Actions Speak Louder than Words

Community Activism as Curriculum

Celia Oyler

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136645600
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

How do educators engage students in community action projects without telling them what to think, how to think, or what to do? Is it possible to integrate social justice organizing into the curriculum without imposing one's political views on students? In Actions Speak Louder than Words, longtime activist and teacher educator Celia Oyler delves into such questions through firsthand accounts of social action projects. By moving beyond charity work or volunteerism, she shows how community activism projects offer fertile ground for practicing democratic engagement as part of classroom work.

Actions Speak Louder than Words is a systematic, qualitative study offering in-depth and detailed portraits of teachers who design social action projects as part of the regular classroom curriculum. Each case forms a chapter organized as a narrative that includes excerpts from classroom dialogues, and interviews with students, teachers, and parents describing their social action projects with sufficient detail to give educators guidance for designing such projects for their own classrooms. The final chapter examines power, pedagogy, and learning outcomes across the cases, providing specific guidance to educators wishing to take up such projects and offering instructional and procedural advice as well as cautions. A fresh new example of taking up the challenge to teach toward equity and social justice, Actions Speak Louder than Words is an invaluable resource for educators who are passionate about the possibility of integrating activism and advocacy into curriculum as a means to engage in strong democracy.

1

Curriculum For Civic Agency

Rebecca Jim and Tar Creek

The students are the key to getting Tar Creek cleaned up. They’re the ones that are going to do something about it. I think they’re going to keep it going after they graduate from high school. I think they’re going to stay involved. Because these kids, I guess you probably noticed, they can tell you everything about Tar Creek.

—Nancy Scott, Cherokee Nation Learn and Serve Director

No matter where in the world a school is located, a focus for a social action project can be found. As humans we always have the opportunity to improve conditions for ourselves and for others. Indeed, classrooms can be laboratories for active engagement in the most pressing issues facing us on planet Earth, and curriculum can be organized around creating a more humane, a more just, and a more sustainable planet. In the hands of a creative and committed teacher purposeful links can be made in almost any school subject area. The decision about what sorts of projects and issues to take up may come from either the teacher or the students, and are most often a negotiation and point of discussion that is part of the classroom curriculum.

I use this case of Tar Creek to underscore the central assumption of social action projects: that school curricula can be a site for leadership development as well as learning the skills and dispositions of public activism and advocacy. In Miami, Oklahoma, the students I met were all acting as powerful citizens advocating on behalf of their land and their community. They learned and practiced a wide range of skills central to engaged citizenship. They courageously and publicly tackled a local issue, which many adults in the town were studiously ignoring. Their creativity and commitment serve as inspiration for teachers to take up real-world problems as part of the regular school curriculum.

Indigenous peoples, including the Quapaw, Seneca-Cayuga, Miami, Modoc, Wyandotte, Ottawa, Peoria, Cherokee, and Eastern Shawnee, still heavily populate this area of Oklahoma. Indeed, according to Nancy Scott—the Cherokee Nation coordinator of the service-learning grant that supported some of the Miami High School projects—approximately 63% of students at Miami High School have some Native American Indian ancestry. The Cherokee Nation is investing in promising school-based projects because the Native American high school graduation rate is the lowest for any ethnic/racial group in the United States. In an interview at her office, Ms. Scott explained why the Nation was supporting this particular service-learning project:

The reason why our kids are in so much trouble nowadays is because they don’t know who they are. They’re lacking their identity. They don’t fit into the Native American world because they don’t really know anything about their culture, or they’re not being taught, or they don’t have that person that can tell them who they are. And then, on the other hand, in the non-Indian world they don’t fit there either. So, to me, it’s like an identity crisis that they’re going through. So, through this program, I thought maybe getting the students involved in the community … would help them feel like they were part of something.

Ms. Jim—in her capacity as a high school guidance counselor and with the support of the Cherokee Nation Learn and Serve Project—began to spark that involvement.

The Tar Creek Superfund Site

I returned from my trip to Miami, Oklahoma, wearing a cream colored t-shirt with a large orange design on the back: Tar Creek Fishing Tournament and 10K Toxic Tour. Orange, you see, is one of the colors of Tar Creek—a body of water that runs through the town. Residents remember when their parents and grandparents used to fish in Tar Creek—now there are few living fish in the waters. A few years earlier, the city leaders responded to the visually disturbing site of the discolored water by building walls on the sides of the bridges so the water is not visible. Signs saying “Tar Creek” were removed. The t-shirt, however, was one of the fundraisers that Miami High School students made for their campaign to address the lead poisoning in their community.

Ottawa County, Oklahoma, is now part of what the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) calls the Tri-State Mining District. However, back in the 1830s when white settlers were angling for prime Arkansas farmland, the area was simply called “Indian Territory” and was considered worthless and highly undesirable land. Hence, the federal government gave a portion of the area to the Arkansas-based Quapaw People, and as part of the Indian Removal, program forced the tribe to move there.

Many years later, however, at the turn of the 20th century (before Oklahoma became a state), lead and zinc were discovered. Suddenly, this worthless Indian land was deemed valuable, and the Bureau of Indian Affairs facilitated a way for mining companies to lease the land from the Quapaw. Eventually over 300 mines were opened, and ended up supplying lead for the vast majority of bullets manufactured for World War I and II. Hundreds of thousands of tons of lead and zinc were extracted from a forty square mile tract, a site that includes the towns of Picher, Cardin, North Miami, Quapaw, and Commerce. In the early days, these were mining boomtowns, and the local economy flourished. By the early 1960s, mining activity slowed, and finally came to a halt in 1974. Since that time, the area has been economically depressed.

When the mines were shut down, most of the hundreds of mineshafts were abandoned by the companies and were not properly sealed. Surface and ground water filled the underground caves and shafts, and the sulfuric acid reacted with metals left in the caves, creating acid water filled with lead, zinc, cadmium, sulfates, iron, and other heavy metals. After a few years, this acid water surfaced and began to run into local creeks.

However, polluted water is only one of three environmental disasters. The second comes from the abandoned mines that honeycomb the entire forty-square mile site. When the companies dug for lead and zinc, they were required to leave pillars of earth for support. When the mining companies pulled out, the former workers used the heavy equipment left behind to mine the pillars, leaving no support for the ground above. So over the last forty years when the mines filled up with water, some of these areas collapsed leaving huge sinkholes. Different field surveys indicate that hundreds of shafts have already collapsed. While there are few reported instances of destruction of buildings and roads, eighteen homes were affected by one collapse just north of Picher High School in 1967. In this collapse, the ground dropped approximately twenty-five feet, and five minor injuries resulted. One local woman remembers that when she was five years old her family’s house “fell in.” Police and fire department officials had to come to get the family out.

Aside from the toxicity of the ground waters and the destructive nature of the sinkholes, acres and acres of mine tailings (chat) left over from years of mining operations dot the landscape. These are places that look like a moonscape—dusty grey mountains stretch as far as the eye can see. Local knowledge regarding the health effects of the chat was slim. For a long time, the chat was a cheap or free source of fill for many projects. Much of it has been utilized in the construction of driveways, roadbeds, playgrounds, and baseball fields. The chat piles, some of them 200 feet high, are mostly unfenced, and provide a tempting place for recreation. As a mother of one of the high school students explained, “I let my kids play on the chat piles when we moved to town a few years ago. I let my kids climb on it, we thought it was fun.… We didn’t realize that dust we had on us could potentially make us sick. We had no idea.” Adults and youth rode motorized bikes up and down the slopes of the chat piles, not knowing that they were ingesting lead through the dust they created.

Residents’ lead levels are extremely high in the area and are suspected to be an explanation of many children’s learning and behavior problems. It is well documented that lead poisoning can cause cognitive disabilities, decreased growth, hyperactivity, impaired hearing and even obesity. At the time of my visit, researchers from Harvard University were measuring area children’s lead levels by analyzing their baby teeth as they fell out. They judged the lead levels unusually high and extremely dangerous. Tests by the EPA triangulate this finding. For example, between 1994 and 1995, the EPA (U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, 1997) tested 2,055 families’ yards and found that 65% had concentrations of lead in at least one part of the yard at or above 500 parts per million. In this same report, the EPA extrapolated that 21% of children could have blood levels at, or exceeding, 10 micrograms per deciliter (ug/dL), the level at which the Centers for Disease Control say that children experience adverse health effects. The effects of lead poisoning are lifelong: “Exposure to lead is particularly dangerous to the unborn and to young children less than 72 months of age. Lead can effect [sic] virtually every system in the body. Lead is particularly harmful to the developing brain and nervous system of fetuses and young children” (EPA, 1997).

Due to the constellation of environmental disasters in the area, in 1981, the EPA ranked Tar Creek the nation’s worst hazardous waste site, and by 1983, declared the area a Superfund site. Residents believed cleanup was imminent. Yet, by the late 1980s, the EPA had quietly left town, much as the mining companies had done in years past. By the time of my visit, however, the EPA had begun to dig up contaminated yards and driveways, and quarantine the debris in a storage area. And according to many local citizens, the EPA had returned to Tar Creek due—at least in part—to the campaign waged by the high school students.

Meeting Rebecca Jim

Like most of the teachers I met as part of this project, Rebecca Jim is both dynamic and understated; dynamic in her passion for the subject of ameliorating environmental degradation, and understated regarding her own individual role as a catalyst for student activism. Throughout the visit, she continually moved the conversation away from herself and focused on her strategy of following students’ initiations:

I’ve followed what they’ve wanted to throughout my career and this is where they are now. And they’re having the time of their life. And so I’m going to follow it, if that’s where they want to go.… We find a way to incorporate their ideas in a way that is a learning thing. For example, the Fish Dance. They wanted to have a school dance. And in twenty-one years I’ve never sponsored a dance. Didn’t see that you could make it a learning thing. Couldn’t see a way to do that … And then we found ways to make it be one of the best learning situations we ever could have thought of.

Ms. Jim traces her style of blending community organizing and education to her early training in the Teacher Corps. This was a federal program—with roots in the anti-poverty money of the Johnson administration—which based preservice educators in low-income communities. Teaching interns spent a third of their time in classrooms, a third of their time studying, and a third of their time doing community work. As Ms. Jim describes it: “We had to organize people to do things. The Teacher Corps will always be remembered in that little town of three hundred people because it was amazing. Everybody had to come up with their own plans to spend that amount of time. And it was just full blast. And so, ever since then I’ve just run it full blast.”

Rebecca explained that her training as an educator grounded in a community-organizing model was complemented by the courses and workshops she took in group process. Indeed, the students spoke repeatedly about how she is able to bring out the shy or “depressed” student and encourage them to talk. Cheryl—a senior—went on at some length about how Ms. Jim’s pedagogy encouraged participation from all students:

She just brings everybody together, and it’s like you’re learning how to associate with people, you’re learning how to talk to people, you’re learning how to stand up in front of groups, and you’re learning how to voice your opinion.… You wouldn’t think it was that hard to think of how you feel about something. But then, once you actually have to get up there and say something about it, because I mean she’ll always give everybody an opportunity to speak their mind … I really respect her for that because it’s got to be hard with some of the kids that we have to just sit there and listen to them half the time because some of them can ramble on and on, like me, and then some of them can just sit there and say, “Ah, uhm, ah, ah…I don’t know what I think, pass.” And then she’ll say, “Well, what are you thinking right now?” It’s amazing. I mean, it just floors me to think how one person can bring such a huge controversy, such a huge group together, such a community.

This pedagogy of helping students find their opinions and then find a way to voice these points of view to others was central to all the teachers I studied. In fact, it was in this pilot case at Tar Creek that I also realized how essential it was for me to observe in classrooms as the teaching was taking place. (In the Tar Creek case, school was already finished for the summer when I visited so I didn’t actually observe any of the classroom instruction.)

Overall, it was quite fortuitous that Tar Creek was my pilot study, and Ms. Jim my first educator. Upon arriving at Miami High School, she gave me a list of all the interviews she had already pre-arranged. Not only had she planned an interview with local reporters, but she had also arranged many hours of interviews with students, school personnel, and parents.

Integrating Social Advocacy and Action into the Curriculum

When people think about the role that guidance counselors play in the school, many people think first about their work with students on social, emotional, and academic issues of adjustment. However, some guidance counselors conceptualize their roles more broadly and seek to work with classroom teachers on designing instruction to better meet the needs of learners. Rebecca Jim took this latter approach and explained that she volunteered to come into classrooms to help discover ways to engage students in learning. She said, “I beg teachers to let me come into their classrooms. I want to allow for all the ways that people can learn.” And in the year of my visit, Nancy Scott (from the Learn and Serve Project) said that Ms. Jim had integrated the Tar Creek Project into ten classrooms. Ms. Jim explained that the school administration was very supportive of service-learning and had also required that the sports teams do some service projects.

Teachers from a range of subject areas collaborated with Ms. Jim on curricular integration, including English, science, and government. One English class studied Arthur Miller’s adaptation of Henrik Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People. In this play, the theme centers on the conflict in a community between an environmental problem and economic development. In a government class, students studied the organization of government bureaucracies and also learned about citizens’ movements, including boycotts, petitions, lobbying; in science classes, students learned a variety of water testing techniques. To support this scientific inquiry, Ms. Jim wrote and was awarded a $25,000 EPA grant to get meters with long probes so the students would not have to touch the water to test it. She obtained enough equipment to have three area schools link up via laptop computers that were also part of the grant. And using an integrated curriculum approach, seniors in an English class wrote individual poetry, essays, and scientific reports about Tar Creek, which were ultimately collected and published in a book, Tar Creek Anthology: The Legacy (Scott, 1999). A few years later, high school students wrote another book, The Tar Creek Anthology 2: Our Toxic Place (Scott & Jim, 2002).

Educational Outreach

A major focus of the high school students’ activism was education and outreach in the elementary school and high school. The year I visited they had organized two large high school events: The Fish Dance and the Tar Creek Conference. Regarding the conference, one student explained, “The last week of school, we took over the fifth and sixth hours of the day and had four different sessions that people could go to. It was mandatory so everybody got some education whether they wanted to or not.” High school students led some of the sessions, and scientists and environmental activists led some. In a focus group, students reflected on their organizing skills and how the first year of the conference it was not well attended so in the second year they decided to make it part of the school day. They outlined for me all that they had learned about organizing an effective conference.

Because the students spoke in such detail about what they had learned about organizing, the power of student-led decision-making in activist projects became very obvious. If Rebecca had stepped into the early details of their first conference planning, they may not have made the mistakes they did. But, the students were clear that they had learned from their mistakes and had changed their plans the following year. I know as a teacher it is often very difficult to step aside and allow students to lead, but from this example (and other examples in other case studies), it is obvious that learning by doing requires that teachers not overly intervene to guarantee “success.” Indeed, learning community and educational organizing skills is better served by letting students make plans, enact them, and then reflect on the successes and failures, rather than having a “perfect” teacher-led event. The ownership that all the students in this case (and in all the others) felt about their work was overwhelmingly evident.

At the elementary school, the high school students designed instructional materials and collaborated with elementary teachers (whom they knew from their own time at the elementary school) to teach the lessons. They taught children to wash their hands after coming in from playing outdoors and that taking recreational vehicles up the mountainous chat piles was extremely dangerous. Ryan—one of the young men interviewed—said the teachers in the elementary school were very supportive of their efforts: “They’re one hundred percent willing to let...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Series Editor Introduction
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Teaching with Social Action, Activism, and Advocacy Projects
• 1. Curriculum for Civic Agency: Rebecca Jim and Tar Creek
• 2. A Curriculum of Protest: Joe Szwaja at Nova High School
• 3. Advocating for the Commons: Lance Powell and Hunters Point
• 4. Culturally Relevant Pedagogy and Action for the Community: Derrlyn Tom at Mission High School
• 5. Emergent and Integrated Curriculum: Brian Schultz at Byrd Academy
• 6. Education for Action: Eric Rofes at Humboldt State University
• 7. Becoming an Activist Teacher: Barbara Regenspan at SUNY Binghamton
• Conclusion: Planning Social Action Projects
• Afterword: Where Are They Now?
• Appendix: Notes on Methodology and Methods
• Notes
• References
• Index