Through the Schoolhouse Door: Folklore, Community, Currriculum

9. Turning the University Inside Out: The Padua Alliance for Education and Empowerment

192 9 Turning the University Inside Out: The Padua Alliance for Education and Empowerment Lynne Hamer1 First, start where the individual is the expert and work out from there. Second, it is not right to ask an expert fiddler to play in a tent for free; she or he ought to be paid to play in a concert hall. These two instructions from my advisor Henry Glassie at the Indiana University Folklore Institute perpetually influence my thinking as an associate professor of education in postindustrial northwestern Ohio. Together they persuade me that our work as folklorists has its most profound potential in our ability to advocate for the value of the knowledge and expertise held by people who have been systematically shut out of access to full education and employment through institutional racism based in cultural bias. Foregrounding the relationship between individual prejudice, cultural bias, and institutional discrimination provides a framework (Martin 1991) for thinking about folklore and education that I did not have prior to beginning my work in education. Here are two facts that I as a white, female teacher have become familiar with—and motivated by—through fieldwork and teaching here in Toledo. First, socioeconomic apartheid, described by Melvin Oliver and Thomas Shapiro as “sedimentation of inequality” (2006, Lynne Hamer is an associate professor in the Department of Educational Foundations and Leadership at the University of Toledo and teaches most of her graduate and undergraduate courses as collaborations through the Padua Alliance for Education and Empowerment. Turning the University Inside Out 193 236), or the ways institutionalized policies and practices preventing blacks from buildingwealth generations ago continue to affect current generations, as seen in the startling recent research documenting that black women on average each have only five dollars in wealth (Insight Center for Community and Economic Development 2010). Second, the school-to-prison pipeline , a national trend toward criminalizing—rather than educating—youth through zero-tolerance policies, exacerbated by the pressures of high-stakes testing. The American Civil Liberties Union (2011), Children’s Defense Fund (2007), and others have documented the phenomenon: African American students are much more likely than white ones to be suspended, expelled, or arrested for the same kind of (oftenminor)misconduct at school, leading to African American youth accounting for 45 percent of juvenile arrests but only 16 percent of the nation’s overall juvenile population. Although my current work is with a predominantly African American neighborhood in Toledo—and thus it constitutes the demographic focus in these examples—the framework in folklore and education is not limited to a particular group. What matters is that our disciplinary focus and research methods prepare us to work with historically marginalized students and their families. We are positioned 1) to recognize and affirm the value of their knowledge and skills by starting where they are experts, and 2) to advocate for the value of cultural knowledge, here not on the concert stage, but rather in the schoolhouse. This can happen at any level of education but my work is at the university. Democratic Spaces In spring 2007 a counselor and a former student in my graduate course Qualitative Research I introduced me to Sister Virginia Welsh (“Sister Ginny”), the founding director of the Padua Center, a community center in the central city inToledo that opened in 2006, funded by theToledo Catholic diocese. UT students and I had recently been invited to a participatory action research (PAR) conference hosted by Bowling Green State University at the Sofia Quintero Art & Cultural Center in south Toledo. Upon learning that PAR is based on researchers and the community being studied working together as a team toward common goals, the counseling student asserted that not only should we participate in the conference, but we should reconceptualize the course as PAR conducted at and with the Padua Center. Through the Schoolhouse Door 194 In opening the center in one of the economically poorest neighborhoods in Toledo, Sister Ginny had insisted that it be dedicated to “education and empowerment.” When we approached her, she quickly embraced collaboration with my department and to host the course Qualitative Research I: Introduction and Methods at the center in the summer of 2007. We named our project the Padua Alliance for Education and Empowerment, and with the graduate research course as our main vehicle, we were off and running—culminating our research-team work by making a presentation at the PAR conference that...