January (December
18, 2000-January 17, 2001)
LOG OF TIME SPENT ON NATIONAL SERVICE FELLOWSHIP
Name _______Danika M. Brown________________________________
Period Covered by Invoice: from _12/18/00_____________ to ___1/17/01_____________
Day of Number of Hours Day of Number of Hours
Month Worked on Fellowship Month Worked on Fellowship
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8 | 3 | 8 |
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8 | 4 | 10 |
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8 | 5 | 8 |
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8 | 6 | 8 |
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8 | 7 | |
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8 | 8 | 8 |
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9 | 8 | |
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10 | 8 | |
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6 | 11 | 8 |
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12 | 10 | |
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8 | 13 | 8 |
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8 | 14 | |
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7 | 15 | 8 |
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16 | 8 | |
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17 | 8 | |
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|
8 |
Total of Hours Worked on Fellowship During Invoice Period __________185_________
Signature & Certification __________________________________________
_____________ (date)
CNS National Service Fellowship Narrative
December 18, 2000 - January 17, 2001
The months of December and January have been and are a period of reflection, organization, setting things in motion, along with intense theoretical reading for background on the project. The participants of the project have been working on their individual project definitions (including myself in my role as an instructor), and I have been developing additional materials while keeping in contact with members of the local project to facilitate connections as possible. These months have been the beginning of the "wheels in motion" phase of the project, and everything seems to be going well.
Goals for December/January:
In order to meet the above goals for the month, I:
Developing materials
I have resource pages developed for almost all the local issues/projects. I am currently seeking feedback and contributions to those resources from the project participants. My contribution is primarily a framework for the resources and some starting points for instructors, students, and community organizations. It is my hope that the instructors and organizations will contribute additional materials and that student projects will become part of the resource materials.
I have drafted out a general design of the final project methodology (which is separate from but built upon the local version). This will lead to major revisions of the layout and format of the local project, but will be more user-friendly and allow for cross-referencing of issues and resources. The bigger benefit is that it will place the local work carried out in this project in a larger context.
Additionally, I have conducted research of several programs and projects that are similar or related to the project I am working on. For example, I have looked into LinkResearch, Inc. (http://linkresearch.org/) and INVST (http://www.colorado.edu/ArtsSciences/INVST/Home.html). My analyses of these projects and programs have helped me to articulate my own goals and what is unique about my project in addition to helping me learn from the successful principles of other projects. For example, LinkResearch is an organization that ties university researchers (faculty and students) to community organizations through the use of internship like research opportunities accessed through registration in a database. The organization has developed and expanded in San Francisco, New York and Seattle, major urban areas. The similarities to Link's goals and my own, effective collaboration between education and community organizations on community issues, tells me that there is a need for this type of work and that the ways to facilitate those connections is through centralizing information so people know where to go to find those opportunities. However, Link is a metropolitan-based organization and tends to reach larger nonprofit organizations. Additionally, the database works as a sort of internship clearing house (that is, the organization determines what research they need done and "advertises" for students or researchers to fulfill those project needs). The difference for me here is that I am working more closely in the collaborations to see that the organizations and the educational institutions work together to define both problems/issues and ways to address those issues. I am aslo looking for ways to incorporate those issues directly into curricula rather than simply having a student do work for a nonprofit. These differences reveal different goals and assumptions as well as identify a need that isn't being fulfilled by current projects.
Launch Pilot projects
Of course the nuts and bolts of developing this methodology has been the launching of pilot projects on the local level. The workshop sessions have been devoted to local participants actually operationalizing the principles and methodology I am developing. To that end, I have been working with the participants to get these projects underway.
In general, most of the instructors have structured their curricular ideas around the needs of the organizations in a menu-type of format. That is, the instructors have gathered the information from community organizations and connected those needs to a more general theme in their course and identified ways students could choose a project to work on specifically. For example, one instructor has structured her Business Writing course around the theme of "globalization and professional communication." She will be providing students with theoretical and practical readings on this larger theme and asking them to look at specific sites in the community, specific community issues from that framework. The students will then conduct a project that applies analysis in a useful way for the community organization most involved. Another instructor has themed his course around labor issues in general and devoted one section of the curricula to "local mining issues" and has invited members of the community (participating in the project) to speak to his class about the issues in context. In this way, he has given students a broad theoretical context, a local historical context, and an immediate issue based context for addressing the issues he's concerned with, and he's working directly with guidance from the community on the current issues.
In addition to the course curriculum development, I have participants who are structuring individual research projects with the community collaboration. For example, I am working with one graduate student who has been working on theoretical analyses of prison issues. She is now moving into the dissertation phase of her graduate work and is using this project methodology to develop research projects for the dissertation that also serve as community research projects and volunteer work in prison issues. We were able to connect her with a local group working on prison concerns and she is now collaborating closely with that group, providing them with research support, as she gains access to primary research materials for her dissertation work and shapes that work in terms of current community organizing and activism. In turn, her graduate work and her community connections will become an integral part of a graduate seminar in women's studies that deals with prison issues. She and the community members will help design the curricula with the professor for the course. This particular project has been the most successful and rich example of the potential of the methodology I am working out. I am very interested to see the assessment strategies we are able to develop for this project and how their work impacts the issues they are working on down the road. The benefit of this project taking place within the methodology I am developing is that what does become of the work will become part of a growing resource; it will have a history and become an artifact that can be developed and maintained beyond the experience of any of the individuals involved.
Research and Theory Development
While the local projects are "incubating" and developing, I have spent a great deal of time doing reading in critical theory and practice and looking at the materials that have been developed that place community issues within scholarly research. I am attempting to foreground theory in this project because I believe that a theoretical framework allows for more insightful collaboration, and enables those projects to address systemic issues and become integrated in more sites. The research I have been doing also enables me to provide better resources for the project web page and enables me to talk to a broader group of people.
One area I have not fully worked out but think is especially interesting in relation to this type of work is the concept of inter- or trans-disciplinarity. I am finding that the most effective collaborations between community and academic activists also tends to foster collaborations across disciplines in the academy and that interdisciplinary collaboration benefits communities because of the mutliple perspectives available on the issues at hand.
Avenues for Sustainability and Dissemination
As I have been developing this methodology, researching other programs, working with local community members and instructors as well as faculty and instructors from other locations (Chicago, the Bahamas, California), I have come to see an opportunity for a sustained center that develops these collaborations on a more extensive and broad level. The methodology, I am convinced, is the most effective way to address long term the issue of integrating university research and community organizing. Consequently, I have been hashing out the idea with interested colleagues and possible partners and (as I have mentioned in previous reports) looking for funding to sustain that project.
I drafted up a preliminary, informal proposal and submitted the proposal to a close friend who works as a professional grant writer. He reviewed the proposal and gave me feedback, as well as confirmed that the project has significant funding potential. He helped me think through the possible prospects a bit more, and he nominated me for a Ford Foundation "Leadership for a Changing World" grant (http://www.leadershipforchange.org). While I don't realistically think I will be a finalist (much less a recipient) for this grant project, I am thrilled that the proposal I am developing has enough merit to be considered even for nomination. As I develop a more formal proposal, I will put that proposal up with the methodology materials and ask for feedback from the other fellows as well as from the Corporation staff as they are willing and able to give it.
Additionally, I met this month with a coordinator from the Arizona Community Foundation who is initiating community development projects in Southern Arizona with funding from Ford. She is establishing an internship program that will link graduate students with community development projects in rural Arizona and we were able to talk through the connections to my project. This will provide a valuable resource for the future development of my own project and possible model partnerships for the methodology in general.
Finally, I have been drafting a couple of articles, one theoretical
and one more practical, based on this methodology and the process I have
been going through, in order to submit to the journals indicated above.
Part of the article will indicate the methodology principles as well as
where to get the online version of the methodology. This, I hope, will
be an effective way to disseminate both the methodology itself and the
theoretical framework behind it for other approaches to be developed.
Assessment of Project and Instruments for Local Pilots
I have been developing, disseminating, and reflecting on evaluation forms for the project methodology to the participants as well as to colleagues and supporters of the program. The feedback has been significantly positive (for example, a member of the Composition Program is interested in finding ways to support my work next year at the University). There have been obstacles and limitations--sustained communication seems to be the biggest, but there's also the issue of getting responses from over-worked participants as well. I am continuing the assessment and revisions of the methodology based on those assessments. I expect the most assessment to come in April.
In terms of including the second level of assessment in the project, I am selecting instruments for participants to utilize in order to assess their own pilot projects. I have drawn from some technology assessment tools from the Progressive Technology Project and evaluation instruments for Service Learning from Ohio State's service learning program and Epicenter resources. I will be including the instruments in the materials for the fourth workshop, where we will discuss and modify them as needed for individual's use. I hope to have several options available for users of the final methodology.
TO DO
As I reflect on the methodology I am working with, I reflect on two different levels. The first is in terms of critique of the methodology; the second is in terms of future directions and what this process means to my work in general.
In terms of the methodology, I am struck by a few things. First, the fact that the instructors (myself included) tend to move to a "menu-option," summarizing potential project possibilities and placing them within the context of their course for their students to choose from is interesting and revealing to me. It indicates for me that we remain reluctant to devote a course to a particular project--and I believe that has to do with setting an agenda for students, fearing students' rejection of what we deem important work, etc. I think the methodology I am working on indicates a good deal of flexibility in that regard and I find that a benefit.
However, I also see how this approach tends to leave community organizations hanging, either not really involved in the shaping of the projects or waiting for student groups to "choose" them and work with them to develop them. In many ways, that limits the extent to which the community organizations are participating in the curriculum development and throws the responsibility of developing good student projects back on the organization itself. That's problematic for me.
I'd like to see more directed projects developed in collaboration, and more focused projects like the"prisons concern" project I mentioned above. To that end, I have suggested to my community partners that I would like to work directly with them later in the semester to begin developing full project potentials that they help shape to make available for courses in summer and fall--not necessarily courses I teach, but as guidelines for an instructor to utilize with their students. This approach would be something that I would do with a "center" (the Outerversity) in place, where these projects could be collaborated on in development, then taken through completion on a different type of collaboration (with the instructor and with the participating students).
Another aspect of the methodology that keeps coming up for me as somewhat problematic is the tendency of participants to be much more comfortable retreating into their own individual work and just bringing that work to the table for feedback. This, of course, is caused by the very nature of the systems in which we work and is the whole purpose of my particular project. I see a tendency to understand collaboration as peer review or approval rather than genuinely building something together. My original intention with the workshops was to have that building going on in the workshop, but the participants successfully encouraged me to let them independently work. While having the workshops and the resource materials and my serving as a hub of connection has mitigated the isolation in this work, it has not gone far enough, I don't think, to foster more integrated collaborative relationships and I am working on how to revise the workshop content to do so.
My larger reflection continues to tell me that I am doing important work and that this opportunity has enabled me to revise, reflect, enact, and envision development of the principles I am working with. I still believe that the community benefits have been under-realized in this process and my commitment is to determine how to do this work to compensate for that. In addition, I see the potential for developing this work to more effectively address issues of diversity in participants, the development of related program initiatives such as internships and popular education possibilities, and networking collaboration between nonprofits, education, and the public sector (a sector I have not extensively included in this current methodology, unless you consider higher education itself as representing it).
So it goesÖ I feel that I am doing good, necessary work, and that the
participants in the local project are doing innovative work in their classrooms
and in their research because of this opportunity. I am very much looking
forward to assessing the projects and moving forward with this methodology
in the future.