Introduction to the project

Introduction to the project

The essays in this symposium were produced by undergraduate stu- dents enrolled in Portland State University's "capstone" program. A capstone is a senior-year course for community-based learning, scholarship, and service that is part of PSU's University Studies curriculum. This capstone was designed to help the Young Women's Christian Association (YWCA) of Greater Portland celebrate its centennial in 2001. Students engaged in archival research, conducted oral history interviews, and hosted annual public forums and historical exhibits over a six-year period. This course was among the pilot cohort of PSU's capstones, begun in 1996. The production of original scholarship in a classroom and community-based format entailed significant innovation in teaching for me as the capstone facilitator. This introduction describes some of those innovations and then introduces the essays that follow.

Capstone participants reckoned first with the concept of a "community partnership" between the PSU and the YWCA. The idea of "partnering" was a key enabling device for the creation and legitimation of the capstone curriculum at the university, and struck a chord—sometimes positive, sometimes negative—with students. ¹ In addition, we were intrigued by the notion of collaboration between two institutions whose missions were not particularly in alignment. PSU's mission is "Let Knowledge Serve the City" and the YWCA of Greater Portland's is to be "an agent of change for girls, women, and families." "Whose city?" asked my students. "Which knowledge?" and in "service" to what ends? Furthermore, the relationship between stated mission, institutional behavior, and constituents' buy-in were highly variable within each agency. Participants on both sides of the partnership ranged along a spectrum of politics and ideology. What, then, would be the nature of this collaboration? We determined that negotiating the many disjunctures of the project would be a major framing intellectual task. And that it sounded a lot like history.

A number of teaching tools came to our aid. A particularly good book, Feminism and Community,edited by Penny A. Weiss and Marilyn Friedman, provided an accessible, diverse, and theoretically informed set of accounts of feminist institution building that helped us identify related dynamics of our own project. ² These essays, read in conjunction with historical scholarship on the YWCA found in Men and Women Adrift: The YMCA and YWCA in the City,edited by Nina Mjagkij and Margaret Spratt as well as Nancy A. Hewitt and Suzanne Lebsock's Visible Women: New Essays on American Activism,eased students, many of whom had never studied history, into the fields of U.S. women's history and feminist theory. ³ Coupling these readings with student reflection exercises on the personal meaning of concepts like "community," "identity," and "citizenship" enabled each participant to see the contingent and multi-sided aspects of their own lives, and then to link these insights to the project. As each participant began to see themselves as multiply grounded and even fractured "citizens"—the work of Chela Sandoval and Mary Hawkesworth is also critical here—they were better able to focus their own curiosity about the past and articulate their own historical questions for research. ⁴ By taking responsibility for their own intellectual agendas, many students overcame their initial resistance to service learning as "enforced volunteerism," sensing that the university's mission was not—and need not—be their own.

A similar, if less closely articulated set of negotiations took place between the capstone participants and the YWCA community partner. These contacts and reflection points relied on regular dialogue and the development of trust over time. Dialogues took place in annual public forums, within the YWCA's official centennial committee (on which I served), and with a community history advisory group. Because the YWCA, like most non-profits, did not have the staff or resources to do historical research, they were relieved to leave much of the intellectual agenda...