Inner City Kids: Adolescents Confront Life and Violence in an Urban Community

Introduction

■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ Introduction I WAS INTRODUCED to the principal of the Blair School,1 an innercity public school located in the northeast region of the United States, in September 1997. A community activist I had met when I relocated to the area encouraged me to speak with the principal about my ideas of developing a participatory action research (PAR) project with a group of middle -school students aimed at exploring how they negotiate their daily lives within an inner-city community. Mrs. Lawton, an energetic African American principal, was receptive to my ideas and within minutes, introduced me to Mrs. Leslie, an African American science teacher at the Blair School. At the time, Mrs. Leslie was also the homeroom teacher for the students in Homeroom 211. Like Mrs. Lawton, Susan (Mrs. Leslie) was very interested in a collaborative project and invited me outside to meet “her babies .” We stood outside in the school garden—a contained space of soil and seed that is cared for by the sixth-grade students. Susan had spearheaded the creation of the garden many years ago and each year there is a new group of students who rake, plant, weed, and learn the dos and don’ts of growing vegetables, flowers, and other mysterious living matter that appears every season. As we stood near the garden, Susan invited the students to listen to my proposal, reminding me that the decision was up to the students —if they wanted to participate, she and they would commit to every facet of the project. But if they decided not to participate, she would respect their decision and I would need to investigate other possibilities. I told the young people a little bit about myself: my experiences growing up and teaching in an inner-city middle school in Boston; my journey from teaching in a public school to teaching in a university; and my desire to collaborate with a group of young people in exploring community issues that were important to them. I also informed the students that I had recently moved to Ellsworth and that as director of a teaching program at a nearby university, I wanted to develop linkages between the students attending the university and the young people at the Blair School. My “pitch” was successful—and so began our collaboration. Using a feminist (PAR) approach,2 creative techniques (for example, collage making , storytelling), community resource inventories, and community photography , we began a participatory process of investigation and action in the hope of addressing community issues that were of most concern to the young people involved in this project. This book describes that process—a process that has resulted in what Kohl (1995) refers to as a “radical story.” By that he means a story with the following characteristics: • the major force of the story is the community or social group; • collective action is involved; • there is an intentional effort to show opposing forces involved in social struggle and to represent the numerous complexities that get played out in people’s lives; • the story illustrates the comradeship as well as the tensions that are created when groups are engaged in some form of community-building or struggle or collective endeavor; • lastly, a radical story has “no compulsory happy ending. . . . There are many defeats and regroupings, partial victories, new and larger problems to tackle and a decent world to sustain or build. What characterizes all the stories, however, is a projection of hope and possibility.” (1995:68) This book tells a radical story about struggle and possibility, hope and despair , frustration and enthusiasm, victory and defeat with the explicit intention of better understanding the experiences of a group of adolescents living in an inner-city community and, in response to those experiences, 2 ❙ Introduction developing action programs to support and foster youth-initiated strategies for individual and community well-being. The story of how a group of young adolescents of Color living in an inner-city community moves from dialoguing about issues that concern them to acting on those issues is fraught with confusions, complications, and a host of distractions, all of which can mobilize and/or paralyze a collaborative process. Traditional methods of social science research would not be able to contain the push and pull of conflicting and competing agendas that are inherent in a participatory process. Nor would conventional research paradigms provide a framework for addressing the researcher -participant relationship. Similarly, there would...