Judging a Book By Its Cover: Community-Based Research & Higher Education
Wow, the snow weekend really threw me off… not even sure if this posting counts cause it’s so late, but here goes anyway…
I’m walking into my religious ethics class holding Strand’s Community-Based Research & Higher Education, trying to get a few sentences in before the TA shows up, and he walks in. “What are you reading?” He asks. “Looks pretty… boring.”
“Oh no!” I actually get pretty vehement about this. “It’s all about this new approach to higher education; having college students partner with community organizations to work on community development projects, instead of being all isolated on campus, working for social change and all that– it’s really cool actually!”
So I manage to sound like a total educational policy dork to my grad student TA, but the fact is that the title doesn’t accurately convey the compelling theory found inside– that breaking down the definition of who knowledge is for and how knowledge is transmitted leads to active citizenship and cultural engagement.
And the best part of Strand’s thesis is how this knowledge transmission works both ways: it’s not top-down “COMMUNITY EMPOWERMENT”; the University isn’t patronizingly entering the larger community in order to present its knowledge and leave. The University is learning too: about how knowledge can be applied to the real world, about the conditions of the world many of us hope to leave or circumvent by enrolling in a prestigious college, and ultimately how we can be an advocate for that world. This is assuming that the community in community-based research is less privileged than the world of the university; an assumption that Strand makes. And if a throwback to that “hard knowledge” makes college kids or their parents feel any better, its obvious from looking around our classroom that many of us are destined for jobs in public service & arts administration, and CBR is teaching us skills we’ll need for life in the public sector all too soon.
I’m a huge fan of institutes of higher education, but I’m a huger fan of democratic education. To see Strand bring it into conjunction with arts administration and political activism… well… it’s too soon in the semester to say I’ve found my calling, but…
So back off, religion TA. Boring? Don’t judge a book by its cover.
Week 1: Cultural Preservation or Downtown Development (or, both?)
I’m starting this blog from the perspective of a reader, not quite an activist. I couldn’t make the class trip to Richmond and I haven’t yet set foot in either of the art spaces we’ll be working with this semester; what I’ve learned about “community cultural development” so far comes from articles and our Goldbard textbook, New Creative Community.
In New Creative Community, as I understand it so far, Goldbard makes a distinction between community development and global development. Community development is really community preservation– a “dynamic…cultural action, with its ambitions of consciencization and empowerment”– an effort to uphold and often celebrate the traditions, opinions, and voices of a distinct culture, whether that culture is inner-city LA or aboriginal Australia. By contrast, global development is a counterforce that often leads to “globalization at it’s starkest: [when] cultural continuity and family values are treated as expendable as compared to economic benefits in the form of salary savings to privileged societies.” (p 29) In a world with permeable borders, capital development often leads to diffused communities– cultural and familial. In Goldbard’s argument (here totally oversimplified, of course,) community cultural development upholds community in the face of the development of globalization and global capitalism.
But what about when capitalism and permeable borders inspire community cultural development? In his article “Downtown Takeover” (http://styleweekly.com/ME2/dirmod.asp?sid=9B6FFC446FF7486981EA3C0C3CCE4943&nm=Articles%2FNews&type=Publishing&mod=Publications%3A%3AArticle&mid=8F3A7027421841978F18BE895F87F791&tier=4&id=1E0EF576E3DA471181B103AEC615F831 sorry i havent figured out how to embed yet) Tom Robinson advocates for community cultural development on economic, capitalist, tourist-centered grounds. He suggests that Richmond’s downtown area must be culturally reawakened and revitalized along a NGO model. “Typically, NGOs are created in impoverished Third-World nations that are controlled by evil or incompetent despots,” he writes. “When a government shows total disregard for its citizens, or is no longer able to provide to them effective and cost-effective leadership, it’s time to call upon the private sector and free enterprise to correct the situation.” Where Goldbard looks at NGOs as vehicles for cultural preservation, Robinson sees them as tools for economic development and increased tourism. Both look towards arts and culture as the answer.
My plug: community cultural development can, and should, be both.
I’m from a small town on the Massachusetts coastline with fishing-village heritage and, until pretty recently, a downtown as stark as Richmonds (or at least the Richmond in Robinson’s photograph). Like the Richmond that Robinson paints, downtown development in Gloucester has been blocked by City Council officials who are so focused on preserving the dying fishing industry that they are unable to make way for tourism and cultural development. In doing so, my town suffers economically and culturally– instead of preserving the more precious aspects of the fishing culture to posterity or opening our vibrant community to the outside world, we stay insular and, in many ways, stagnant.
What I believe has upheld Gloucester’s heritage is its vibrant arts community. Art colonies on harbor wharves that showcase fishing scenes and abstracts of our ocean views; downtown galleries and studios (one of which was my moms for several years until she moved it into our own home) that offer classes and promote community involvement in the arts; student centers like the now-defunct “ArtSpace” that provide highschoolers with a place to rock out on weekends; these are both preserving our history and moving it forward creatively and, in many ways, economically.
So that’s where I’m coming from, literally, to this class. And that’s why I think, lamely, that both Goldbard and Robinson make solid arguments. Sometimes you need to move forward in order to hold on.
(Don’t worry, subsequent posts won’t be nearly so long or detailed. Have a great weekend.)
