Students Have Their Own Minds. A Response to “Beyond the Catch-22 of School-Based Social Action Programs: Toward a More Pragmatic Approach for Dealing with Power”

1 article response 1 Matthew Goldwasser, PhD is an independent consultant who conducts research and program evaluation in Chicago. He specializes in student voice, civic engagement, and high school reform. He has been an adjunct professor in several schools of education, an administrator and teacher in a public charter school and for many years before academia, a practitioner with at-risk, adjudicated, and delinquent youths in a variety of program settings across the United States and Great Britain. year of this project, students and researchers found a middle ground, as well as a strong creative manner, to accomplish tasks. The students learn to negotiate around, rather than directly overcome, some power barriers to achieve a modicum of success. To build their case, the authors assess different strategies for youth community engagement. The first example they select is service-learning (S-L). Their appraisal seems overly general, basically decrying S-L as being apolitical, having no real connection to macro issues, and being an example of a way for those with advantages to provide charity to those less advantaged. It is not difficult to find examples of poorly done or not especially reflective service-learning projects, and there are a plethora of projects that are apolitical in design and intent. Certainly in public (noncharter) schools, the standards-driven curriculum often limits and fixes the scope of how S-L can function in a given class. In their paper, the authors describe their struggles to coach high school students at Social Action Charter High School in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, to design projects that would help them authentically engage with power and people in power (Fehrman & Shutz, 2011). The authors’ stated reason for creating this project is to expand on previous research that found that civic activism improves students’ connections to their communities and to the larger world. It also builds qualities such as self-esteem, political efficacy, and academic engagement and performance. The authors are mindful that social action projects might enhance students’ belief in their own capacity to solve community problems, but the work of teachers and other adults who clear the way of any “significant barriers to success” also might wind up “misleading students about the realities of unequal power in society and create a catch-22” (p. 1). In this paper, students don’t have confidence and the desire to participate in social action to better the future because they have a lack of authentic, real-world engagement with institutional power. Borrowing the concept first advanced by Joseph Kahne and Joel Westheimer (2006), the authors use the term catch-22 as a conceptual framework for their work with one high school group. The paper identifies a number of other groups also working in the school at the same time. It seems like a missed opportunity to ignore an analysis of contrasting data from all of the groups and instead focus only on the progress of this one group. In the second Abstract In response to the authors’ work on finding a more pragmatic approach to dealing with power, this commentary calls into question the possibility of a preestablished agenda by the researchers, who struggled to engage high school students. There might have been a case of overly ambitious expectations at work; also, the authors confess to being in the school only once a week and that their students were themselves struggling to find their place in a new charter school with an emphasis on social action. This response challenges the authors to reexamine their wish to engage students with institutional power by suggesting that they consider their own positions of power inside the school and classroom. Lastly, the response posits that rather than focusing on the limitations of service-learning and/or public achievement, which may make them appear as less desirable models for social action, we should consider such approaches as providing the very thing—small wins—the authors sought in and that educators should prepare their students for more substantial engagements with power. Students Have Their Own Minds A Response to “Beyond the Catch-22 of School-Based Social Action Programs: Toward a More Pragmatic Approach for Dealing with Power”