Thinking About CBR:
Some Questions as We Begin
Randy Stoecker
rstoecker@wisc.edu
Keynote address given to "Best Practices in Undergraduate Community-Based Research: Challenges and Opportunities for the Research University," March 22-23, 2002, Ann Arbor, Michigan.
Introduction
It is daunting to be here in front of so many of you who know so much and have so much experience in this field we call community-based research or CBR. And I have tried for weeks now to figure out what I might have to say that would be of any use.
As I pondered, I began to realize that one reason I felt so uncomfortable and inadequate was because, to an extent, the simple act of standing up in front of you, as an academic, contradicts my sense of the spirit of CBR. Community-based research, for me, is about the collective generation of knowledge, information, and understanding. It is not about one person, or even a small group, spouting great and certain truths.
So I started to think that rather than focus on answers, I could offer questions--things to think and talk about during the next two days. And for me, there are many questions. The "field" of community-based research is in danger of becoming definitionally so confused that CBR itself will become meaningless and no longer trustworthy by communities that have only recently begun to risk real relationships with academics and the institutions they represent. Today we have action research, participatory research, participatory action research, community-based research, community-based learning, popular education, service learning, community theatre, community-based participatory research, and no shortage of related practices that go unlabeled or defy categorization.
And the more of this work that we do, the more questions I have (I am a critical sociologist after all). And so I ask them of us today in the hopes they may lead us to explore answers. I also speak here as an academic. I have been doing versions of CBR since the mid 1980s with community organizing, development, and Internet efforts. And as much as I think I am sensitive to community perspectives, I have learned over the years that I do not share the history or the background of most of the communities I work with and can only learn about them as an outsider. My hope is, for those of you from community organizations, and those of you who are students, that you may also find some of these questions of importance, and may find them of use in working with us.
So let's begin with what I find to be the most basic question, and then move on to the definitional issues.
Why do CBR?
For those community members with the clearest understanding of CBR, the reason to do it is because it helps them accomplish their goals. They need research, whether it is for a grant proposal or a court case or a policy proposal down at city hall. Sometimes it is research they are perfectly capable of doing themselves except that they don't have time. Sometimes it is highly technical research they don't have the time to learn or the equipment to carry out. Sometimes they just need a document that has a "PhD" on it. At times, community organizations feel pressured to give up some of their organizational self-interest to serve students needing training or academics wanting publications, but the smart ones resist. Paula Toynton, of the Hyacinth AIDS Foundation in New Jersey, says:
"We've turned down research because of the way they [academics] want to do it...Our first responsibility is to our service population. Our rules are that one, if it will help, do it; two, if it will neither help nor hurt, do it only if we have time; three, if it will harm, don't do it."
Community groups and members are wary of us academics because, among other reasons, we often have a much more diverse set of reasons for doing CBR. For academics, the hours are bad, the risks are high in doing research that actually matters, it's hard to get institutional credit, and the results are difficult to publish in any of the journals that count in high-powered academic circles.
So why do it? I've come across a few reasons in my travels and readings. Some academics do it because it's better research. Disillusioned with the standoffish ivory tower attitude that pronounced the only good research as that produced by researchers with no relationship to the "subjects," since the early days of contemporary feminist research many of us have come increasingly to realize that the lack of a relationship produced bad results. Those who could not trust us because we refused to have any real relationship with them, also refused to be fully truthful with us. Those academics who do participatory validity checking by returning data back to community members to check for accuracy, or engage them in the analysis, realize how much academic researchers miss. And finally, we get to test the accuracy of our research in action--a risky and scary trial but the most certain in determining whether our research matters. Those of us captivated with this research design have become reminded that "objectivity," far from being a goal in and of itself, was never more than a strategy to improve accuracy. Accuracy, not objectivity, is the goal.
Other academics, particularly those who approach CBR from a service learning background, do it because it's better for the students. These teachers have already become convinced that book learning is incomplete. And increasingly, they have been listening to the critiques of service learning approaches that emphasized the service over learning--painting houses for credit. Research was something students could do that actually developed and tested skills they were learning in higher education. The result is an experiential, skills-based pedagogy that surpasses book learning and service learning.
Of course, for many of us the 'A' reason for doing CBR is because it helps the community. As the critiques built against service learning for exploiting communities to serve students and enhance the university's image, some academics began to make the community central to our work. We sometimes sacrifice our own careers and even our students for the cause of empowering the community. For many of us this is a dramatic leap, because not only does it put the community before the institution and even the students, but it puts the community before the academic as well.
Behind the 'A' answer is another one, worried over by philosophers throughout modern history. The secret answer for doing CBR is because it selfishly feels good. In an era where higher ed administrators often seem more interested in body counts than intellectual outcomes, and where students seem more engaged in soap operas than serious thinking, being able to work collaboratively with community members who care and are engaged is a treat indeed. Being truly useful, and part of real social change, is something too few of us academics get to experience on a regular basis.
One last reason, though not necessarily the final reason, for doing CBR is one that I rarely hear these days. And yet it is one of the most important reasons for me, though the scariest to admit to publicly in these days of rekindled anti-American lists. After naively becoming involved in a project a decade ago that I became convinced was helping bankers and developers more than communities, I vowed I would only get involved in projects that had revolutionary potential. I decided I would only work with projects that held the hope of undermining corporate control of the globe and expanding democracy to those who had been historically excluded. CBR, done right and done well, holds that promise for me.
Now you may already see questions developing. Are these motivations compatible with the main community motivation of getting the job done? Can students have different motivations and still contribute to the cause? Are some motivations better than others? How do you prioritize motivations--which comes first? Are any of the motivations sufficient in and of themselves? Are any of them necessary before you should do CBR?
And here is where the answers lag. I have concerns that entering CBR with the goal of teaching students may put curriculum before community, and yet I have colleagues out there (you know who you are) who effectively balance those interests. Others worry that my revolutionary potential goal needlessly causes conflict and yet the most successful CBR I have seen does exactly that. Others worry that "helping the community" contains hidden condescension. To date, we do not know the extent to which different motivations produce different outcomes, and that is partly because we may no longer know what community-based research is.
So What is CBR?
My friends Kerry Strand, Sam Marullo, Nick Cutforth, Pat Donohue, and myself, with the support of Bobby Hackett of the Bonner Foundation, have been trying to find a definition of CBR that is both broad enough to include the diversity of work going on out there while still maintaining focus that can promote some standards for the practice. As a consequence, we have come up with three basic principles.(1)
I want to devote the remainder of my comments to these principles and the questions they generate for me. As a preface to this discussion, to the extent that you find clarity here, please credit my colleagues, and to the extent that I introduce confusion, please blame me. For it is, in fact, my purpose to cause confusion.
Who is the Community?
You knew the question was coming. No one seems to want to talk about the question of who is the community. Some don't want to talk about it because they fear that the conversation will be divisive. They would prefer to think about us as all one big community, and to talk about the community as separate from those of us trying to help will reinforce divisions and cause conflict. Another reason some don't want to talk about it is because at some level of consciousness we "on the outside" know that the community is not us. And that goes not just for us academics. It goes for foundations, United Ways, government agencies, and even most nonprofits. Because by and large those organizations are not controlled by people who live, eat, and sleep with the problems that CBR is designed to attack. And that is where I begin in thinking about the community in CBR.
To me, "the community" is the people with the problem: The economically disinvested neighborhood trying to get respectful and effective police protection; the gay/lesbian community trying to get fair marriage and adoption laws; the Latino or African American community trying to stop employment discrimination. The community may be spatial, or may span spaces. It may be well organized or disorganized. In some cases people may not even define themselves as a community until a good community organizer brings them together so they can discover their common issues and complementary resources. When they do understand their issues and resources they sometimes form their own community-based organizations (CBOs)--groups that they as a community control either by a majority hold on the board of a formal organization, or by their mass membership and participation in an informal group. In a recent CBR project I did with the extremely diverse Cedar-Riverside neighborhood in Minneapolis, I found myself working with the neighborhood community development corporation (which is run by an elected neighborhood board), the Confederation of Somali Community in Minnesota, the Oromo Community of Minnesota, the Korean Service Center, and an informal Vietnamese group, among the many other non-community-based nonprofit organizations.
A step removed from the community are those organizations that are not controlled by the community but are connected to it by staff or board members who come from the community. Those "link people," or "bridge people," or "translators," as they are variously called, are special. In multicultural situations they are the people who not only speak multiple languages, but also understand the rules of multiple cultures. In Cedar-Riverside I worked with Dat Dao, a Vietnamese community leader, Saeed Fahia, of the Somali Community, Alemayehu Baisa of the Oromo Community, and Yoonju Park of the Korean Community. All were members of their respective ethnic communities, and were also running formal community-based service organizations in the neighborhood.
Two steps removed are those organizations with no direct connection to the people with the problem. Their staff or boards may share some structural characteristics--of class, race, sex/gender, sexual orientation, disability, or other important characteristic--but they do not share the experience of the problem. Service providers, institutions, government, and other similar organizations trying to help a community when they have no community base, no community participation or control, and no bridge people, are often suspect in a community. And yet it is with these twice-removed groups that so many academics partner--something I call working from the middle.
This situation confronts us with a number of questions. What do you do in a divided community when there are divisive CBOs? What do you do when there are no CBOs, and no other nonprofits that want to be community-based? What happens, for example, when you do CBR with a homeless shelter, but the users of the shelter are involved only as clients, not as participants? What happens when you are solicited by a funder to do CBR that the community hasn't requested?
It is this last question--who gets to choose the research--that leads us to our next topic: what collaboration means in CBR.
What is "Collaboration" in CBR?
As much as academics talk like liberals, we often act like libertarians, believing we have some innate right to choose and follow our own academic interests without accountability. To allow our research to be directed by community folks who may have a high school education or less seems unthinkable. Yet, when we allow that to happen, we find that ignorance may not be related to amount of education. I remember my second CBR project in Toledo. The community development coalition that formed out of our first CBR project decided it wanted a study of foundation philanthropy. At the time I didn't know what a foundation was, much less how to study them. But then I found myself and an extraordinarily dedicated graduate student ruining our eyesight reading microfiche tax records of Toledo foundations. For me personally it was the most tedious research I have ever been involved with but, for the community, it was the most popular and influential CBR project I have ever contributed to.
So does that mean collaboration is whatever "the community" wants and the academic just becomes labor? Academics often feel caught between thinking they know what's best for the community, or not contributing their own perspective for fear of being too influential. Both responses, however, are symptomatic of misunderstanding what collaboration and community-based expertise mean. I remember being brought up short a few years ago, working with an African American community in Toledo. I was at a meeting, not contributing because I was stuck in the "fear of undue influence" trap, when one of the leaders asked me directly what I thought. We'd worked together for about a year by that time, and while I hemmed and hawed, Rose Newton, in her wonderfully confrontational way, said "Just tell us what you think and don't worry about it--if it's a stupid idea we'll tell you."
So I've come to understand that collaboration is about relationships. The closer the relationship, the better the collaboration. Beyond that, however, the actual process of collaboration gets murky. How much collaboration, at what point in a CBR project, is necessary? If we think about a typical research project, it starts with choosing a question, developing a research design, collecting the data, doing an analysis, and reporting the results. In CBR, reporting the results expands to include acting on the results. How much influence should the community, compared to the academic, have at each of those stages? Are there some circumstances where the academic should have more influence and others where the community should have more influence?
One would think the answers would be clear, but they are not. Are there circumstances where a community might know what it wants at the end of the process, but not what research questions could get them there? Is it possible that some communities may not gain enough in skills or relationships to collect their own data, and a group of students collecting data will best serve the community? Are there issues where the research is so technical, and the need for quick results so paramount, that the academic should do it? Are there strategic situations, such as a lawsuit, where a report given by a credentialed expert will be tactically more effective? Or, conversely, are we overemphasizing the research in CBR, and not recognizing that the research is but a small part of the overall project, and it is really the community organizing and development aspects of the project that are most important, which means that community involvement and even control are paramount at every step?
A final issue we need to address is whether it is possible for the collaboration to be not between the academic and the community, but between the students and the community. And if the real collaboration is between the students and the community, how involved should the academic supervisor be? And that brings us to our next big question.
How do Students Fit in CBR?
You students here have been very patient. And you've probably noticed that you have been relatively invisible in this discussion so far (though I should note here that you now get the longest section). I am personally ambivalent about including students in CBR. I know people in this room who are magicians at taking a group of students, engaging them in a CBR project, and making minds and communities grow. I have not been able to do that without feeling stuck in the tensions between serving the community and serving the curriculum, and between the participatory research model I use and the service learning model so popular today. I work with students in CBR projects regularly, but as individuals, not as classes. I so this partly because of the questions that others have already asked about service learning models. Though there are different models of service learning, in general the characteristics of service learning do not fit with the version of CBR I use.
First, service learning, with few exceptions, is about providing service rather than social change.(2) O'Meara and Kilmer (n.d.)(3) review the definitions of civic engagement, and nowhere in the review does "social change" become part of the definition. Mooney and Edwards (2001)(4) distinguish six forms of "experiential learning" and cite only one--service-learning advocacy--with having an action component. Even when "community organizing" is included it is lumped in uncritically with community building and community development, which are much more conservative practices.(5) A distinction between "charity" and "justice" service learning has developed within the field of late and is beginning to gain some momentum, but also remains couched in student-focused strategies. Hironimus-Wendt and Lovell-Troy (1999)(6) compare Dewey and C. Wright Mills, the American critical sociologist, for a more critical social justice model of service learning, but do not develop the broader social conflict implications of such a model. Marullo and Edwards (2000)(7) pose a justice service learning model to move students toward a critical examine of root structural causes of social problems. They also address issues of resource inequalities in university-community collaborations and integrate community development principles, and so far come closest to moving service learning from service to social change.
Second, service learning "community partners" are typically not social change organizations, but social service "agencies." The Learn & Serve America National Service-Learning Clearinghouse (n.d.)(8) "community-based organization resources" page does not identify a single resource focused on service learning with grass-roots organizations, but of the 17 resources listed, 8 specifically focus on working with social service agencies. Robinson (2000b)(9) notes recent research showing that only 1% of service-learning programs were involved in grass roots social change work, and apolitical service work is officially promoted by funders such as the Corporation for National Service.
Third, the service learning model is still predominantly practiced as an expert-based rather than collaborative model (which fits with an agency-based social service perspective). Dorsey (2001)(10) describes service service learning as linking faculty "expertise and interests" and student "needs and interests" with community individuals' and groups' defined and prioritized "needs" (emphasis mine). Eby (1998)(11) argues that agency partners must have authentic roots in the community, the process must include analysis of structural issues, and the action part of the process must include advocacy and community development. But advocacy and community-development are both problematic strategies for community empowerment,(12) as we will see. Mooney and Edwards (2001)(13) do not see any form of service learning as engaging the community in social action. Their "service-learning advocacy" model only speaks to engaging students, not community, in collective action.
To the extent that the service learning model does not match the principles of collaboration, multiple forms of knowledge, and social change in the CBR model, then how do students fit in CBR? From the community's perspective the question is whether students are useful (which is the same question that they apply to the academic). Community organizations judge their resources, the relative cost of training and supervising students, and the expected benefits. Some also look at the potential investment in creating a potential pool of skilled future employees and volunteers, but usually only in those rare cases where they have a few extra resources.
In a flip-flop critique of the old service learning model where service was emphasized over learning only because the service (such as painting houses) was disconnected from the learning, now the question is whether CBR should be an opportunity for students to learn something new at the expense of the community, or to serve the community by putting into practice something they have already been certified as competent at? In other words, should the experience be available to all students or is it best reserved for advanced highly skilled students? Related to this, to what extent should student involvement in CBR be driven by what the community needs and wants, or what the curriculum demands? Should community organizations have to accept partially trained students, or fit their needs to what students are learning, because the curriculum is out of touch with the real world of community life?
It is also interesting, as I have spoken with students doing CBR the last couple of years while working with the Bonner Foundation, how much diversity there is in their perceptions of CBR. And from their perspective, a new question is emerging over whether CBR for students should be a requirement, a responsibility, or a right.
On one end of the continuum, and the one where the most discussion has occurred, is the question of whether students should be required to serve the community. And many of you know the issues involved. Should students be required to work with community efforts whose politics they oppose? Should they be required to work with a community even if they have nothing to offer? Do communities want or have the capacity to mentor the larger numbers of students who would be involved under such requirements? Even community organizations are divided on this, with some accepting any help from anyone for any amount of time. Other organizations will only take students with real skills that they can have for at least 10 hours a week for an entire term.
In the middle is the question of whether CBR should be a responsibility, where students who choose it get advantages over those who do not. This seems to be the civic engagement perspective, whose goal is to produce more community-minded students--i.e. to produce a greater sense of social responsibility. Instilling the sense of responsibility to do CBR, rather than requiring it, seems more consistent with instilling responsibility rather than just resentful obedience. The question is how to instill a sense of responsibility in students to choose CBR experiences that are supposed to instill a sense of responsibility, especially when the research is showing that CBR experiences don't seem to be instilling a sense of community responsibility.(14)
But perhaps we worry about those picky things too much. For service learning type experiences, including CBR, seem to be getting more and more popular among students. Far from resenting a requirement to do CBR, we may be facing a time when students resent not being able to do CBR. We haven't really argued about this one in the literature yet except to discuss the question of whether it is a student's right, for example, to do community service with a "community organization" like the Ku Klux Klan. But there is a subtler question lurking behind the scenes. In the once again competitive employment market, students are being compelled to seek every advantage. And as service learning models have more influence inside and outside of the academy, service learning experiences are being seen as good resume lines. And why not? They impart real skills, show real hands-on work experience, and show teamwork ability. Can we legitimately deny any students access to those resume-building experiences? Or is it a student's right to get access to every resume-building experience the institution has to offer, even if they end up being a burden rather than a boon to a community?
How do you do CBR?
Here we move onto the second principle of CBR (but have no fear, even though we are only at the second principle there are just two more slides left), that the practice validates multiple sources of knowledge and promotes the use of multiple methods of discovery and of dissemination of the knowledge produced. We have discussed the research process itself. Here we are concerned with broader questions of the overall philosophy behind CBR. Because I think we are beginning to see a tension in our practice that comes from the mixing of at least partly incompatible radical/critical and mainstream/consensual approaches to CBR.
The research part of the CBR model is being pulled between what has historically been called participatory research and action research.
Action research was probably first founded by Kurt Lewin (1948). He and his colleagues worked with racial issues, attempting to resolve inter-racial conflicts. They also worked with industry, conducting applied research to increase worker productivity and satisfaction. The importance of action research is in its emphasis on mixing theory and practice. It has been used in education settings, and in corporate settings to save jobs and improve worker satisfaction.(15) Action research values useful knowledge, developmental change, the centrality of individuals, and consensus social theories. The point of reference for action researchers is the profession more than the community, and the practice is very similar to the models used by professional planners. The action research model emphasizes collaboration between workers and management, and denies the structural antagonism between those groups recognized by the participatory research model. Action research does not challenge or often even address existing power relationships in either knowledge production or material production, but seeks to resolve conflicts between groups.(16)
Participatory research was influenced by the third world development movement of the 1960s, ranging across India, Africa, and South America, and led by practitioners such as Rajesh Tandon and Paulo Freire.(17) Participatory research was also promoted in the United States by sociologist John Gaventa (1993),(18) who would come to direct the famous Highlander Research and Education Center.(19) Participatory researchers(20) have historically distinguished themselves from the conservative action research model. An important article by Brown and Tandon (1983)(21) showed how participatory research maintains a view of social change that emphasizes the centrality of social conflict and collective action and the necessity of changing social structures.(22) Participatory research is about people producing knowledge to develop their own consciousness and further their social change struggles.(23) As Rahman (1991)(24) argues, "domination of masses by elites is rooted not only in the polarization of control over the means of material production but also over the means of knowledge production.... These two gaps should be attacked simultaneously wherever feasible"(p. 14). In practice, participatory research is very much a community organizing approach that includes a research process. It begins in the community and ends with structural social change. The highest form of participatory research is seen as research completely controlled and conducted by the community, and it is interesting that the most well-known U.S. practitioners of this model, such as the Highlander Research and Education Center (2002),(25) the Applied Research Center (2002),(26) and Project South (2002),(27) are all organizations outside of academia (Hall, 1993).(28)
The teaching or pedagogy part of the CBR model is pulled between Dewey-influenced(29) service learning approaches and popular education approaches. We have already discussed service learning. What is important to note here is that, in general, the characteristics of mainstream service learning are quite similar to the action research model. The focus on working with middle-level service organizations, bridging structural inequalities and antagonisms, emphasizing gradual individual level change, and avoiding conflict make service learning and action research quite compatible and form what we might call a mainstream version of CBR.
In contrast to service learning is the popular education model. Paulo Freire and Myles Horton, the founder of the famous Highlander Center, are most often cited as core influences of this approach.(30) Freire built his model working with rural Latin American communities, and it became a popular education process used in many social change efforts. Those working in the tradition of participatory research regularly draw from this tradition as part of their practice.(31)
Popular education is, most importantly, a participatory approach to learning that makes participatory research a central part of the learning process. Research is not done just to generate facts, but to develop understanding of one's self and one's context. It is also about understanding how to learn, which allows people to then become self-sufficient learners and evaluate knowledge that others generate.(32) Probably the most famous U.S. example of popular education has been conducted through the Highlander Research and Education Center. Shortly before Rosa Parks refused to move to the back of the bus, she had participated in a Highlander workshop on implementing the Brown v. Board school desegregation decision. The experience she had at Highlander was one of the important factors in giving her the power to stay in her bus seat that day in Montgomery.(33)
There are service learning models now using popular education, but only with students, not with the community where it has historically been applied.(34) Even so, popular education and participatory research, because of their mutual emphasis on structural change, collective action, and a conflict worldview, are beginning to form a radical version of CBR.
It appears that CBR today is much more likely to adopt an action research/service learning approach to working with communities rather than a participatory research/popular education approach. It may be because of our antipathy to conflict in the wake of September 11; it may be because of our oversimplified equating of conflict with violence. It may be because us middle class academics, who do not experience the conflicts created by being on the wrong side of social structural barriers, therefore do not see conflict strategies as legitimate. But the question arises whether our distaste for conflict situations, and conflict groups, and our gravitation toward safe "middle" service organizations may be making it difficult to achieve the third principle of CBR, which is social change for social justice.
What is your Model of Social Change?
If we agree that CBR is about making social change, then the community, the intermediary organization (if there is one), and the academic need to discuss their definitions of social change. Most relevant to this discussion is the distinction between what us sociologists call conflict theory and functionalist theory.
Functionalist theory argues that society tends toward natural equilibrium and its division of labor develops through an almost natural matching of individual talents and societal needs. For functionalists, healthy societies maintain some basic degree of equilibrium and place all of their members into the roles for which they are fit. This theory also assumes that people have common interests even when they have different positions in society. Healthy, persistent societies are in a constant state of gradual equilibrium-seeking improvement. Thus, a group organizing to force change is actually unhealthy, as it can throw off equilibrium, and cooperation to produce gradual change is a better alternative.(35) In this model, poor people only need opportunity, not power, and cooperation between the haves and the have-nots is the best means to provide opportunity. But because the model does not recognize structural barriers to equality, it can only provide opportunities determined by existing power holders.
Conflict theory sees no natural tendency toward anything but conflict over scarce resources. In this model society develops through struggle between groups. Stability in society is only fleeting, and to the extent that it is achieved even temporarily, it's not because society finds equilibrium but because one group dominates the other groups. Conflict theory sees society as divided, particularly between corporations and workers, men and women, and whites and people of color. The instability inherent in such divided societies prevents elites from achieving absolute domination and provides opportunities for those on the bottom to create change through organizing for collective action and conflict.(36)
Which theory a person uses, however casually, has enormous implications for what kind of CBR we do and what kinds of partnerships we feel most comfortable with.
CBR, in fact, holds within itself a tension between these two theories. CBR can be based on participatory research and popular education, which use a conflict model of social change, or action research and service learning, which are closer to a functionalist social change perspective. And CBR practice looks very different from the two different approaches. Participatory research and popular education tend toward exclusivity, working only with the community itself, arming itself with information to go into battle against bad guy targets. Action research and service learning work across boundaries, with workers and management together, to try and supply information to resolve disputes.
Different organizations also tend toward one of the two models. Practitioners tend to divide the community work industry into the practices of advocacy, service delivery, community development, and community organizing. Advocacy--the practice of trying to create social change on behalf of others (such as children or trees or illegal immigrants who are unable to advocate for themselves)--and service delivery--what we normally think of as social services--both tend to occur through mid-range non-community-based organizations. Community development--providing housing, business, and workforce development--and community organizing--building powerful self-advocacy organizations--are more likely to occur through true community-based organizations. Advocacy and community organizing are based more on conflict theory, while service delivery and community development are based more on functionalist theory. As you can see, service provision fits consistently with Action Research/Service Learning and community organizing fits consistently with Participatory Research/Popular Education. Advocacy and community development are "mixed" models, and we don't yet know for sure how they might combine with CBR.
So now we have a situation where CBR could occur through either a mid-range organization or a community-based organization, and through organization structures based on a conflict model or a functionalist model. The questions at this point gain in complexity. How good of a fit should there be between the academic and the intermediary organization (if there is one) and the community on the questions of social change theory and social change model? What if the academic is convinced the community needs to adopt a conflict theory but the community is using a functionalist theory? What if the academic and the community are in agreement on the theory and practices but the organization is not? What if an outside funder or government agency wants to be involved in a conflict-oriented community organizing project?
As we Begin
Child psychologists know that the earliest years of a child's life can have the most profound impact on their future. CBR is in its early years. And just like unreflective parenting can create unintended consequences for the future of a child, unreflective CBR can create unintended consequences for the future of our society.
These questions are not rhetorical for me. Finding good answers, I believe, will make the difference between consciously serving communities versus unconsciously using communities. They will make the difference between consciously creating a more progressive, inclusive society and unconsciously maintaining the status quo. And please, let us attempt to find those answers in collaboration rather than in isolation. The process of true collaboration, particularly between grass-roots community members and academics, will itself facilitate finding good answers. As part of that process I am very pleased this morning that you are not hearing just from the academic but also from the community.
Notes
1. Strand et al.,( 2001).
2.
Crews, (2000b).
3. O'Meara and Kilmer (n.d.)
4. Mooney and Edwards (2001) 5. Stoecker, (2001). 6. Hironimus-Wendt and Lovell-Troy (1999)
7. Marullo and Edwards (2000)
8.
Learn & Serve America National Service-Learning Clearinghouse (n.d.)
9. Robinson (2000b)
10.Dorsey (2001)
11. Eby (1998)
12. Beckwith and Lopez, 1997),
13. Mooney and Edwards (2001)
14.
Loeb, 2001; Center for Human Resources, (1999)
15. William F. Whyte (1991).
16. Brown and Tandon, (1983)
17.Brown and Tandon, (1983); Hall, (1993); Freire, (1970); Paulo Freire Institute, (n.d.).
18. John Gaventa (1993),
19. Adams, (1975); Glen, (1988); Horton, (1989).
20. Brown and Tandon, (1983), Hall, (1992)
21. Brown and Tandon (1983)
22. Brown & Tandon, (1983); Comstock & Fox, (1993)
23. Gaventa, (1991)
24. Rahman (1991)
25. Highlander Research and Education Center (2002),
26. Applied Research Center (2002)
27. Project South (2002),
28. Hall, (1993).
29.
Dewey (1944)
30.
see Horton and Freire, (1990).
31. Williams, 1996; Lynd, (1993).
32.
Park, 1993, Heron, (1996).
33. Glen, (1988).
34.
Brown (2001) Myers-Lipton (1998)
35. Dahrendorf, (1958); Morrow, (1978); Eitzen and Baca Zinn, (2000).
36. Ryan, (1976); Morrow, (1978); Eitzen and Baca Zinn, (2000).
Reading List
Adams, Frank. 1975. Unearthing Seeds of Fire: The Idea of Highlander. John F. Blair, publisher.
Alinsky, Saul. 1969. Reveille for Radicals. New York: Vintage Books.
Alinsky, Saul. 1971. Rules for Radicals. New York: Vintage Books.
Applied Research Center. 2002. http://www.arc.org/
Barber, Benjamin R. 1992. An Aristocracy of Everyone : The Politics of Education and the Future of America. New York : Ballantine Books.
Beckwith, Dave, with Cristina Lopez. 1997. Community Organizing: People Power from the Grassroots. COMM-ORG: The On-Line Conference on Community Organizing and Development. http://comm-org.wisc.edu/papers.htm
Belbas, Brad, Kathi Gorak, and Rob Shumer. 1993. Commonly Used Definitions of Service-Learning: A Discussion Piece October 1993. http://www.servicelearning.org/who/def.htm
Boal, Augusto. 1982. The Theatre of the Oppressed. New York: Routledge.
Bobo, K., Kendall, J. & Max, S. (l991). Organizing for social change: A manual for activists in the l990s. Washington, DC: Seven Locks Press.
Brennan, James F. 1998. Readings in the History and Systems of Psychology, 2/e. New York: Prentice Hall.
Brooks, William. n.d. Was Dewey a Marxist. http://www.stlawrenceinstitute.org/vol13brk.html
Brown, Danika. 2001. Putting it Together: A Method for Developing Service-Learning and Community Partnerships Based in Critical Pedagogy. http://www.outerversity.org/slmonograph.html
Brown, Danika. 2000. Learning to Serve?: The Necessity of Marxist Critique in Service-learning Curricula. Rethinking Marxism, 2000, conference paper. http://www.u.arizona.edu/~danika/learningtoserve.html
Brown, L. David, and Rajesh Tandon. 1983. Ideology and Political Economy in Inquiry: Action Research and Participatory Research. Journal of Applied Behavioral Science, 19, 277-294.
Campus Compact. 2001. http://www.compact.org
Campus Outreach Opportunity League. n.d. http://www.COOL2SERVE.org/
Cancian, Francesca M. 1993. Conflicts Between Activist Research and Academic Success: Participatory Research and Alternative Strategies. The American Sociologist, 24, 92-106
Center for Human Resources, 1999. Summary Report, National Evaluation of Learn and Serve America School and Community Based Programs. Brandeis University.
Corella and Bertram F. Bonner Foundation. 2002. http://www.bonner.org
Crews, Robin. What is Service-learning? April 8, 2000 http://csf.colorado.edu/sl/what-is-sl.html
Crews, Robin. Benefits of Service-learning. n.d. http://csf.colorado.edu/sl/benefits.html
Cummings, C. Kim. 2000. John Dewey and the Rebuilding of Urban Community: Engaging Undergraduates as Neighborhood Organizers. Michigan Journal of Community Service-learning, 7, 97-108.
Deans, Thomas. 2000. Writing Partnerships: Service-Learning in Composition. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English.
Demerath III, N. J. 1996. Who Now Debates Functionalism? From System, Change and Conflict to "Culture, Choice, and Praxis." Sociological Forum, 11, 333-345
Dewey, John. 1944. Democracy and Education: an Introduction to the Philosophy of Education. New York: The Free Press.
Dorsey, Bryan. 2001. Linking Theories of Service-Learning and Undergraduate Geography Education. Journal of Geography, 100, 124-132.
Eby, John W. 1998. Why Service-learning is Bad. http://www.messiah.edu/agape/pdf%20files/wrongsvc.pdf
Field, Richard. 2001. John Dewey (1859-1952). The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. http://www.utm.edu/research/iep/d/dewey.htm
Freire. Paulo. 1970. Pedagogy of the oppressed. New York: Continuum.
Gaventa, John. 1993. The Powerful, the Powerless, and the Experts: Knowledge Struggles in an Information Age. Pp. 21-40 in in Peter Park, Mary Brydon-Miller, Budd Hall, and Ted Jackson (eds.) Voices of Change: Participatory Research in the United States and Canada. Westport, Connecticut: Bergin and Garvey.
Gedicks, Al. 1996. Activist Sociology: Personal Reflections. Sociological Imagination, 33, http://comm-org.wisc.edu/si/sihome.htm
Gittell, Ross, and Avis Vidal. 1998. Community Organizing: Building Social Capital as a Development Strategy. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Glen, John M. 1988. Highlander: No Ordinary School. University press of Kentucky.
Hall, Budd. 1993. Introduction. Pp. xiii-xxii In Peter Park, Mary Brydon-Miller, Budd Hall, and Ted Jackson (eds.) Voices of Change: Participatory Research in the United States and Canada. Westport, Connecticut: Bergin and Garvey.
Highlander Research and Education Center. 2002. http://www.hrec.org/
Hironimus-Wendy, Robert J., and Larry Lovell-Troy. 1999. Grounding service-learning in social theory. Teaching Sociology, 27, 360-372.
Horton, Aimee Isgrig. 1989. The Highlander Folk School: A History of its Major Programs, 1932-1961. Carlson Publishing.
Horton, B.D. (1993). The Appalachian land ownership study: Research and citizen action in Appalachia, in Voices of Change: Participatory research in the U.S. and Canada. P. Park, M. Brydon-Miller, B.L. Hall, & T. Jackson. Westport, CT: Bergin and Garvey.
Horton, Myles, and Paulo Freire. 1990. We Make the Road by Walking: Conversations on Education and Social Change. Ed. Brenda Bell, John Gaventa, and John Peters. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
Kahn, S. (1991). Organizing: a guide for grassroots leaders. Silver Springs: MD. NASW Press.
Kahne, Joseph, and Joel Westheimer. 1996. In the service of what? The politics of service-learning. Phi Delta Kappan, 77, 592.
Kosnoski, Jason. 2000. Is John Dewey a Communitarian? In Thinking Fundamentals: IWM Junior Visiting Fellows Conferences, Vol. 9: Vienna. http://www.univie.ac.at/iwm/publ-jvc/jc-09-07.pdf
Learn & Serve America National Service-Learning Clearinghouse n.d. http://www.servicelearning.org/res/faqs/faqs.php?page=faqs18.htm
Lewin, K. (1948) Resolving social conflicts; selected papers on group dynamics. Gertrude W. Lewin (ed.). New York: Harper & Row, 1948.
Loeb, Paul Rogat. 2001. Teaching for Engagement. Academe. July/August, also at http://www.soulofacitizen.org/articles/Teaching%20for%20Engagement.htm
Margonis, Frank. 1993. Leftist Pedagogy and Enlightenment Faith. Philosophy of Education. http://www.ed.uiuc.edu/EPS/PES-Yearbook/93_docs/MARGONIS.HTM
Marullo, Sam, 2000. Summary of Georgetown University's Community Based Research Project, Third Report to Bonner Foundation, L&S Three-Year Narrative.
Marullo, Sam, and Bob Edwards. 2000. From Charity to Justice: The Potential of University-Community Collaboration for Social Change. American Behavioral Scientist, 43, 895-912.
Mooney, Linda A. and Bob Edwards. 2001. Experiential Learning in Sociology: Service-learning and other community-based initiatives. Teaching Sociology, 29, 181-194.
Morris, A. (l984). The origins of the civil rights movement: Black communities organizing for change. New York: Free Press.
Morrow, Paula C. 1978. Functionalism, Conflict Theory and the Synthesis Syndrome in Sociology. International Review of Modern Sociology. 8, 209-225.
Munson, Carlton E. 1978. Applied Sociology and Social Work: A Micro Analysis. California Sociologist, 1, 89-104.
Myers-Lipton. 1998. Effect of a Comprehensive service-learning program on college students' civic responsibility. Teaching Sociology, 26, 243-258.
National Association of State PIRGs. 2000. http://www.pirg.org/
O'Meara, Kerryann and Heather Kilmer n.d. Civic Engagement: Terminology. http://www.compact.org/mapping/civicterminology.html
O'Meara, Kerryann and Heather Kilmer n.d.b Gaps in the field. http://www.compact.org/mapping/gapinfield.html
Parsons, Sharon. N.d. Teacher Research. http://www.accessexcellence.org/21st/TL/AR/
Piven, Frances Fox, and Richard A. Cloward. 1979. Poor People's Movements: Why They Succeed, Why They Fail. New York: Vintage Books.
Paulo Freire Institute. n.d. http://www.paulofreire.org/
Rahman, Muhammad Anisur. 1991. The Theoretical Standpoint of PAR. Pp. 13-23 in Orlando Fals-Borda and Mohammad Anisur Rahman (eds) Action and Knowledge: Breaking the Monopology with Participatory Action-Research. New York: Apex Press.
Project South. 2002. http://www.projectsouth.org/
Reisch, Michael, and Stanley Wenocur. (1986) "The Future of Community Organization in Social Work: Social Activism and the Politics of Professional Building." Social Service Review, 60, 70-93.
Robinson, Tony. 2000. Service-learning as justice advocacy: Can Political Scientists do politics? Political Science and Politics, 33, 605-12.
Robinson, Tony. 2000b. Dare the School Build a New Social Order? Michigan Journal of Community Service-learning, 7, 142-157.
Ryan, William. 1976. Blaming the Victim. New York: Vintage Books.
Saltmarsh, John. 1996. Education for Critical Citizenship: John Dewey's Contribution to the Pedagogy of Community Service-learning. Michigan Journal of Community Service-learning, 3, 13-21.
Sanderson, Stephen K. and Lee Ellis. 1992. Theoretical and Political Perspectives of American Sociologists in the 1990s. The American Sociologist, 23, 26-42.
Smith, M. K. (2001) 'Kurt Lewin, groups, experiential learning and action research', The encyclopedia of informal education, http://www.infed.org/thinkers/et-lewin.htm
Stoecker, Randy. 2001. "Community Development and Community Organizing: Apples and Oranges? Chicken and Egg?" In Ron Hayduk and Ben Shepard (eds) From ACT UP to the WTO: Urban Protest and Community Building in the Era of Globalization, New York: Verso.
Stoecker, Randy. 1999. Making Connections: Community Organizing, Empowerment Planning, and Participatory Research in Participatory Evaluation. Sociological Practice 1:209-232.
Stoecker, Randy. 1999. "Are Academics Irrelevant?" Roles for Scholars in Participatory Research." American Behavioral Scientist 42:840-854.
Strand, Kerry. 2000. Community-Based Research as Pedagogy. Michigan Journal of Community Service-learning, 7, 85-96.
Whyte, W.F. (Ed.) (1991). Participatory Action Research. Newbury Park, CA: Sage.