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5. The Neighborhood Learning Community
- State University of New York Press
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Chapter Five The Neighborhood Learning Community We’re trying to create a community alive with learning. —Nan Skelton In neighborhoods across America, there is a great, often unrealized, potential for learning and civic life. Recreation centers might be abuzz with children’s energy. Libraries can be filled with children reading, researching on the Internet, and doing their homework with adult mentors. Barbershops might be centers for discussing the issues of the day. The university might partner with local youth to create a community mural. A public forum involving local politicians, police, and residents might be taking place concerning neighborhood safety. In short, communities can be alive with civic learning. The West Side of St. Paul in Minnesota is no different—with one important exception. Over the past ten years there has been an explicit effort to nurture the communities’ potential to connect education in the community with civic life. This point can be illustrated in the story of two bus tours with two very different approaches to neighborhoods. In 2004, community leaders brought a group of politicians on a bus tour to visit neighborhoods in the Twin Cities—but not just any neighborhoods . The bus took riders to drug-infested and high-crime areas where frightened parents told them about their fears and concerns for their children, who had to be instructed to avoid certain streets in the neighborhood. Residents talked about friends and neighbors who had been victims of crime. They talked about finding condom wrappers and dime bags in front of their houses and stores. The bus stopped at a local grocery store, where the owner explained that he was recently robbed at 91 gunpoint—an all-to-common story. The purpose of the tour was, of course, to let politicians and policy makers see firsthand the difficulties in crime-ridden inner-city neighborhoods.1 This story, unfortunately, could have been about almost any innercity neighborhood in the United States. Crime, violence, and fear are the prevalent perceptions of America’s urban neighborhoods, where the focus is on the problems, deficits, and obstacles to individual success and community life. These stories are important and document the reality of too many Americans. But they also create a cultural narrative that guides the policy priorities and funding decisions made by well-intentioned politicians and policy experts who want to fix problems. The focus on deficits leads to the veritable industry of professional service providers and a massive criminal justice system, while undermining communitycapacity -building initiatives that support civic learning. This chapter tells a different story. On the West Side of St. Paul, young people from the neighborhood use a bus every weekday in the summer to attend formal and informal learning opportunities in their community. Several days after hearing the story of the Twin Cities bus tour on public radio I sat with a group of African American, Hmong, and Somali youths who were waiting for a bus at the West Side public library that would take them across the neighborhood to the Baker Recreational Center. These youths were some of the 175 young people who use the “West Side Circulator” each day on the 7.5 mile loop that includes regular stops at learning sites and public places in the neighborhood, such as the Boys and Girls Club, Humboldt Junior and Senior High School, Our Lady of Guadalupe Church, and Torre de San Miguel housing. “The Circulator is a visible symbol that shows how where learning takes place is connected in a neighborhood,” explains Nan Kari, one of the catalysts for the Neighborhood Learning Community, “and how learning happens in many places, not just the school.”2 In this chapter, I examine the roots, approaches, and practices of the Neighborhood Learning Community, a contemporary community learning experiment, which, like Hull House and Highlander, deliberately ties education to civic life. A Culture of Learning The West Side Neighborhood Learning Community (NLC) is a network of people and organizations working collaboratively to strengthen learning in the West Side neighborhood of St. Paul. Since the mid-1990s, the group has been developing a neighborhood network that not only connects the multitude of learning opportunities available in the neighbor92 Why Community Matters [3.230.76.153] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 10:08 GMT) hood, but also connects neighborhood-based learning with the creation of a vibrant civic life. Three ideas are central: recognizing the importance of place; seeing citizenship as active and co-creative; and engaging in public work that integrates civic...