July-August 2000

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The Community in the Classroom

An English professor describes describes how the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee is restructuring its core curriculum to work with the community.

By Gregory Jay

What was the deconstructionist doing at the Social Development Commission, anyway? As I sat in the office of the commission’s executive director, Deborah Blanks, listening to her discuss race, education, and public service, I felt both inadequate and inspired. That appointment was one of a series of meetings with community leaders that I had begun to attend off campus as part of my commitment to the Milwaukee Idea, the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee’s new effort to build bridges between the ivory tower and the city street. Blanks, an articulate African American community activist, clearly had much to teach me, though this was hardly the kind of seminar table I had been accustomed to after twenty years as a professor. My place at this table was not at the head, and the syllabus was not of my devising. There were no students in the room, except perhaps for me.

I am probably not alone in feeling disorientation at the kind of experience I had that afternoon. As institutions of higher education increase their efforts at community engagement and civic participation, more and more faculty members find themselves going through an awkward transition. The walls dividing the campus from the world that surrounds it are falling fast, sometimes for good reasons, sometimes for reasons that should alarm us. Community engagement for the purpose of enriching education is exciting; community engagement for the purpose of enriching corporations and endowment accounts is suspect. Yet the problems faced by contemporary institutions of higher education make it increasingly difficult to discern the fine line between these two purposes. My decision to get involved in my university’s new initiatives stemmed largely from my conviction that faculty had better draw that line before someone else does it for them.

Economics of Engagement

Not surprisingly, economics explains much about the current rage for community engagement. The proportion of public university budgets covered by state appropriations continues to fall. This makes campuses increasingly dependent for money on alliances with other public and private organizations, including for-profit corporations that may attempt to dictate research and teaching agendas. Skeptical legislators and governors want today’s university to renew and extend the commitment to economic and social improvement that underwrote the funding of land-grant campuses. Urban campuses are especially targeted with high expectations: save public schools, clean up pollution, jump-start new technologies, deliver improved health care, diversify the arts and culture, and provide the engine for economic growth—and, oh, by the way, educate students from every background, age group, and preparation level through dozens of degree programs using all media at all hours of the day and night.

Higher education has always been seen as an instrument for addressing large social problems. This expectation has, however, been balanced by the powerful notion of academic freedom and the extensive support given to pure research and the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake. How long we can maintain this balance in today’s climate is anybody’s guess.

Thus when Milwaukee’s new chancellor, Nancy Zimpher, invited me to join about a hundred other faculty, staff, students, administrators, and community representatives in a year-long brainstorming session, I was ambivalent. Here are the initial questions given to us:

  • How can we create better economic opportunities for people of all ages?
  • What will learning look like in the next decade?
  • What does it mean to live in a global economy and how, as an international hub, can Milwaukee and UWM broaden the community’s horizons?
  • Our natural and social environments are under siege. What can and should the neighborhoods of the twenty-first century look like?

Clearly, the mandate lay in turning the university’s attention toward addressing worldly concerns. But what, I wondered, could the place of the arts and humanities be in a redesigned "engaged university," especially one known as a "commuter school" in a hypersegregated, working-class town with a public school system known nationally for its crises? I accepted the invitation partly because I feared that the trend toward seeing universities primarily as job-training centers would only be accelerated if arts and humanities faculty gave up in advance. But the 1960s idealist in me also became excited about the possibility of really transforming the curriculum by mainstreaming much of the best progressive scholarship and pedagogy developed over the last thirty years.

Interdisciplinarity

At the start, the process did not look promising. Only one of the project’s ten working groups was to discuss "culture and education," the others being more pragmatically focused on health, technology, international affairs, and the like. But our culture and education group was large and varied; it included state legislators and community activists as well as students, faculty, and administrators. The first payoff was almost immediate: liberation from isolation in our separate universes. Large metropolitan universities are notoriously fragmented places, and in twelve years at UWM I had talked with precious few people outside my discipline or building—much less from off campus. Now I was in dialogue with occupational therapists, sociologists of race, elementary education specialists, bookstore owners, dancers, librarians, community organizers, and a whole host of others who became my friends and allies in the months to follow.

Moving out into this larger world helped address my frustration with the pace of change in my own little academic backyard. For a decade, I had been a trooper in the "culture wars," a career that had succeeded my earlier partisanship in the "theory wars." I thus had already made something of a transition from a deconstructionist to a canon-busting "tenured radical," moving, like many, back into issues of race, gender, class, and social justice, which had been central concerns of my pre-graduate-school years. Much of the political engagement of such work, however, remained theoretical, though many faculty members in women’s studies and ethnic studies were closely linked to activism in their communities.

Alternative Curriculum

Most campuses have done little to create structural engagements between academic and community lives, beyond the vocational programs central to professional schools and now proliferating across campus through internships and service learning. Certainly few have tried to rethink their core curriculum so as to integrate new knowledge paradigms with restructured community relationships.

But that is precisely what we boldly, or foolishly, began to imagine. Having talked much about our goals, we knew we needed a practical way to bring the Milwaukee Idea down to the level of everyday undergraduate classroom practice. Fortunately, the chancellor’s guidelines required all Milwaukee Idea proposals to address issues of diversity and community engagement. These were orientations that, if taken seriously, would challenge us to come up with new curricular models stressing cross-cultural literacy, innovative pedagogy, and classroom-to-community partnerships.

Looking for some kind of device that would serve as a major practical catalyst for change, we stumbled upon the university’s general education requirements. As we looked them over (and how many faculty members have read their institution’s general ed or core curriculum requirements lately?) we began to see an opportunity.

Like many other large state schools and private universities, UWM no longer has a "core curriculum," if by that we mean a sequence of prescribed courses in specified subjects taken from the first to the senior year. Instead, we have a mix of "competency requirements" and "general education requirements." The competency requirements stipulate minimum achievement levels in English, math, and foreign languages. The general education requirements are "distribution" requirements: two courses in natural sciences, two courses in social sciences, two courses in the humanities, one course in the arts, and one "diversity" course from within this distribution.

Students usually choose their general education courses last, after scheduling courses to meet requirements for their schools and majors, and they often find themselves scrambling in their senior year to plug holes in their general education mandate. There are no thematic or structural links among general education courses and no sequencing. Most students view the general education requirements as a mystery and an annoyance, and faculty are embarrassed to admit that the major function of the requirements is to drive enrollments, and thus budgets, by piling bodies into introductory courses in their disciplines.

Our idea, then, was this: why not propose a new, optional core curriculum focused on "cultures and communities"? This curriculum could be an engine for innovation and experimentation, a place to test the principles of the Milwaukee Idea and of much of the scholarly and pedagogical thinking upon which it is based. As an option, it would have the advantage of not directly challenging business as usual, since no one would be forced to take it or teach it. In reality, funding the proposal would divert university resources from some established programs, and, if the option became popular, directly affect the traditional track. But we’re still a long way from that stage of development.

Plural Community

The plurals in "cultures and communities" reflect the variety, hybridity, and ongoing social challenges of our region. Our neighborhoods, cities, and suburbs are increasingly made up of diverse communities whose distinct cultural formations are in dynamic relation to global changes. Milwaukee’s demography includes not only multiple white ethnic communities but also burgeoning Latino and Asian American neighborhoods. The city is also home to most of Wisconsin’s African American citizens, who continue to suffer the effects of systematic economic and educational discrimination. Yet many of our students come from outlying or upstate small towns and agricultural areas, where jobs are limited and racial homogeneity is the norm.

Stories about Milwaukee’s schools and its experiments with vouchers regularly appear in the national news, as do reports on the state’s radical "reform" of its welfare program. If the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee intends to engage its region, it must recognize the plurality of cultures and communities around it and the need to create productive dialogues among them. If we are to educate the future citizens of our region (and statistics show that a large majority of UWM students remain here), then we are well advised to design a curriculum that intentionally addresses these issues and provides the knowledge and skill to negotiate the challenges they offer.

The work of the cultures and communities group blossomed as campus and community involvement increased. Each meeting drew new, enthusiastic members until we ran out of chairs and lunches. Usually these monthly sessions drew from fifteen to thirty people, about a third of whom came from off campus. Discussions were wide ranging and intellectually challenging. We invited people to think and speculate, so that the sessions often resembled a combination of graduate seminar and town-hall meeting. We discovered that we were becoming a community, and that the culture of listening, dialogue, and respect developed in these sessions would be essential to the vision of the new curriculum.

Working groups on specific subjects (community partnerships, teaching and learning, student recruitment and retention, and so on) met separately, sometimes off campus, and generated reports for the final "action plan." After almost eight months of work, we produced a fifty-page proposal, which, after four months of campus and community review, received the chancellor’s endorsement for implementation. (For these and other related documents, see the cultures and communities Web site <http://www.uwm. edu/MilwaukeeIdea/CC>.

Groundwork

Of course, the administration cannot wave a magic wand and mandate this curriculum. It will require long and careful faculty review, which no doubt will lead to substantial revisions. In the meantime, however, the cultures and communities (now widely known as CC) office is up and running—though at an ungainly and awkward speed, as we invent ourselves along the way. To lay the groundwork for change, CC is sponsoring two new grant programs, Faculty Fellowships and Class-to-Community Minigrants. Faculty fellows (usually one-year appointees) will have a reduced teaching load and a budget for research and special projects. Each fellow will design or revise a course intended for the CC curriculum, and the fellows will meet together in colloquia and with visiting speakers, artists, and consultants. The minigrants (usually $1,500 to $2,500) will go to faculty, staff, students, or community organizations for projects with a strong collaborative potential.

To build the network for these collaborations, CC has begun arranging meetings in the community with potential partners, such as Deborah Blanks’s office. We have talked with the staff at Public Allies (an AmeriCorps agency), visited with the history curator at the Milwaukee Public Museum, and met with a local foundation officer who specializes in youth development initiatives. What I find most interesting about these meetings is their intellectual, even scholarly, content. Our off-campus neighbors include many people we have come to call "community scholars," individuals who are deeply learned in their fields through real world as well as academic experience. They articulate sophisticated analyses of their work and concerns, give us bibliographies, and treat us to seminars.

When we approach them with the respect due to colleagues, they respond in kind. This approach helps prevent the notorious tendency of university-community relations to degenerate into cynical pragmatism or institutional condescension, which happens when universities concoct "solutions" that they then attempt to sell or impose without first listening to the community partner (often wrongly thought of as a "client" rather than as a colleague). In the long run, we hope to involve these community scholars in the design, preparation, and teaching of our curriculum, and to get our students out of the classroom and into community learning sites.

Content

It is way too soon to say exactly what the curriculum will look like, though principles and goals are beginning to take shape. First- and second-year courses will focus on understanding cultures and communities through interdisciplinary perspectives and will be team taught. Cultures and communities will be seen as key contexts for understanding how different disciplines construct knowledge and carry out their practices; those disciplines, in turn, will offer essential theoretical, analytical, and pragmatic tools for understanding cultures and communities. An emphasis on comparative approaches will place different cultures and communities into dialogue with one another, stressing mutual accountability and responsibility across borders of race, ethnicity, nation, class, gender, religion, and age.

Upper-division courses will deepen these critical and disciplinary perspectives and offer opportunities for internships and service learning that are embedded in academic frameworks. Senior projects will give students a chance to synthesize their experiences and demonstrate their capacities as producers of knowledge.

CC will not be a separate department, school, or major. As a core curriculum, CC will be an option available to students in all of the university’s undergraduate colleges and professional schools, whatever the students’ declared major. For those who choose it, CC will fulfill their general education requirement. CC courses will be offered through current departments, either through revised versions of existing courses or through newly designed classes. Thus enrollment incentives will spur the acceptance and involvement of departments in the CC curriculum, and CC will become an all-university enterprise for curricular transformation.

Obstacles

After some eighteen months of brainstorming, proposals, negotiations, and "launch activities," CC has a promising start, but it also faces formidable obstacles. We must overcome a long history of neglect by UWM that has led to deep suspicion of the university in many parts of the local community. Our efforts to diversify the student body depend on radical improvements in the graduation rates and performance of the city’s urban schools, which are the natural source for new undergraduates. In trying to diversify the university’s teaching and administrative staff, we face a huge shortage of minority candidates in virtually every field, as well as mass confusion about how legally and professionally to conduct targeted hires—not to mention a firm residual resistance among many faculty to affirmative action. Our vision for new courses and curriculum is endangered by budgetary practices and disciplinary interests that work against general education principles, and by differences in ideology that are not easily smoothed over. Our commitment to a core curriculum emphasizing critical thinking, civic responsibility, diversity, and a reflective approach to science and technology runs against the tendency toward vocationalism among many of today’s students, parents, and administrators. And the academic landscape is littered with curricular reforms that have crumbled under the weight of ill-conceived and impractical objectives.

I don’t intend to become a career administrator or to give up my writing and teaching. For now, I have made changes in my time commitments and daily work life, not only because I believe in our project, but also because I don’t think we really have a choice at this time. Higher education in the twenty-first century will not much resemble education in previous centuries. History reminds us that the norm we defend today bears little likeness to the accepted practice of thirty, fifty, or a hundred years ago. Urbanization, globalization, technology, multiculturalism, feminism, the culture wars, the science wars—all around us, the forces uprooting academic practices grow stronger. Certain core ideals of higher education—the nurturance of independent and free thinkers, the uses of knowledge for social justice and equality, the responsibility to improve the material lives of people, the strengthening of democratic citizenship—must still guide how we grow in the future. Community engagement should mean that the university and its partners join together in building new ways to realize these core ideals. Compromising or abandoning them would damage both the campus and the community, and in the process squander a great opportunity for revitalizing both. As long as there’s a chance we can keep these ideals central, I’ll stay engaged.

Gregory Jay is professor of English and director of the Cultures and Communities Program at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee.