On the road to education for democracy.

Abstract

Democracy is the ongoing work of people to create and recreate the places where they live and the communities that anchor their lives. A democratic society is fundamentally dependent upon an educated and activated citizenry. Community service can be at the core of creating such a citizenry, but may not automatically do so. This paper introduces a team-based approach to service. The model extends the growing research on service-learning, focusing on public work and problem solving as the link between education and preparation for citizenship.

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Community Service And Citizenship

Democracy is the ongoing work of people to create and recreate the places where they live and the communities that anchor their lives. A democratic society is fundamentally dependent upon a citizenry that possesses the capacity and interest to work together as problem solvers and co-producers of public goods (Boyte and Karl 2000). This is difficult in a modern world that rarely teaches the skills of citizenship and devalues public work (Rimmerman 2001; Astin and Astin 2000; Boyte and Karl 1996).

Despite this difficulty, we do have a generation of students who desire to work as citizens (Long 2002; Sullivan 2000; Rimmerman 1997). We also have communities that desperately need them (Weinberg 2000; Nyden et. al 2000). In particular, we have a generation of college students who are interested in service, and who define their commitment to society through that involvement. This is the goods news. More troubling are the motives and world-views behind the renewed commitment to service. The current generation of students is shaped by a series of interweaving paradoxes. They are cynical about politics, but care about social change. They believe that time is a precious commodity not to be wasted, and yet they are willing to devote large amounts of time to activities that matter. Students are not likely to vote or engage in formal political activities. However, they are attracted to community involvements through service (NASS 1999; Walker 2000). A group of undergraduate student leaders recently wrote, "For the most part, we are frustrated with conventional politics, viewing it as inaccessible.... however, we are deeply involved with civic issues through non-traditional forms of engagement ... service is a viable and preferable alternative at this time" (Long 2002:1)."

Service provides both an opportunity and a problem. It can be serve as an entry point for engaging students in democracy, but it can also be a mechanism of retreat. At its worst, service can be driven by cynicism over formal politics and can result in individualized, compartmentalized acts that shield people from the realities of community and rob communities of the well versed and multitalented citizens they need. Too often service disengages students from the community by employing a philanthropic/charity form of volunteerism. Philanthropic/charity models give students opportunities to volunteer in service to their communities. The main emphasis is on individual voluntary efforts to "do something" (to quote a non-profit name) in the community. Little is asked of students. There is minimal training, reflection, or emphasis on the long term. The action is directed at providing service or money to somebody in need. As a result, philanthropic/charity forms of service are thin. Students are not presented with opportunities to acquire the information or frameworks needed to understand the messy, complex realities of communities. Consequently, students do not develop the skills to become community builders or organizers. Finally, many students grow cynical about service because it seems divorced from social change. It appears to once more exemplify how actions cannot produce outcomes in a world that is seemingly hostile to change. In short, students learn to go someplace and volunteer, but they do not learn the skills of community organizing, the art of public dialogue, or the process of critically thinking that allows them to become a productive citizenry.

How do we develop community service as a process of developing citizens and healthy communities?

Harry Boyte and others have argued that the key concept is public work (Boyte and Kari 1996, 2000). Here the emphasis is on ordinary citizens coming together to produce things or create processes with lasting civic value. Boyte states, "Public work is work by ordinary citizens who build and sustain our basic public goods and resources. It solves common problems and creates common things. It may be paid or voluntary, done in communities, or as part of one's regular job. Public work takes place with an eye to general, other-regarding consequences. It is also work done 'in' public: a mix of people whose interests, backgrounds, and resources may be quite different" (Boyte and Farr 1997). Public work is the conception of service as engagement in the messy, complex, ugly reality of communities with an eye towards working with others to identify, specify, and solve problems. Thus, the emphasis shifts towards:

--complex and long term projects geared towards changing social structures and institutions, rather than simple tasks of doing good;

--students as producers of public works, as opposed to consumers of volunteer activities;

--developing the skills of citizenship, over the development of virtues and values.

The core of a public works conception is problem solving. Problem solving requires frameworks for understanding the complexity of communities. It also requires learning to work across the spectrum of social, political, and economic institutions. Producing public works engages students in a process of identifying root causes of issues while working towards solving problems.

How does public work reshape community service?

One example is the model of Team-Based Community Work being developed at Colgate University by the Center For Outreach, Volunteerism, and Education (COVE). A Team-based approach builds from the growing research on service learning (Stanton, Giles, and Cruz 1999; Eyler and Giles 1999) to reposition community service around public work. Below, I describe the model and then connect it back to service-learning.

Team-Based Community Work

Team-Based work is built around a different set of processes and outcomes. A six step process is used:

#1: Organizing a core group of peers: Students start by acquiring the skills needed to organize and educate a core group of peers who come together to form a project team. Most often, this happens when a group of students express an idea for a project (often carried over from a pervious semester). Team members are recruited through student activities night and by word of mouth. However, there are other paths to team formation. Increasingly, students (or a group of friends) come to the COVE looking for projects. Here, we train them to identify and recruit peers with particular skills or resources that would be helpful to the projects. Through this process, we talk to them about and prepare them with skills as community organizers who can mobilize and educate their peers.

#2: Working with community partners to map community needs: Working through the COVE's Director of Community Outreach, project teams partner with a community entity. Although this is often a traditional non-profit organization, it may also be an informal association of neighbors, a government entity, a merchant's associate, or any other sort of formal or informal community group. Trained with the basic skills of coalition partnering and needs assessment, the project team and community partner map needs and opportunities.

#3: Mapping Campus-Based Assets." The project team returns to campus to locate under-utilized assets that can be used to meet the identified needs and opportunities. This step is done in consultation with the COVE's Director of Community Outreach. Often the under-utilized asset may be unused student time which we turn into volunteering hours. However, the asset mapping may unearth a range of assets. For example, students may locate valuable items in the waste stream like computers and books, opportunities to divert university funds, faculty research expertise, student skills (e.g. website design), and other intellectually based resources.

#4: Forming An Action Plan: The project team works with their community partner to develop a specified project plan. Students start a continuous training process to acquire basic community building skills. In the process, they learn to address several basic questions: How can we use these assets to solve public problems and create public goods? How do our assets fit with the assets of our community partners? Where is there synergy? How do these synergies get maximized? What are the potential threats? How do we avoid the threats while using our assets in unison with others to meet the vision a community has for itself?. Students then work with their community partner to turn their ideas into a specified action plan.

#5: Community Work: Students are now ready to act. Using the action plan, the team works to implement their project. The duration of a project can vary tremendously. Most projects take place over an entire semester, but some last only a weekend or day. Still others take place across an entire academic year or longer. During this time, the team meets with the COVE staff to assess the project's progress. Throughout the process, there is tremendous emphasis on the acquisition of skills needed to produce public work that solves public problems.

#6: Assessment: At the end of the project, the team comes together with COVE staff and community partners to assess outcomes. Forums are held to assess and reassess. Team leaders prepare a report for future teams about lessons learned and suggestions for future actions. This process is used to move from a one dimensional outcome to a multi-dimensional outcome matrix that includes:

1. Direct Community Service: providing direct services to a population in need.

2. Student Growth: developing the hearts and minds of our students, thereby preparing them with the capacity and interest to work across social, economic, and political structures to become problem solvers and producers of public goods.

3. Campus Impact: raising the political, intellectual, and/or ethical conversations on campus, thereby ensuring that all students, even those who do not participate, are engaged and impacted by our service.

4. Social Change: moving towards the longer-term elevation of need through the production of public works. Our mantra is, "A good community service center should always be working to put itself out of business. A community should have only opportunities- not needs." Every project must specify how it will meet all four goals. Two seniors are paid as COVE Fellows to work with the 35+ volunteer groups to ensure that goals #3 and #4 are met.

Community Service and Service Learning

The team-based model arose from institutional work assessing our service-learning program. A growing body of research suggests that service-learning does create the values and skills of citizenship (Rimmerman 2001). It does so by using the intellectual engagement of the classroom, the richness of community-based experiences, and the magic of guided reflection (Stanton, Giles, and Cruz 1999; Eyler and Giles 1999). For community service to have the same benefits as service learning, it must adopt many of the same features. The team-based model infuses key components of service-learning into community service.

Sustained Reflective Dialogue: The process allows team members and COVE staff to enter into a sustained reflective conversation. As they build action plans, map needs and assets, and reflect and assess, students converse. They start to engage each other in dialogue about themselves, community, community service, and social change. This type of reflective, intellectually charged dialogue helps students develop their own values and moral voice. It also sharpens their intellectual skills as they pull from their course work to participate in challenging conversations. Finally, it helps students develop the crucial skill of citizenship- the ability to engage others in conversation that deepens the commitment to and the quality of community work. Through conversation, we generate attachments to the wider world, come to understand the wider world, develop a vision for the wider world, and generate power to transform the wider world (Guarasci and Cornwell 1997; Eliasoph 1998:8).

A Focus on Problem Solving: A focus on problem solving allows us to move beyond "good work" as a goal. We want to be a catalyst for community development throughout the Upstate New York region. Because the root causes of community needs are complex and challenging, the projects are specifically designed to address them. We work across social, economic, and political venues to focus on community building and problem solving. Only by working to solve problems will students avoid the cynicism and apathy that leads to retreatment from public life. Similarly, only through life long commitment from trained citizens will communities prosper in the emerging world.

Team Work: The work of producing healthy communities is joint work. We are moving beyond individual acts of service to joint projects of producing public goods. By working in teams students learn how to organize their peers, how to collaboratively identify and solve problems, and how to work within communities of difference. These are the basic tools of citizenship.

Partnering With Difference: We want to place our students in direct conversation with people who are often different from themselves. Democracy is a system predicated on the public as a "we." Yet, we live in a world where the "we" is less apparent. People tend identify themselves through complex matrixes of race, class, gender, sexual identity, and lifestyle. As people come to embrace and define their lives based on these identities, we must all develop the skills to work across difference. The challenge is to find ways of associated living in a world marked by diversity. We must develop skills to construct, celebrate, and thrive in communities marked by difference and connection.

Training With Basic Skills of Organizing and Community-Building: As Craig Rimmerman reminds us, "people are not born as citizens; they need to be educated and trained" (Rimmerman 2001:4). Contrarily, the Wingspread students remind us that "colleges and universities do not teach us the community building/organizing skills that we need" (Long 2002:8). The COVE provides students with training at every stage of the process. We see training as a life-long task and as a multifaceted process of mentorship. Students are both the people being mentored and the people mentoring others. Often, the two aspects of training are contained in the same act. One acquires training through the guided mentorship of others.

Implications: Slowing the Process

In the course of implementing the model, we were struck by three sets of challenges commonly confronted by anyone attempting to move from community service to community building:

(1) We needed to teach our students about democracy. Our students knew little about democracy. Most could not clearly articulate what democracy means or the range of actions a person can take in a democracy to create change. We have spent more time than expected teaching student volunteers about the values and skills of democracy.

(2) The need to let students work and negotiate directly with community partners. The process works best when our staff stays out of the way. Generally, we create relationships with community partners. We work to establish trust, but we then remove ourselves to allow students to work directly with the partners. This slows the process, as it takes longer for students to make the phone calls, arrange the visits, and negotiate projects. It has required us to be patient and to be comfortable focusing on process as opposed to outcomes.

(3) The need for training. We cannot do enough training. We train students to organize groups, hold effective meetings, do service, reflect and so forth.

Conclusion

America's challenge at the beginning of a new century is two-fold: 1) to create healthy communities able to meet the multiple needs of people within a rapidly changing and globalizing world; and 2) the widespread re-engagement of a citizenry as the driving force in public life that can provide the wise and ethical stewardship needed to produce and sustain these communities. Community service can be at the core of connecting education to democracy. A team-based approach instills within students a passion for the world of ideas, a better intellectual tool-kit of ideas and skills, and the habits of acting as engaged citizens and creative problem solvers. In doing so, the model can transform universities as places committed to and successful in civic renewal.

References

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Weinberg is Associate Professor of Sociology and Dean of the College at Colgate University. He is the author of two books and over twenty-five articles on issues of community development, service-learning, and sustainable development.