PA 2013- MLK Marade Plus More

            Each week on Monday unless I am somehow delayed I will write a blog post about the previous week in Public Achievement. In each blog post, I will include a general review of what happened, then an evaluation of how this contributed to our overarching team goals in PA as well as my personal goals. The main purpose of these blog posts is for me to reflect upon each week’s activities in order to be better prepared for the next week. In this sense, it is a working blog. But it will also serve as an overarching guide to the development of my thoughts over the course of the next two quarters, a chronicle of the transformations in my perspective on civic engagement. Unlike the previous year, I am starting PA midway through and my fellow coaches have considerable more experience working with the students than I do, so at times I might privilege their perspectives over my own.

            Several events of importance occurred in this past week. On Monday, both the inauguration of President Obama and the birthday of Martin Luther King Junior were celebrated. For Martin Luther King Junior day, we took some of our PA students downtown to join in the MLK Marade, a march/parade (hence marade) that travels from City Park near East High School all the way to Civic Center Park and the State Capitol building. Thousands of people and hundreds of organizations participate in the Marade in honor of MLK’s enormous contribution to civil rights and the continuing struggle for equality and liberty in America. Eight of the students from my PA class participated and the event provided me with the opportunity to finally engage with our students on a one to one basis. I was able to make posters in collaboration with D___ and R___. R___’s poster stated “Equality comes from within us…” and D___’s poster stated “I have a dream that all races will come together as one.” D___ is known to be quite the wild child, so I was actually impressed by the amount of effort and thought he was able to coordinate into the poster and then into class on Friday. I also was able to make some great connections with the other students as we walked along the extremely long parade route. Fortunately, our fearless leader, Cara had given everyone neon green backpacks. I can’t begin to tell you how helpful these backpacks were in keeping track of my students and fellow coaches who all were running in a hundred directions at once. Afterwards, we ate lunch and then rode the bus with our students back to South High School. As compared to the morning, the students were much friendlier towards me. Overall, the Marade was very successful as an event to build better relationships with our students and recognize the contributions to civil rights and the community of those that came before us.

            On Friday, the main goals for our PA class were to reflect on the Marade and Frank DeAngelis’s talk from the previous week, then to identify whether we were going to work on the broad issue of violence in general or something more specific, and finally to explore the root causes of our chosen focus (Frank discussed violence as it related to the Columbine High School shootings where he is Principal). The reflections on the Marade and Frank’s talk went very well and the students that attended the Marade were particularly engaged. Unfortunately, once we had moved on, we spent the rest of the class period stuck on clarifying what issue/sub-issue we would focus on. Emily, my co-coach took the lead in guiding this discussion, and we were able to discern that there was student interest in at least three sub-issues: gang violence, school violence, and domestic violence. Nevertheless, we were unable to get the students to commit to focusing on only one of these sub-issues or to agree to separate into smaller groups. To compound, this problem several students in the back of the class were disengaged from the whole process. While most of the students responded well to the questions we put towards them, I still felt neutral about whether we accomplished anything during the class. It was especially hard for me to judge progress, because of my relative lack of experience with these students as compared to the other coaches due to my studying in Japan the entire previous quarter.

            In general, I felt that I made progress on several of my goals for PA on both Monday and Friday, though I felt more successful on Monday. My communication with the students definitely improved over previous weeks and I felt a personal connection from several of the students built on Monday and continued on Friday. I felt that the students definitely took something away from Frank’s talk and the Marade in that it gave them a chance to remember and see the contributions of others to their issues while allowing them to take limited actions themselves. Frank left our students with a challenge to talk to others all by themselves at lunch and several of the students went through with it even though they felt uncomfortable or weird doing so. Between this and the active engagement in the Marade, I was happy that our students were doing something active to engage with the issue of violence this week. I also was impressed by the ideas that the students were throwing out such as visiting the jail to see the consequences or violence or bringing Frank back to give his talk to all of the students at the school. By in terms of what my team contributed to these efforts, I felt dissatisfied. On Friday, we failed to coordinate well enough who would take on what task, what the other coaches would be doing when they were not taking the lead, how roles would be divided between the team leads and the coaches, and how we would transition between each topic for discussion. Part of this failure came from failing to follow the lesson plan, but part of it came in the uncertainty caused by this being the first week that we had a normal fifty minute class period to fill. Regrettably, these problems left Emily with the major burden of directing the class. Because of these issues, I plan to bring up the issue of team dynamics at our meeting tonight. Nevertheless I felt positive about how interested the majority of our students were in the discussion!

            This Saturday I will be attending the statewide PA Conference in Boulder, so hopefully I will have some fresh new insights on PA in the rest of the state and on what to do with our students!

All Things Must Come to an End

Note: Actually written in May 2012.

Looking back on my time within the Public Achievement program at DU, I find myself both hesitant to bring my thoughts to a close, and excited to apply what I have learned to my future ventures. PA provided me a dramatic introduction to working with high school students, dealing with issues of cultural competency, and working with a small team of individuals over a long period of time. Considering my desire to study abroad and volunteer or work in the education field, all those experiences will prove invaluable in the future. But on a more fundamental level, PA has provided me with a more basic experience that I have not explicitly had before, that of working in a moral and public philosophical context.

In academia, beyond issues of academic honesty, rarely are students pushed to think about the ethical considerations of their actions and activities and about the questions of how they should engage others in interaction. Our treatment of our peers is understood in terms of getting along or achieving academic goals, rather than in terms of uplifting or empowering them in order to make the world a better place. In fact, education and college are typically set forward to students as self-serving ventures for which the ultimate goal is a better life for you, the participant and the student. While on a certain level I appreciate being treated as an individual and being regarded by the merits of my own work--after all, group projects in classes drive me nuts!!!--I think that such an individualistic focus has troubling implications, leaving us unprepared to deal and interact with others at best, and at worst belittling and disparaging the contributions of others in life. Morality ultimately is a question of how one should act towards and around others, whether the impetus of that "should" is utilitarian, divine, or logical. But unfortunately moral questions are dealt with tangentially in education if at all, leaving their exploration to church, home, and the extreme cases, the law. Simultaneously, questions of meaning, purpose, reality, existence, and knowledge are treated in secondary detail to questions of grammar and addition.

I suppose I should feel fortunate that no one has ever told me how I should live my life, but by having the absence of such instruction or at the very least exposure to such questions beyond the rare English or Philosophy class, we as a society are encouraging our youth to avoid those questions, not challenge the status quo, and accept the traditional patterns of life. And if they reject that, we are encouraging them to rebellion, rather than engagement with their peers and elders to construct a new vision of how the world should be.

Public Achievement provides an opportunity for high school and middle school students to engage in questions of how the world should be, which leads both them and the coaches to question how they should act, considering that our social world is constructed by our combined actions.