From the “Ivory Tower” to the “University of the Poor”

Abstract

Adopting a Freirean perspective, the purpose of this autoethnography is to reframe the typical relationship between university educators and communities in poverty by highlighting the educative impact of such a community on a university professor’s academic, cross-cultural critical and civic learning. By reframing communities in poverty as sources of learning for counter-hegemonic praxis, this article highlights how community engagement facilitates the authentic understanding of critical pedagogy, the rethinking of curriculum development, deeper critical awareness of the mechanisms by which privilege and marginalization are perpetuated, and opportunities to learn how some of these processes might be interrupted through meaningful university–community partnership.

Keywords

poverty social ethnography subjects literacy urban education

Reframing Our Relationship With/in Communities in Poverty

Central to the concerns of contemporary educators is the growing gap between social classes (Prashad, 2011) and its deleterious impact on public education (Gibboney, 2008; Kohn, 2004). As detailed by Ahlquist, Gorski, & Montano (2011) the increasing pathologizing of communities of poverty as exemplified by the work of Payne (2005), are exacerbated by educational and social policies that further stratify and marginalize rather than equalize diverse groups. Concerns about the relationship between education and poverty led the American Educational Research Association (AERA) to dedicate its 2013 conference to this theme, framing poverty in economic, intellectual, and moral terms. Responding to AERA’s call for “intellectuals to be in intense engagement with one another, with students, and with society that we might better understand the flaws of one another’s argument,” Miller (2013) called on educators to “rupture, reframe and reposition the oft negatively associated connotations of poverty to create systemic change around the perception of poverty” (p. 4).

Such interruptions of deficit perspectives can occur only when educators themselves have engaged with communities of poverty in relationships of mutual collaboration and learning. Framed as an autoethnography, set within a 5-year critical ethnography that began as a sabbatical in spring 2006, this article offers insight into the education of a university professor amid an economically disadvantaged community of immigrants. By focusing on my learning experiences from a first person perspective, this autoethnography seeks to reframe the typical relationship between educators (particularly university professors) and communities in poverty. Rather than viewing communities in poverty in deficit terms as passive entities to be acted upon by educators, this article highlights the educative impact of such a community on an educator.

Context

On the first day of my sabbatical, I was greeted by the staff of the Family Literacy Program (FLP) with the words, “Welcome to the university of the poor!” The FLP was in its 13th year of existence, serving primarily Guatemalan Maya immigrants who had little or no formal education. Typically, about 25 mothers and their young children were enrolled in any given year. Many were bilingual (a Mayan language and Spanish), and were striving to learn English despite limited formal literacy in their first two languages. Most participants lived below the poverty level, and family incomes averaged 60% below the poverty line. Most of the participants had not attended school in their home country (the median and mode on years of school attendance was 0) and the average across all participants was 2.4 years. On arrival in the United States, many of the participants could have been classified as “preliterate,” a designation assigned to people, especially of indigenous backgrounds, whose languages have not been codified, or are in the process of being codified (Burt, Peyton, & Schaetzel, 2008). More than 90% of participants were unable to read or write in any language when they entered the program.

The bilingual FLP staff consisted of the Director (a Dominican Sister who had also worked in Guatemala), an Early Childhood teacher, two Adult Education instructors (one for Spanish, one for English), a part-time office assistant, and an HIV-AIDS educator. Two staff members were Guatemalan Maya immigrants. At the time I was introduced to it, the program was funded in large part by the Diocese, as well as through support from private grants and the school district. The program was offered on weekday mornings from 8:00 a.m. to noon, and the day was structured to include adult education (in English, Spanish, and, where needed, language instruction in Q’anjoba’l, a Mayan language); early childhood education for children (birth to 4 years of age); parent and child collaborative activities; and “parenting”¹ lessons. This structure was a requirement for a particular grant funding that the FLP received through a partnership with the school district for a few years.

Much of my association with the FLP before and after my sabbatical occurred in partnership with a university colleague who specialized in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL)/Bilingual Education and who introduced me to the program following an invitation by the director to conduct an evaluation of the FLP and support its curriculum development. As a teacher-educator in multicultural education, I saw this work as crucial to my own professional development as it offered firsthand knowledge of a recent immigrant group, particularly unique to our community, who were underserved and marginalized both within the educational system and in society in general. This university–community partnership, solidified through the awarding of a sabbatical that allowed me to spend a semester as a volunteer at the FLP, forged a solidarity between us as professors and the Maya participants as well as the staff of the FLP. Our backgrounds as fellow immigrants and parents were catalysts in establishing a personal connection with the participants, although we were keenly aware of how our positions of privilege as English-speaking professionals of Asian descent rendered our cultural experiences starkly different from Guatemalan Maya adults and the disparate experiences of our children within the same school system. This inequity, consistently manifested, served as an impetus for our ongoing involvement with the program. Although I entered this experience hoping to grow as a teacher, I also left with a deeper understanding of what it meant to be a critical multicultural researcher and the urgency for leadership in each of these roles.

This article focuses on my own learning within a 5-year critical ethnography at the FLP, beginning with my sabbatical. The autoethnographic stance highlights a shift in the typical focus of university–community partnerships where analysis is focused on the “other” and the direction of influence flows from the university “expert” to community members. Instead, the emphasis is on community engagement, especially in traditionally marginalized communities, as a context for faculty professional development. This emphasis also underscores a shift in the focus of learning in multicultural education. Whereas the typical concern of multicultural teacher educators is on students’ learning through community engagement (Beilke, 2005; Boyle-Baise & Sleeter, 2000, 2001), this article surfaces the need for ongoing learning for teacher educators, and the transformative potential of community engagement with marginalized groups. Drawing on Lea’s (2011) discussion of the impact of structured learning experiences for students, I will highlight how this experience allowed me to “come, reciprocally, to recognize and re-cognize or rethink” (p. 145) my own limited and privileged perspectives.

Rethinking Our Conceptual Frameworks About Communities in Poverty

Critical Multicultural Education for a Professor

I draw on critical multicultural education (Kincheloe, 2008; May & Sleeter, 2010; Sleeter & McLaren, 1995), specifically the work of Freire (2000, 2005) in critical pedagogy, to frame my own learning experiences highlighted in this article. Critical multiculturalists, especially in the context of teacher education, are committed to the development of culturally responsive, critical curriculum aimed at deepening students’ awareness of structural inequalities and unequal power relationships. Typically, such awareness is facilitated through a range of educational experiences, including cross-cultural, community-based experiences (Brown, 2004; Clausen, Malaby, & Zygmunt-Fillwalk, 2010); study abroad (Johnson & Battalio, 2008; Marx & Moss, 2011; Tarrant, 2010); academic service learning (McKenna, 2000; Swick, 2001), fieldwork (Wiggins, Follo, & Eberly, 2007); and internships (Seidl & Friends, 2002). Although such experiences are deemed crucial to student learning, less attention is paid to the value of similar experiences for university faculty. Faculty sabbaticals could serve such a purpose, although they are typically “won” through competitive processes and are frequently viewed as opportunities for faculty members to pursue individual scholarship and/or opportunities for professional disengagement (Brazeau & Van Tyle, 2006; Hubbard, 2002; Tiedje & Collins, 1996). Nevertheless, like Thompson and Louth (2003), I frame my sabbatical as a learning opportunity whereby I would return to the university “not only transformed myself but also bringing new knowledge to the world I’d left behind” (p. 162).

Lea and Sims (2008) and Kroll (2008) underscore the impact of such learning experiences on both students and teacher educators noting that they “help us lift the lid off our adaptive unconscious minds” (Lea & Sims, 2008, p. 16), requiring that “we, the educators, are the first to rethink traditional categories of knowledge, our own relationships with others, our sense of who we are and what counts as legitimate” (p. 6). In our relationship with the communities within which we learn, Kroll notes, “while learning the histories of the world, we must come to see them as parallel, intersecting narratives, not as intractable binaries within a value hierarchy” (p. 19).

Critical pedagogy frames learning as a process of conscientization (Freire, 1970, 2000), achieved through an ongoing process of reflection and action. Such a process is achieved through dialogical learning that facilitates a movement toward a level of critical consciousness that allows learners to interrogate and interrupt received hegemonic perspectives, assumptions, and practices that perpetuate patterns of social injustice. Drawing on Freire’s notion of existing in and with the world, I entered my learning experiences with the FLP committed to learning from/with the Maya, the FLP staff, and the context within which they learn; about myself, my institutional and social positioning; as well as about their community-based experiences, wisdom, and perspectives that were typically rendered invisible, marginalized, or irrelevant within mainstream educational contexts. In so doing, I sought to frame my role as a learner-teacher (Freire, 2000) in the community and discuss the long-term transformative nature of community engagement on my role as a professor.

Service Among Communities in Poverty

The FLP, funded in large part by the Diocese and directed by a Dominican Sister of Peace, was guided by commitment to the service of people in poverty that was grounded in Biblical and theological teachings (Camara, 2009; Esquivel, 1981), even as the curriculum and pedagogical practices were secular. This foundation blended seamlessly with my own perspectives informed by critical multiculturalism and critical pedagogy. Both perspectives espoused a commitment to the principles of social justice.

The perspective of family literacy espoused by the FLP drew on an explicit commitment to human rights, literacy, and the health of the family forged specifically within a Christian framework that advocated service to/with the poor and marginalized, as exemplified in Biblical teachings, the messages of St. Dominic, and the life examples of Esquivel (1981, 1982), a Guatemalan female theologian, poet, and human rights activist, and Dom Helder Camara (2009), Archbishop of Olinda and Recife, Brazil, an advocate for the poor. For the director of the FLP, literacy education for poor, preliterate immigrant families was framed within and inspired by Christ’s message, “Whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me (Matthew 25:40, New International version), and the founder of the Dominican order, St. Dominic, for whom preaching, teaching, and commitment to the poor were integrally linked. Thus, literacy education was undertaken as a means of upholding the human dignity of marginalized, underserved, and largely institutionally invisible groups of people.

The director and a staff member were aware of the work of Freire, less as a pedagogical approach but more as a pastoral approach to working among the poor. This perspective paralleled the view of Julia Esquivel who, like the director and a staff member of the FLP, had served among the poor and “illiterate”² in Guatemala prior to being exiled (http://www.veteransof-hope.org/veteran/julia-esquivel/). Esquivel’s views are exemplified in her powerful rendition of the Lord’s Prayer (Esquivel, 1981), in which she says,

Your name is hallowed . . . In the poor and humble who still show faith and hope in you by organizing and struggling for dignity. In all those who work night and day to free their brothers [and sisters] from illiteracy, sickness, exploitation, and persecution. (www.onelifeinstitute.org/images/Guatamalan-Prayer.pdf)

Consequently, the staff of the FLP viewed the program participants in sacred terms, where every human being was a manifestation of the divine among us.

The connection with Freire (1970, 2000) was further underscored in the example of Camara, who espoused a special love for the poor, noting the “invisible unity between preaching the Gospel and promoting human development” (Camara, 2009, p. 38). He called for the recognition of Christ in every human being, a dialogue between the two worlds (i.e., the church in the rich world and the poor world) and advocated for breaking “the vicious circle of underdevelopment and destitution” (p. 40), noting that development included an awakening of minds and public feeling, an idea akin to Freire’s notion of conscientization. Another parallel with Freire’s perspectives includes Camara’s observation that, “For me, men are not divided into believers and atheists, but between oppressors and oppressed, between those who want to keep this unjust society and those who want to struggle for justice” (http://www.jmm.org.au/articles/31503.htm).

Although my own entry point to this project emanated from a more secular perspective, the intersections between my own critical pedagogical perspectives and the Biblical/theological perspectives of the FLP underscore the intention in this article to interrupt the pathological, deficit-oriented, classist views of communities in poverty and debunk fallacies of universal marginality, powerlessness, and disadvantage (Ahlquist Gorski, & Montano, 2011; Bohn, 2006; Bomer, Dworin, May, & Semingson, 2008; Gay, 2013; Gorski, 2006). By highlighting what a professor learned from working among immigrants in poverty, this article underscores the potential of such communities for intellectual, professional, self, and social transformation.

Critical Pedagogy in Literacy Education

The principles of Freire (2000) and their relevance to pedagogy, curriculum development, and scholarly partnerships are central to the learning described in this article. Chief among them is the observation that education should be emancipatory, humanizing, and an act of love, and the warning that, too often, education is oppressive. The characteristics of a pedagogy of oppression are epitomized in what Freire termed the “banking” approach to education, which engenders student passivity and compliance, stifles growth and generative potentiality, and reproduces an inequitable status quo that reifies the teacher as the “expert” whose task is to “transmit” information to students’ otherwise empty brains. The banking approach is described by Dale and Hyslop-Margison (2012) as “an act of violence because it interferes with the human capacity to reason, prevents happiness . . . and therefore denies the possibility of humanization” (p. 79). Instead, Freire advocates a dialogic approach to teaching embedded in a relationship where all participants are simultaneously teachers and learners. This teacher/student−student/teacher relationship parallels the desired epistemological position of a researcher toward research participants, and the university–community partnership that emerged from this collaboration.

Freire also offers a contested view of literacy (and illiteracy) arguing that reading the world precedes reading the word, and calling for a counter-hegemonic reading of reality that is linked to rewriting what is read (Freire & Macedo, 1987). Although I came to the FLP to learn about family literacy and to better understand the concept of multiple literacies (Hull & Schultz, 2002) especially as it applied to the Maya, I learned about multiple illiteracies (including my own), a construct that highlighted the literacy limitations especially of those deemed “literate” in mainstream society. The dialectics of reading/writing the world/word were useful in understanding the work of the FLP and were central to the critical reflexivity of this autoethnography in the examination of the lessons learned in a professor’s educational journey.

A Journey of Learning: An Autoethnographic Perspective

This article, framed as an autoethnography, emerges from a 5-year critical ethnography (Barton, 2001; Foley & Valenzuela, 2005) that began with my sabbatical where I spent a semester (Spring 2006) as an observer, participant, and volunteer at the FLP. Drawing on critical research methodology (Kincheloe & McLaren, 2005) derived from critical pedagogy (Freire, 2000; Freire & Macedo, 1987; Kincheloe, 2008), I was conscious of the hegemonic potential of research, the manner in which indigenous knowledge was in danger of being recolonized (Denzin, Lincoln, & Smith, 2008) and the need to consider the public good as the marker of “good” research (Hostetler, 2005).

The first person account of my experiences and insights exemplifies the performative-I stance typical of autoethnography (Spry, 2011) and highlights the transformative potential of community engagement for both the researcher and the community. Committed to the process of “studying up” (Foley & Valenzuela, 2005, p. 226) the concerns and experiences of an immigrant group that is among the poorest and the most underserved in the community, my intent was not merely to learn (or document) from an underrepresented perspective, but also to act on what I learned, especially with regard to issues of inequity or injustice. This “view from below” required that I engage dialectically with the process of ethnography to understand the experiences and concerns of the program participants and the staff, vis-à-vis the institutional biases that shaped my own thinking. For this reason, dialogue and journey are central metaphorical concepts in this analysis.

As recommended by Ellis (2004), an important focus of autoethnography is the discussion of the ways a researcher changes as a result of doing fieldwork. This article captures key elements of the dialectical process of my learning and actions as I shifted back and forth in data collection, analysis, and reflection between a focus on the staff, participants and our interactions, and the critical reflections (undertaken individually and collectively) on my own learning (Muncey, 2010). Following Chang (2008), the themes highlighted in the analysis of my learning emerge from the presentation of the self as related to others. Central facets of the dialogue between/among the researcher, the FLP staff and program participants that served as catalysts in my personal journey as a researcher and educator, and in our collective journey as advocates for social justice through literacy, are presented. The juxtaposition of myself as a researcher with the Maya program participants and their educators aims to capture the basis for reflexivity from which my conclusions are drawn; they also offer readers the opportunity to journey with me and/or engage in their own reflection and draw their own interpretations.

Catalysts for Learning in a Professor’s Education in the Community

Highlighted in this section are events and insights that served as catalysts for my long-term reflection and development as a researcher and educator. Organized by themes that capture my deepening and broadening consciousness about my own knowledge, my cross-cultural positioning, and my (relative) connectedness to the community, the following discussion focuses directly on the lessons that I learned at a more immediate level of dialogue with the staff and students of the FLP and reveals my assumptions as well as key facets of my professional identity that were both challenged and deepened through my sabbatical in “the university of the poor.”

(Re-)Reading Freire in the World

Chief among my learning outcomes in “the university of the poor” was a deeper understanding of Freirean praxis. At the time I began my sabbatical I was known among my colleagues and students as being a “Freirean”; so it was pertinent that one of the most significant insights of my sabbatical was the acknowledgement that “I thought I knew Freire but this experience has made me recognize that I had a limited idea what Freirean pedagogy would look like in practice.” My observations of the FLP in action facilitated the “uncovering” of Freirean pedagogy as it emerged organically in their daily work.

This was particularly evident in the FLP’s HIV-AIDS education and prevention efforts, where the central task was educating and engaging a population at particular risk of HIV-AIDS without relying on their ability to read or write, or prior access to formal education. The fact that the zip code in which the FLP was located, and in which families lived, had been identified by public health services as a “hot spot” for HIV-AIDS became a catalyst for the curriculum that focused on how to save lives. In this context, failure to educate was an injustice, a matter of life or death; thus, failure to educate was not an option. Participants’ questions and subsequent requests for ongoing instruction served as the basis for community-based, community-driven education.

I observed similar patterns in the adult-education Spanish and English literacy classes, which typically emerged from the daily experiences and struggles of the learners. These included family health care issues, domestic violence, understanding how to shop for and feed their families in their new cultural context, lessons in numeracy and currency, the purpose of forms that they frequently had to fill out, and effective communication with community members such as doctors, teachers, or grocery store clerks. This “reading” of Freire “in the world” stood in contrast to my experiences at the university: Freirean pedagogy—to the extent it was evident in our daily practice—was something that qualified professors as variously “radical,” “cutting edge,” or “unusual.” It also typically revolved around the decontextualized “reading of the word” through the typical academic study of Freire’s writing.

Ironically, however, the FLP staff was unaware of Freirean pedagogy. When I remarked that their work reminded me of Freire, they were curious. “Tell us more . . .” they inquired. Some of them had learned of Freire’s work through the World Council of Churches, but not as a pedagogue. Our discussion of Freire’s ideas generated excitement and relief. Finally, to the staff, a widely recognized educator appeared to understand them and they him. As part of the professional development sessions conducted, I shared my “book learning” about Freire and linked it with how I was reading Freire “in the world” of their literacy education practices: “Folks like me in the university struggle to implement this in our classes. Here you do it so naturally . . .” Over time, the staff’s confidence in their work increased, they began to reflect on what they were doing, and they reported “feeling validated.” Reflecting on the impact of my sabbatical on the work of the FLP, the director noted, “She helped us understand what we were doing.”

Re-Thinking Curriculum Development

The other lesson that I learned within my supposed “area of expertise” was the nature and function of curriculum development. I had been invited by the FLP staff to help them “work on curriculum”—an area for professional development that they recognized as crucial to their institutional survival, especially as they relied on grant funding. Their first request for professional development was to help them to answer the question, “What is your curriculum?” frequently posed by potential funders or school district partners. My response to this request was the assumption that I would draw on my “expertise” as someone who wrote curriculum at the university and develop a curriculum for the FLP. My initial comfort with and acceptance of this task was short lived as I thought more seriously about the curricular challenge of the FLP. What in my previous professional experience had prepared me for fully understanding the complexity of what these instructors did each day? How did one begin to provide literacy skills (together with knowledge central to acculturation, parenting, cross-cultural communication, etc.) to immigrant adults who had never been to school, and for whom English was a third language, although they could not read or write in their first two languages? Traditional approaches to curriculum planning and development made little sense in this context, where a sense of urgency and multiple facets of literacy (functional, cultural and critical) coexisted.

This required shift in approach to curriculum development was also evident in my response to program participants who frequently asked me when I was going to teach them something (instead of merely observing). I was unnerved that I had no idea where to begin if I were to teach them. What did I know that would be useful to them and how could I begin to bridge the cultural and experiential divides between us as I sought to teach? These questions emerged in addition to the stark realization that I did not have the linguistic skills to be effective, and any lesson I offered would have required a translator. This dilemma underscored that my teaching in this context was inextricably linked with my successful learning, and that although the participants might have viewed me in terms of the teacher-as-expert in their inquiries about me, I could only succeed if I became what Freire termed a teacher-learner. Once I broke free from the notion that “teaching” had to be didactic, we engaged in many meaningful conversations on our common experiences as immigrants, parents, and as women.

Even as I recognized my own curricular ineptitude in this context, imbued with the requirements and rhetoric of grant applications and education standards, I worried about the limitations in traditional curriculum development knowledge and skills among the staff whose frames of reference were different from more mainstream educators for whom “curriculum” was central to daily lexicon and activities. As noted below, it was evident that we entered the conversations about curriculum from very different experiential bases. Clearly, my questions reflect the mainstream preoccupation with outcome measures.

Researcher:

How do you know that you are making a positive impact in the education you offer?

Staff (somewhat puzzled; somewhat vehement):

They keep coming back! Year after year, our waiting list only gets longer.

(I also remember feeling uncomfortable about the fact that they kept coming back. Shouldn’t they be “graduating” from the FLP and moving to adult education classes in the community where they will proceed to the “next level” of ESOL?)

Researcher:

So if the school district asks for data to support your claim that you are doing something good here, what will you show?

Staff: (Puzzled):

We’ll show them the people. Let them ask the moms about why they come and what they learn.

Years later, the staff would laugh about their responses to my questions, as they considered how far they had come in their “vocabulary building” and understanding the language of educators within the more formal systems of public education. Each time, however, I would appreciate more deeply the significance of pointing to “the people” as both the curriculum and the evidence of its success. This is a simple, yet profound curricular stance, in an era when “the people” in so many facets of the education system have been reduced to a test score; the challenge to look at my students, all of them, as fellow humans, and not just their graded assignments as an indication of my success as an educator has significantly transformed my own pedagogy at the university.

I also recall my early frustrations about the slow pace of curriculum development through the process of professional development. I remarked to a colleague and partner in this project:

If we locked ourselves in the office over the weekend, we should be able to work this thing out and present them a curriculum that has everything they need for accountability. Getting the staff to a position where they do it themselves seems so much more painful for them and us.

This was emblematic of my cross-border struggle as I wrestled with the values of action, efficiency, curriculum-as-product, accountability, and documentation that imbued my life as a professor in a public university versus my own commitment to critical pedagogy and multicultural education where my goal was to listen, learn, and NOT impose. Recognizing this struggle, and acknowledging it as part of the learning experience was crucial to my professional growth. Although troubled by the staff’s obvious difficulty with lining up standards, objectives, curricular content, instruction, and assessments, which I saw as crucial to their ability to procure funding, I also constantly urged them not to do anything that “did not make sense” to them as teachers. I saw my task as documenting what they were doing to identify and explain what made it effective. “You are doing good work,” I consistently urged them, “I just need your help in explaining it in terms that others will understand.” These conversations, which revealed the tensions in our different “entry points” on curriculum, laid the conceptual groundwork for future collaboration on grant-supported curriculum development, authentic assessments and the publications on the work of the program.

Learning Across Cultural Borders

The opportunity to learn with and from members of the community from different cultural and experiential backgrounds yielded crucial insights and critical consciousness about my own privilege and the sociopolitical positioning accorded the FLP and its participants by mainstream educators and society. Embedded in my critical awareness of this sociopolitical positioning was the social construction of notions of literacy (and illiteracy) facilitated by my conversations that spanned linguistic borders.

Learning across linguistic borders

Conversations with the program participants provided an opportunity to learn across linguistic borders, facilitating critical awareness of the social construction of notions of literacy versus illiteracy Entering the program, I was deeply self-conscious of my linguistic limitations vis-à-vis the Maya who had learned Spanish as their second language. “What languages do you speak?” I was asked by adult and child alike, and I sensed their excited anticipation of a long list worthy of a “professor” and puzzled deflation when I fessed up to being only bilingual. “How long have you been in the USA?” I cringed at the recognition that I had been in the United States longer than many of them, yet I had not managed to muster enough Spanish, as they had, to be able to have a basic conversation. These conversations occurred in a culture of genuine hospitality and kindness to a stranger, a humanity that continually touched me on a daily basis as they fed me during snack time and encouraged their children to give me gifts of artwork or bouquets of wildflowers picked along the walk to the FLP. As I worried about my inability to communicate in Spanish, I was counseled by the director, “The Maya read people well.” This insight made me conscious that I could be communicating without saying a word, and it has served me well as an educator ever since. How different it would be to be judged by your actions and demeanor, and not your words! Yet this would be more effective if we educated people to read more than just words. Being tongue-tied, largely a result of my own literacy choices, provided me the experiential learning so vitally necessary to appreciate alternate ways of reading and being read. It was a constant reminder that who I was and how I acted was more important than what I said—even in the university classroom.

Appreciating the language background of the Maya also meant recognizing my own dependence on print-based literacy. I had to wrestle with what it meant to live without the ability to read and write in communities where such literacy was not needed (rural Guatemala) compared with the United States, where it was central to survival, and to contemplate what it meant to move from one system to the other. I became deeply aware of my (over-)dependence on print-based literacy, and my inability to remember, explain, teach, or learn without writing something down. I became fascinated by the perspectives of the Maya, who were becoming more aware of print-based literacy, and saw everything I wrote as having equal significance. So, in the presence of people learning a written script (where everything written was deemed potentially meaningful), I had to be especially conscious of how I wrote on the board. I became acutely aware of my tendency to use arrows and squiggly lines to show “connections” between concepts spelled out in bad penmanship and the confusion this caused as these symbols did not resemble the letters that they had learned.

The oral tradition and the collectivistic culture of the Maya made learning a community endeavor. Participants in the FLP became educational “satellites” in their neighborhood, sharing their knowledge with others in a process the staff described as “each one, teach one” and as I dubbed the “network model of education.” This meant that when I “taught” them, not only did I need to keep my ideas uncomplicated to facilitate translation, they needed to be easily replicated within an oral tradition. The ability to teach through metaphors and symbols, and to connect at a deeply personal level, required me to add to my instructional repertoire, which had generally consisted of skillful scaffolding of learning toward abstract ideas and concepts. This transition allowed me to reconnect with my university students on a more personal level, keeping in focus their need to successfully connect with their future students, some of whom may well be from families with similar backgrounds.

Becoming conscious of patterns of institutional injustice

A personally significant outcome of my sabbatical with the FLP was my critical awakening to the multiple levels of institutional injustice faced by the staff and families of the FLP. This was particularly evident in the context of grant writing as I became aware of the injustice of narrow perspectives of literacy evident in the fact that grant funding was only available to programs that taught English (regardless of the research evidence that literacy in the mother tongue was a prerequisite to literacy in a second or third language), that enrolled large numbers of participants (necessitating standardized, inauthentic curriculum, instruction, and assessment), and where success was measured only in terms of GEDs earned or employment secured. It appeared that no one wanted to fund literacy education for the preliterate, whose need was most urgent. Although I had been aware of broad patterns of discrimination against groups that had been marginalized in multiple ways, the challenge to support the fiscal health of the program drew the politics of grant funding for literacy education into sharper focus. The director’s insistence that we continue to support this group of people, precisely because they had no other options for literacy education, was refreshing, courageous, and justice-oriented; yet the program was ultimately defunded by the Diocese, because it did not generate funds. It was a reality that still remains deeply unsettling.

Two experiences offered me a “view from below” of institutional policies and practices that adversely impacted the FLP participants and, by implications, similar groups marginalized by race, language, and/or social class. Responding to a notification that a participant’s Medicaid application had to be renewed, we encountered a series of stumbling blocks that would have inevitably thwarted the diligent efforts of most applicants. We learned that, unlike in previous years, the renewal had to be done online. Clearly, there was an assumption that the applicant would have had access to a computer with internet. Having accessed the internet, we learned—after several trials—that the website was faulty. This necessitated multiple telephone calls to locate service agencies and several conversations in English to procure a telephone number to call for assistance in the state capital. The conversation that ensued at this point revealed a confirmation of the faulty website and the suggestion of an “alternate” website that might allow the applicant access to the renewal site. I readied myself with a 3 × 3 notepad to take down the URL: It ran into 3 lines! The fact that even the “profesora” was having trouble with this proved the inhospitality of the system. How was a person with limited proficiency in English and technology supposed to be successful in this supposedly straightforward process of Medicaid renewal?

The second experience, translating/interpreting school correspondence for parents, revealed the difficulties parents encounter when educators communicated only in written English. It is important to note that many of these notes often had me confused as I tried to understand and explain the jargon typically used in school forms. It became quite clear that most paperwork from school was not easily translated without a more specific institutional contextualization. Seeing the difficulties that an English-speaking professor encountered with the documents underscored to the parents and the program staff that their experiences were not to be linked with any perceived “deficiencies” in their own English language skills.

Often the challenge in the interpretation of school-based correspondence stemmed from the propensity of teachers to place Maya children in special education, a pattern of inappropriate placement well documented in extant research (Artiles, Rueda, Salazar, & Higareda, 2005; Garcia & Ortiz, 2004; Harry & Klingner, 2005). While the law requires that parents be notified of plans for testing children for disabilities, there is no requirement that parents understand this notification. My own lack of awareness of these legal requirements and my difficulties with understanding jargon-ridden notifications as well as the evaluation reports written by school psychologists offered me jolting awareness of the potential marginalization of these parents based on their literacy levels.

Solidarity in the Differentiated “We”

On the final day of my sabbatical, when the director of the FLP asked me what I had learned from my sabbatical, I was wracked by having to acknowledge that I had learned about injustice, and was angered that the public school system was either too overwhelmed or incapable of meeting the needs of poor immigrant children. I wanted to support the hopes of parents who were “doing the right thing” by their children, and who were demonstrating a resilience that I had not yet acquired. There was no question that there were many borders that divided the Maya women and me, particularly as one considers the privilege that comes with formal education, English language fluency, social class, and professional status. Yet, what was also crucial was our ability to forge experiential connections and intersections that served as a catalyst from which to build solidarity. These interconnections provided a lens that brought into sharper relief the injustices that characterized the borders of our social reality.

Connecting as immigrants, parents, and women

My richest conversations with the program participants were when I connected with them as a parent to discuss our common concerns about children growing up not knowing their grandparents, the struggles of raising children who were bicultural, the value of multilingualism, and our own difficulties in understanding U.S. school culture. I noted and encouraged their wisdom in supporting their children’s native language development, a choice that I had not facilitated myself as a parent. They were quick to question my decision, sympathetic to my acknowledgement of it as a mistake, curious about the fact that there were two different non-English languages in my household, and understanding of the difficulty of maintaining languages that the child did not encounter on a daily basis.

Responding to their curiosity about how I “taught” my child at home, I addressed how any attempt to teach had to be “disguised” as a game, or conversation. This gave me an opportunity to share with them some ideas about how we could facilitate improvement in their children’s literacy skills, just through skilled questioning about the stories that came up in daily conversations. We discussed skills such as comprehension and inference and how they can be facilitated without paper or pencil. (This is especially important for parents who have internalized the belief that they are incapable of teaching their children, who are more “literate” than they are.) Parents also discussed how they taught their pre-K children to count or recognize colors in their daily walks to and from school and how our own parents had taught us about nature, plants, flowers, birds, or animals. They were curious about the role of women in my native land and the access to education that I was afforded as a female. Reprising earlier curricular discussions of domestic violence, we noted that gender inequity and male privilege were still well entrenched in many countries around the world.

Partners in the education of their children

Perhaps the most lasting impact of the involvement with the FLP was the partnership forged with parents in their interaction with schools. The parents enrolled in the FLP are required to be proactive in their interaction with their children’s teachers and are urged to initiate parent teacher conferences. While the parents were encouraged to use the school-based language facilitators as a support in these conferences, it became a common practice for someone from the FLP staff or a volunteer to accompany the parent as an observer, if such a need was perceived. The first time I accompanied a parent (and introduced to the teacher by the parent as the child’s tutor), I was struck by the attitude of the teacher toward the parent: She was surprised that it was not she but the parent who had called the meeting; was clearly unprepared for the meeting as she arrived with no paper, pen, or any reports of the child’s work; and was unable to explain the report card that had just been issued. This was not a response that I would have received as a parent, and it raised the question about how levels of English literacy and/or income mediated educator responsiveness. Over time, however, teacher-parent relationships became much more collaborative for these parents. As one parent noted,

This program has helped me understand that here (in the USA) I have rights as a parent and this has helped me a lot. When I ask for a meeting the teachers respond. Before, it was difficult to have a conference with the teachers, now, not so.

Responding to the tendency to refer many of these students for special education screenings, my colleague and co-volunteer from the university, who has expertise in TESOL, has been a committed advocate for these parents at Parent Teacher Conferences. Collectively, we have worked to ensure that parents understand their rights (including the right to bring in advocates to a meeting and to not sign forms they do not understand), understand the educational issues and their options in the decisions to remove their students from classes that support English language learners to classify them as children with disabilities, and are clear on the questions they wish to ask and the information they require in parent-teacher meetings. Our purpose is to support these parents as they advocate for what is in their child’s best interest. The presence of a university professor at these meetings has enhanced the tenor and dynamics of decision making surrounding these children in support of the parents whose perspectives had been previously marginalized.

Implications for the Transformation of the Role of a Professor

As Miller (2013) aptly noted, “Poverty needn’t remain the bastard child of education, nor as rife with deficits, but can be embraced for its rich complexities [and] definitions” (p. 4). My welcome into the “University of the Poor” as I began my sabbatical underscored that such a community was central to my learning experience as a professor. Working within this community not only facilitated transformatory learning on multiple dimensions but also underscored for me the importance of recognizing communities in poverty as rich and powerful contexts for educational insight, offering significant contributions toward sociocultural understanding and progress. While the nature and impact of some of this learning was immediate, other facets of my learning emerged over time through ongoing reflection.

Learning occurred on three interrelated dimensions: professional learning that yielded insights related to my theoretical and pedagogical knowledge as a professor, cross-cultural knowledge that facilitated deeper understanding of issues through exposure to alternate perspectives, and critical, civic knowledge that highlighted patterns of social injustice that existed within plain sight in the daily experiences of groups typically underserved. This experience brought to light the ironic tensions in the typical preoccupations of the university professor seeking tangible, product-based, measureable outcomes for the investment of his or her time vis-à-vis the urgent concerns of day-to-day social injustices typically ignored by such preoccupations, but which were central to the work of the FLP. One of the successes of the sabbatical was my ability to move beyond the nagging worry about whether I was using my time wisely and what I had “to show for” my sabbatical (no articles written, nor curriculum developed, just many days/hours spent in addressing the daily exigencies of the population) and propel myself into the experiences that—over time—I have been able to recognize as personally and professionally transformative.

As an autoethnography aiming to live up to its potential as a socially just act that uses text to change us and the world we live in for the better (Ellis, Adams, & Bochner, 2011), it is crucial to focus on how this account might serve as a catalyst for change in the reconceptualization of the role of professors of education vis-à-vis communities in poverty. Three implications emerge from the analysis of my educational journey.

Partnership as a Starting Point

A central implication that emerges from this autoethnography is that successful university–community partnerships involve the development of a dialogic—if also dialectical—relationship of mutual teaching and learning, from which opportunities to disrupt the narratives of dominant discourses and reject society’s assigned roles and definitions emerge. Reframing these communities as contexts within which professors acquire much-needed insights for social justice praxis, as epitomized in the “University of the Poor” label, is crucial. In contrast, such sites should not be framed in typical colonizing terms either as passive recipients of decontextualized professional expertise, nor data mines for individual research agendas. For this reason, the “entry point” of the partnership must be considered with care to ensure that the potential for colonizing relationships between collaborators is interrupted.

An important component of this university–community relationship, in addition to the fact that it began on a request of the program for university collaboration, was the education of the staff about protecting themselves from seemingly friendly researchers and the establishment of some basic ground rules. These included the fact that all data belonged to the FLP; all proposed research publications would be reviewed by the director, and would include invitations for coauthorship; scholarship would be conducted in the interests of the FLP; and there was clear evidence that the primary benefit of the efforts of the university partners would accrue to the staff and families in the program. Other partnership protocols included the constant reflection of all partners. “What have you learned?” was a question that became standard in our meetings, highlighting the mutuality of the learning experience.

By contrast, educators (whether in the classroom or school context) still largely operate within hierarchical models of interaction and rarely draw on notions of partnership or dialogue so central for success in addressing injustices in complex social contexts. The opportunity to view the world from divergent perspectives enhanced the emancipatory potential of the learning experience, as the community context and strong commitment to human dignity challenged my received knowledge of theory and the institutional strictures that subconsciously bound my perspectives. Such partnerships value both the journey (struggle) as well as the destination (self and social transformation).

Reading the World in Freirean Pedagogy

Although initially surprised that Freirean pedagogy came seemingly naturally to the staff while it was so much more difficult at the university, I subsequently wondered whether such pedagogy was only possible in community-based organizations that were unfettered (or refused to be fettered) by institutional constraints that make emancipatory praxis difficult. The FLP connected with its participants on a human level. Framing literacy as “life giving” (best illustrated in the context of HIV-AIDS education where, as the staff noted, “illiteracy was death”) thereby taking care of the whole person, and doing what made sense on a humanizing level was central to their work. At last, I understood Auerbach’s (2005) discussion of a pedagogy of not-literacy, where the easing of daily struggles took precedence over isolated literacy tasks such as reading or writing. I recognized how the “lives of people” rather than isolated products of their classwork, or grades, or rubrics, or compliance with externally imposed mandates became more serious indicators of effective curriculum. While such a choice appeared bold to me as an educator, it seemed perfectly logical to the FLP staff for whom the literacy program was first a moral issue that focused on human dignity, and only secondarily an educational/curricular matter. It became apparent to me that too many educators had become arbiters of top-down edicts, rendering too many classroom lessons meaningless or worse still, dehumanizing. I realized that we needed to re-double our efforts as educators to give precedence to reading and re-writing the “world” in the pursuit of human dignity as a central task of educators.

My journey has yielded several urgent implications for social justice leadership praxis at the micro level of daily interactions as well as at more macro levels of institutional and community engagement. Foremost, it has allowed me to reclaim the promise of education as emancipatory while enabling me to navigate within the requirements of accreditation mandates and the elements of standardization typical of teacher education programs (see also Sleeter, 2005), insights, and experiences that I have shared with fellow instructors and students. Recognizing that the humanizing power of education is something to be experienced, not read about, and that this potentiality can be generated from varied standpoints (e.g., Freire’s commitment to social justice can emerge from an explicitly Christian pastoral framework, or operate within a secular pedagogical approach to educational service among the marginalized) has translated into the primary objective on my syllabus: Students in my class should experience education as emancipatory. This also lays the political and pedagogical groundwork for students to take leadership in their own education and (re-)claim their education as transformative and humanizing, rather than being an oppressive, dehumanizing experience.

The Urgency for Faculty Community Engagement

The politics of literacy and the labels we use also became readily apparent to me, as I grew aware of my own “illiteracies” and the limits of my professional literacy. The ability of the Maya to speak in three languages, and my recognition of the limits of my own expertise in curriculum development to address the needs and acknowledge the funds of knowledge of this unique population, underscored the need for professors to reexamine the boundaries of their knowledge from the perspectives of underserved groups and communities. This reexamination is central to our ability to engage in advocacy with and for these populations.

The experience also made visible and present in my consciousness a group of people who, despite their overwhelming representation in an ethnic enclave, had been deemed invisible by school databases that classified them as “Hispanic” (an inappropriate linguistic and cultural classification of the Maya). In turn, the partnership with parents uncovered opportunities for leadership within schools that university professors could bring to such collaborations. The development of critical literacy among parents as they reclaimed their subtly eroding rights as parents in educational decision making demonstrated that professors’ engagement in the community could have significant benefits. If simply walking into a parent teacher conference as an ally could make a difference in the respect accorded to the parent and their child, or even support a teacher struggling to make a positive difference, why do we not do it more often? What other significant difference can we make by simply being present and visible in the community on behalf of parents, children, and/or teachers in underserved communities? And if we feel we cannot make a difference, shouldn’t that give us pause about the authenticity of our work?

Reading and re-writing the world through community engagement rendered more meaningful my efforts to read the word with students in the classroom context. The fact that our advocacy efforts focused on making the Maya more visible to educators had clear implications for teacher and principal educator programs in our own university. What had been the educational experiences of these educators, who instead of advocating for the Maya in their own schools necessitated our advocacy? To what extent had I, as an educator, failed to facilitate educator preparation that affirmed the humanity and made visible the presence of all groups in our community, especially those on the margins? In what ways do I exemplify the approach of the FLP and prepare educators to embrace doing the seemingly impossible (e.g., educating preliterate populations) simply because it is the morally right thing to do and failure to do so is morally unacceptable?

Two observations of the impact of my ongoing experiences with the Maya families and their teachers are pertinent. First, the depth of my learning became apparent only after many years of reflection and ongoing discussion. This was not a “one-shot field experience” but a particularly salient period of learning in an ongoing multiyear relationship. The reflexivity that made learning more visible came from multiple contexts: conversations with the parents, the staff, my students and colleagues, collective reflections as I prepared grant applications, wrote research reports and presentations, developed curriculum and fieldwork requirements at the university and advised doctoral students on critical methodology. Second, the “view from below,” which allows for a counter-hegemonic critique of schools, curriculum, literacy, and the role of professors, will be a lasting perspective, as I carry the views, concerns, hopes, and expectations of the Maya families and their teachers into my teaching and scholarship. These children and their parents have but one opportunity, and we have no time to lose; we need to do everything in our power to ensure that the education that the children experience fulfills the promise of our nation’s democracy that beckoned so many immigrant parents to risk so much for a better future for their children. We must ensure that in our educator preparation programs, students experience education as emancipatory and humanizing so that they can break the bonds of oppressive pedagogy that currently pervade the educational system. Being among groups most marginalized by this system has enabled me to recognize that the failure to engage in structural change in teacher education and principal preparation programs, in schoolwide reform, and community–school partnerships would turn me into a bystander in the academic genocide of too many students.

Becoming Catalysts for Change

In his presidential address to the American Educational Research Association, Tierney (2013) urged, “The obligation of the intellectual has to be beyond the ivory tower. To eliminate poverty, we have to be engaged, involved” (p. 301). It is hoped that this article will serve as a catalyst for more professors to rethink their roles vis-à-vis the communities within or about which they teach, and to reevaluate their own potential role as catalysts for change that could come through their own immersion as learners among these often marginalized groups. This call for professors to move out of the “ivory tower” is both a matter of professional development and authenticity, as well as a spur for social justice pedagogy. However, it is crucial that immersion in the community occurs in the role of a learner rather than as an “expert” because it is in the former role that one’s previous perspectives can be viewed and critiqued “from below.” The traditional role of the professor has been to use the community as sites in which to apply their “expertise”; the transformation hoped for occurs when these sites become opportunities for critique and partnership.

As Thompson and Louth (2003) observe, “Academia can be isolated, self-serving, redundant; there is a world to learn from outside of schools” (p. 169). As this article demonstrates, there is much to be learned from working among people in poverty. Indeed, some lessons might only be learned from this work. The following summarizes the many insights from my own learning, unlearning, and/or relearning experiences working with the staff and students of the Maya FLP. Those deemed “illiterate” have much to teach those deemed “highly literate” about the latter’s illiteracies. Curriculum is typically oppressive if it does not improve the lives of those who are learning. Those of us who have spent time in the arena of public education must be especially vigilant about our own conceptually and politically straightjacketed perspectives of education. We cannot understand nor appreciate the full scope of what we know, or what we teach, until we view this knowledge with the eyes of a stranger. We cannot teach “about” critical pedagogy unless we are simultaneously engaging in critical praxis. Students will learn more from what they see us do, than what they hear us say.

These are insights that are especially useful as I resist the pernicious forces of standardization and accountability that have gripped public schools and higher education, that have fundamentally changed the work conditions and values of the educational undertaking, further marginalizing students and families that do not fit nor benefit from “standard” approaches to curriculum, instruction, or assessment. As we strive to restore the notion of education as a collective good in a democracy, committed to education as empowerment rather than as oppression, I am now convinced that no professor is absolved of the challenge of constructive social engagement. It is a learning experience that must be undertaken with humility, openness, courage, urgency, and reflexivity.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

Author Biography

Dilys Schoorman, PhD, is a professor in the Department of Curriculum, Culture and Educational Inquiry at Florida Atlantic University where she teaches courses in Multicultural/ Global Education, Curriculum and Instruction, and Critical Perspectives in Research. She is deeply committed to serving among and learning from the diverse communities of practice within which she engages as a researcher. These include first- and second-generation immigrant students, their families and their teachers, pre-service and in-service teachers both in the USA and in Sri Lanka, school district administrators committed to diversity, and leadership and faculty governance communities in higher education institutions.

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