachers in one term," she said, yet one term is all many college students participating in school-based service-learning courses get. Kelly's course, which uses students enrolled in a year-long, two-credit Penn course in American history and literature, offers more time for that trust to develop, but even that is less than ideal: "It would be a good idea for Penn students to commit to a school for a couple of years, or their entire [undergraduate] career if possible," she continued.
Both the panelists' remarks and the observations that emerged from small-group discussions afterwards suggested ways to lower the drawbridge across the moat and improve the university-community school experience for all involved. While the details were as varied as the people participating, one main element tied them all together: time. It takes time for academics to overcome teacher skepticism of "ivory-tower" theorists; it takes time for the trust needed for effective learning to form; and it takes time for programs to have an effect on student outcomes.
All this means that universities, which one participant noted "are not traditionally problem-solving institutions," need to think along problem-solving lines and be prepared to make long-term commitments to community schools -- commitments that include ways to measure program outcomes.
Return to Compass Features for December 10, 1996