Engaging the Neighborhood

Project Background

Planning for the centennial celebration took shape in spring 1991. The Rogers Park/West Ridge Historical Society decided to sponsor a year-long celebration of the communities’ annexation to Chicago and set up a Centennial Committee chaired by Mary Jo Doyle and Laurence Calhoun, executive director and board member respectively of the Historical Society. The Society issued a call to a wide variety of organizations to participate in both the planning and the celebrating of this event. Doyle and Calhoun, echoing the sentiments of the Historical Society’s board, believed that the celebration would offer local residents an opportunity to reflect on the past, highlight community strengths, and suggest possibilities for the future. Activities would commence on April 4, 1992, and continue throughout the year with culminating events on the commemorative weekend of annexation in April 1993. ²

As anyone attending a heritage or centennial celebration experiences firsthand, such celebrations are chock-full of historical references as well as efforts to highlight identity and attachment issues. These celebrations offer insiders as well as outsiders what Michael Frisch has called a “civic ‘presentation of self.’” ³ An important goal of the RP/WRHS Centennial Committee focused on the promotion of a sense of “collective identity” that transcended local internal attachments. ⁴ The demographic diversity of the two communities as well as their contentious histories demanded that the centennial organizers look for ways to accommodate an array of noisy publics with differing interests and perceptions of the past and present. Organizers wanted activities that both highlighted the historical experience of the Rogers Park and West Ridge communities as well as generated feelings of more general community pride. Even if some of the activities allowed for particularistic projects such as neighborhood reunions, site-specific local history initiatives, and oral histories, other activities were more integrative either in terms of the various celebratory events or projects that possessed transferable skills that could be used in any particular location. These elements of the celebration were designed to obscure social or ethnic distinctions, downplay past political conflicts, and cultivate a “root for the home team” sentiment. ⁵

As Chicago’s two northernmost communities, Rogers Park and West Ridge were among the last suburban units folded into the city during the late nineteenth century and difference rather than similarity marked their historical journeys, despite the fact that they claim a common founder. Rogers Park experienced the earliest and more developed growth of the two areas. It represented the transportation, cultural, educational, and commercial hub of this section of the Chicagoland community. It supported grand turn-of the century homes, saw itself as an up and coming place, and engaged in a variety of local improvement activities. The community enthusiastically supported annexation to Chicago as a way to enhance local growth. West Ridge’s nineteenth-century experience was primarily rural. Floriculture, truck farming, and open prairie land dominated the landscape. Originally part of Rogers Park, it resisted Rogers Park’s drive to extend local improvements and balked at the increased taxes associated with such measures, ultimately seeking its own incorporation as a village in 1890. Despite its lack of enthusiasm toward annexation, like Rogers Park it became part of Chicago in 1893.

Although the pace of growth quickened in West Ridge after World War I as a postwar residential real estate boom swept the community, the limited nature of its public transportation network, its continuing agricultural orientation, and its primarily local commercial and recreational establishments reinforced its sense of difference from the more urban community of Rogers Park. In Rogers Park, population growth surged after annexation with the extension of the elevated lines to Howard Avenue, the last El stop in Chicago’s northeastern quadrant. Recreational venues clustered by transportations breaks. Rental units proliferated and multi-dwelling units mushroomed along the El tracks. Although both communities had attracted ethnically and religiously diverse populations by the end of World War II, Rogers Parks’ surfeit of rental properties and easy access to transportation, transformed sections of the community into a port of entry for immigrants and African American residents displaced from other sections of the city during the last half of the twentieth century.

Despite the fact that outsiders often coupled the two communities together as Rogers Park and West Rogers Park and that the Historical Society had originally called itself the Rogers Park Historical Society, by the 1980s residents of West Ridge consciously maintained distinctions in language. The term West Ridge came into more popular usage and the Historical Society changed its name to reflect both communities, signaling a recognition that although bound together by a common founder and annexation date as well as spatially contiguous, the two communities possessed different histories and identities. ⁶

Organizers encouraged a wide range of institutions to become active partners in the celebration, donating time, money, personnel, and/or space to advance the organizing committee’s centennial agenda. Loyola University Chicago, as one of the major community institutions, received an invitation to contribute to the celebration. Loyola’s relationship with the community reflected two elements of its mission: its role as an urban university and its identity as a Jesuit institution. Colleges and universities historically have positioned themselves as institutions that impact their local area or region in a variety of socially and/or economically useful ways, producing goods or providing services that benefit their communities. ⁷ Urban collegiate institutions have embraced this orientation, albeit with varying levels of interest and success, as location in an urban center does not necessarily translate into active identification with the city in terms of scholarship and public responsibility. Sometimes this mission grew directly out of an institution’s historical experience, such as with the University of Cincinnati, which began as a self-consciously municipal institution during the early nineteenth century. Other institutions grew into this role as their local environments changed from one type of urban community to another, with the more recent one often characterized by residential flight, municipal disinvestment, and instability.

Higher education emerged as one flank of the attack on the urban crisis of the 1960s. Numerous commentators and policy makers argued that higher education could play a central role in local or regional community development. ⁸ President Lyndon Johnson championed the relationship between cities and higher education and urged urban universities to think broadly about their role as catalysts and focus their energies on their local communities. Johnson argued that the urban university’s “research findings and talent must be made available to the community. Faculty must be called upon for consulting activities. Pilot projects, seminars, conference, TV programs, and task forces drawing on the many departments of the university should be brought into play.” ⁹ Federal initiatives during the early 1990s reenergized this orientation through the U.S. Department of Education’s Urban Community Service Grant Program that helped fund initiatives to design programs aimed at addressing urban needs. ¹⁰

Urban universities responded to Johnson in the 1960s and to the renewed federal interest in university–community partnerships of the 1990s in a variety of ways. Their services have typically fallen within three categories: (1) instructional programs to train professionals; (2) research agendas to attend to local needs; and (3) public service programs to address local concerns and promote community–university engagement. At Loyola, the renewed urban initiative took formal shape with the creation of the Center for Urban Research and Learning (CURL) in 1996 ¹¹ and through a reinvigorated student volunteerism that entered the classroom as service learning with off-site hosts from organizations and communities throughout Chicago. Other urban universities supported variations of CURL, exhibited a heightened sensitivity to the interdependence between their institutions and the urban community, and operated with what George Hampton and David Higham have called an enlightened self-interest that propelled them into a variety of partnerships with their communities. ¹²

As Chicago’s Jesuit university, the urban orientation at Loyola is shaped as well by the larger Jesuit mission and the importance of urban centers as a locale to carry out the order’s mission. The urban focus of Jesuit universities and colleges draws sustenance from Ignatius Loyola’s belief that cities represented locales where “the transformation of the human community can take place.” ¹³ In a 1982 address, Fr. Ignacio Ellacuría highlighted this predilection when he stressed that “the university should be present intellectually where it is needed: to provide science for those who have no science; to provide skills for the unskilled; to be a voice for those who do not possess the academic qualifications to promote and legitimate their rights.” ¹⁴ In short, Jesuit colleges and universities must take the wider world into account through “social projection,” a term that includes “all those means by which the university communicates, or projects, social criticisms and constructive proposals beyond the campus to the wider society.” ¹⁵ Given the urban environments of the vast majority of the twenty-eight Jesuit universities and colleges in the United States, the city provides an important landscape in which to carry out the order’s educational mission.

If the city represents an important locale, other aspects of the Jesuit educational mission, such as the importance of using knowledge in the service of society and the 1975 32nd General Congregations’ dictum that reaffirmed the order’s commitment to faith and justice, mandate university and college involvement with their various communities. ¹⁶ During the 1990s, this orientation reconceptualized student community service initiatives into service learning opportunities so that students could receive an education of “social consciousness and conscience” rather than just engage in “doing good.” ¹⁷ Institutions were called upon to promote programs and opportunities to help foster in students a sense of solidarity with the world, that is, an understanding that they are part of it and play a role in its overall well-being.

It is in this context, then, that the University’s Administration signed on to the centennial effort and sent information about the request for involvement to various segments of the University. While other units of the University assisted with selected centennial initiatives, the History Department was tapped by the Administration as the appropriate unit within the University for a more high profile cooperative effort with the community. My Department Chair suggested that the Department’s Public History Program develop a plan of action that would contribute in some way to the centennial. While our program had students working in a wide variety of projects in the Chicagoland area, its Directors had not yet set up projects within the university’s own neighborhood so my charge was to develop a public history project that brought students into the local community.

The Project

The East Rogers Park Neighborhood History Project possessed a number of components. Each of these addressed different elements of the local community and Loyola students. The History Department funded a course during the summer of 1992. Support for many of the project components came from local fundraising, an internal Loyola University award competition, and an Illinois Humanities Council grant. The project stimulated a great deal of research, generated a range of presentations, and produced a publication. The Rogers Park/West Ridge Historical Society provided documents and research assistance for the students.

Part of the challenge with doing history as part of a centennial celebration is that history can become a point of contention among the various parties involved or that particular visions of what constitutes history can generate discord. What type of history and whose history represent political decisions as much as intellectual ones. They are as much about the present as they are about the past and they represent political statements of identity. Additionally, as David Glassberg has pointed out, “civic celebrations represent a collective history” but they are not necessarily in and of themselves “collective.” ¹⁸ Consensus often can be achieved in terms of process but not always in terms of overall content and even when it does emerge can be a relatively fragile web binding the different interests together.

During a series of community meetings in 1991, residents voiced their opinions about what type of history should be pursued. The viewpoints fell into three general categories. One group wanted a celebration of earlier times. The distant past appears rosy and harmonious. Ignoring the present in favor of long ago can make it possible to avoid issues of current contention among the various parties involved in the celebration. In the case of Rogers Park and West Ridge, the communities’ contentious nineteenth-century history did not bode well for a rosy or harmonious version of the past. Nonetheless, this group suggested that focusing on the common founder of the two communities and the early years of community growth would serve the celebration well. Another group worried that getting too close to the present veered into “Sociology.” This group wanted “real” history, not current events. However, in terms of the two communities involved in this centennial celebration, the contention over history had much more to do with contemporary perception and perceived reputation. The third group, composed of residents from West Ridge, worried about what it saw as negative aspects of association with Rogers Park. West Ridgers in attendance at these meetings portrayed their community as more stable than Rogers Park and less tainted by crime and blight. Rogers Park, in the eyes of the West Ridge residents, represented urban decline. These vocal individuals wanted to distance themselves from any suggestion that their community could possess these same problems. Rogers Park residents countered this negative representation of their history by suggesting that their section of the city was a dynamic community that promoted the arts, celebrated diversity, and possessed a rich and urbane past. In the end, however, little consensus emerged at these meetings about the way in which history was to be portrayed. Identity issues remained a constant undercurrent whenever “history” was on the agenda at the community centennial meetings and the actual history-related programs developed were relatively self-contained, that is, isolated events that did not force the merging of the two histories beyond the fact of a common founder and date of annexation but that allowed residents to pursue the history that interested them.

Given these disparate goals that worked against any historical study that balanced the interests of these groups or which addressed the sweep of time, I crafted a project that attempted to navigate the various contentious issues while at the same time offering something to each community. I decided to limit the project to that part of Rogers Park known as East Rogers Park, an area bound by Devon Avenue on the south, Clark Street on the west, the city limits on the north, and Lake Michigan on the east. This is the community in which Loyola University Chicago is located and this decision possessed a certain logic that the centennial organizers recognized as well as made the project more manageable. And finally, I opted to use the landscape as the point of entry for the research and analysis as it shifted the discussion away from an overemphasis on beginnings, which had characterized much of the RP/WRHS activities, as well as the concerns about the distinction between “History” and “Sociology”, while at the same time offered residents a different way to look at their community. The approach was transferable in that it could be easily applied to any aspect of the Rogers Park or West Ridge community and so, while particularistic in terms of locale, it possessed utility for the centennial celebration as a whole.

The History Department had discussed the implementation of a local history course since my arrival at Loyola in 1989. However, it took the centennial celebration to move these conversations into action. While the local history course has now become part of the regular History graduate course offerings and serves students in the Department’s doctoral program as well as in both the traditional MA and the Public History programs, it first emerged as a special summer course that included both undergraduate and graduate students. As indicated earlier, the Public History Program had not initiated any sustained involvement with the local community, as most public history projects to date had focused on other parts of the city, the State of Illinois, National Park Service sites, or U.S. Forest Service initiatives. This inaugural course in the summer of 1992 began the Department’s involvement with its local community and since that time has been offered every two or so years. Over time, its syllabus has become increasingly more developed and sophisticated although its main elements have remained consistent: an introduction to local history, an exploration of basic elements of urban growth and development, an examination of place and space, a grounding in a range of documentary research materials, and a project structured around a particular theme and based on local resources.

Funding from the Illinois Humanities Council, the Loyola Endowment for the Liberal Arts, and local fundraising efforts supported a public lecture and the publication of a booklet on the history of East Rogers Park. ¹⁹ The public lecture by Dominic Pacyga, a Chicago historian whose work has brought him into many of Chicago neighborhoods, was titled “Looking at History from the Neighborhood Up.” Pacyga spoke to a mixed audience of students, faculty, staff, and community members. He discussed the importance of the neighborhood in defining local life and shaping a larger citywide identification and encouraged the audience to think about the dynamics of the local community and its place in the larger urban structure.

The project produced a booklet titled Reading Your Neighborhood: A History of East Rogers Park. Local financial contributors, the RP/WRHS, and all students involved in the project received copies of the booklet to distribute. All local schools (public and private), local libraries, CHS, and the University library received copies. Articles in Loyola’s alumni magazine as well as internal university publications and the local neighborhood paper about the project generated a range of requests for the booklet, which were honored. ²⁰ And finally, a significant portion of the booklets went to the RP/WRHS to sell ($3.00 per copy) as a small fundraiser.

My presentations involved informal small group presentations at RP/WRHS meetings, formal community lectures at the Rogers Park Library and the Chicago Architecture Foundation, a presentation at the Urban History Seminar at the Chicago Historical Society (CHS), and, once the Chicago Historical Society commenced its Neighborhoods Project, a workshop for local teachers as well as at a couple of national meetings. The small group presentations focused on researching local history and using photographs as historical documents. The lecture at the Rogers Park branch of the Chicago Public Library looked at the history of the neighborhood through an analysis of the built environment. The presentation at the Chicago Architecture Foundation was similar in orientation and provided information for docents who were engaged in developing tours of Chicago’s north side neighborhoods. The presentation at the Urban History Seminar offered an opportunity to look at the neighborhood history project as a form of landscape analysis and a format for public history projects in local communities. The teacher workshops focused on the integration of neighborhood history into the high school curriculum in conjunction with visits to the neighborhood exhibits at CHS. The national presentations focused on larger issues relating to a wave of neighborhood public history projects that crested during the 1990s and the role of humanities councils in stimulating local engagement. ²¹

Project Goals

Although the impetus for the project came from outside, its attraction included personal, intellectual, community, and pedagogical elements that influenced its orientation. My own interests in neighborhoods, the built environment, and collaboration helped define its focus. An emphasis on engaged learning and reflective practice informed its pedagogy. Conversations with the historical society shaped the nature of community benefits. As a result, the collaborative project with the Rogers Park/West Ridge Historical Society engaged students in a local history class, brought them into their community, and created a product that gave something back to the community.

Much of my interest in the project was related to my own beliefs about the importance of the neighborhood as a point of identification and an arena for action. ²² I pursued history at the graduate level in large part as a result of my interest in community organizing. As attention focused on the urban crisis of the 1960s, policy makers, politicians, scholars, and urban residents rallied around the neighborhood as a staging ground for urban revitalization. What intrigued me was the fact that these discussions treated the neighborhood, the strategies for revitalization, and the city as givens, that is, creatures of the present with little relationship to the past. Milton Kotler, founder of the National Association of Neighborhoods, captured this orientation when he argued that the “neighborhood movement did not fall from heaven yesterday. It began in the 1960s.” ²³ However, interest in the neighborhood as a platform for developing solutions to contemporary problems is not new as its roots stretch back to the efforts of men and women active in urban affairs at the end of the nineteenth century. My research explored the way in which definitions of the city shaped understandings of the neighborhood and their role in the larger urban structure as well as the goals and selection of the strategies employed at the local level to effect change. ²⁴

Since its emergence as a discrete unit of the modern metropolis in the late nineteenth century, the neighborhood has been a fixture of the American city. Neighborhoods, of course, are not closed communities. Neighborhood residents possess a web of attachments that bind them to a variety of different organizations, interest groups, and workplaces well beyond the confines of the neighborhood. The variety of competing interests notwithstanding, it is very difficult for individuals residing in a given area to ignore the fact of place. ²⁵ Given this, the first goal for the project was to explore the physical space called East Rogers Park. Local history was the vehicle for this exploration. Although the locale may be small, it serves as a manageable laboratory to explore the dynamics of political, religious, social, cultural, and economic history. ²⁶ At its most basic level, local history involves learning about a sense of place, tracing that sense over time, and evaluating the interplay between past and present in the development of a particular locale. It builds upon engagement with a specific place and provides a format through which to raise basic questions about an area’s past: How did it evolve? Why did it take the shape that it did? Who has lived in this place over time? What did life look like for residents while they lived in the area? ²⁷

A second goal addressed the issue of context. One challenge of local history revolves around the relationship between the small and the large community. Far too many works of local history lack a discussion of the larger context in which the local community is situated. ²⁸ Yet the linkages between a neighborhood and the larger city of which it is a part are critical in understanding the range of possibilities available for an area’s growth and the limitations it may experience over the course of its development. As Kathleen Neils Conzen has argued, local history should rest upon a “coherent interpretation of the changing nature of life at the local level and the changing role of the local community in American development.” ²⁹ Albert Hunter made the point even more explicit when he argued that only by making connections between the neighborhood and the city of which it is a part is it possible to understand any individual neighborhood more fully. ³⁰ In all the discussions about history in the centennial celebration meetings, attachment to the small community (regardless if the feelings were positive or negative) completely overshadowed any connections to or influences by, other than the fact of annexation, to Chicago. Accordingly, the project possessed the opportunity to highlight these linkages and simultaneously showcase its unique elements and ties to the larger Chicagoland community.

The third goal addressed the fact of change and represented an effort to examine the process of neighborhood change as well as provide a different angle from which to view it. History can increase public understanding of a community and, in so doing, provides residents and organizations with an accessible context to appreciate their neighborhood’s overall development. The discipline of history asks the basic and most useful question: how did the subject of concern evolve into its current configuration? As we all know, historians focus on the issues of change and continuity. As we look for continuity, we search for those factors remaining stable over time. In our quest to examine change, we seek to isolate those elements that alter over time. The historical method, when applied to current concerns, contributes to the definition of the concern, the identification of the roots of the issue at hand, and the evaluation of the various options for resolving particular problems. ³¹

Among other things, such knowledge can help cope with change. East Rogers Park, more so than the rest of Rogers Park or West Ridge, saw itself as buffeted by change during the period of the project. Grappling with change was certainly one element of history’s role in the Rogers Park/West Ridge centennial celebration and the use of history as a way to explore change represented an important element of the ERPNHP. David Glassberg’s assessment of history’s centrality to local understanding rings very true in the East Rogers Park context. “At the neighborhood level,” he argues, history represents “an anchor for local community identity in environments often undergoing wrenching physical and demographic transformation.” ³²

A guest column in the local newspaper during 1991 focused on the fact that East Rogers Park was a neighborhood undergoing significant changes, all of which had unsettled the neighborhood. These changes raised concerns about neighborhood vitality, population stability, and so forth, capturing the range of issues that West Ridgers had focused on in their quest to distinguish themselves from Rogers Park in the centennial planning meetings. The authors of the article urged readers not to dwell on the problems associated with change but on the possibilities. “Building a positive future for East Rogers Park,” they wrote, “begins with finding a positive outlook, a positive attitude, and a positive vocabulary about the neighborhood around us.” In their eyes, the neighborhood possessed the potential to transform fears of change and neighborhood decline into strengths for community development.” ³³ The project offered an opportunity to explore the dynamics of a neighborhood over time and the relationship of its history to its current configuration. It was designed to provide a window into the past that would contribute to an understanding of where the neighborhood had been, how it changed over time, and how it both weathered and shaped change. It also represented an opportunity to provide a different vocabulary to think about the community’s historical experience.

Since flux and variation represent important elements in the life of any neighborhood, ³⁴ I crafted a study that placed these aspects into context for this particular neighborhood. The lens through which to examine change and continuity in East Rogers Park was the built environment as it offered a vocabulary that asked residents as well as students to step outside of their comfort zones well as their common vocabularies that limited their vision of the past and present. Studying the built environment, or common landscape, encourages an analysis of the more public dimension of a community and to see it as the product of historical forces. As D.W. Meinig has suggested, the landscape “encompasses everything seen in our ordinary surroundings and that virtually all that can be seen has been created or altered by human intervention.” ³⁵ The common landscape, what students and residents saw everyday as they went about their business, possessed a wide range of information about the history of East Rogers Park. The intersection of the topographical and built environment reveals the constant tension that exists between past and present and change and continuity. Examining the landscape offered an opportunity to peak into the past as well as speculate about the future. Since relatively few people, including students, readily see the built environment—which they often just take for granted—as a documentary source or know how to read it, this approach possessed the potential to sensitize both those working on the project and those reading the publication to the ways in which the local landscape provided clues to the historical experience of the community. ³⁶ Learning to unlock the information contained in the landscape could facilitate an understanding of the causal relationship between past and present. ³⁷

Structured in this way, the project and resulting publication asked students as well as local residents to move beyond a progressive timeline of firsts and a seemingly dictatorial linear march through time that obscured human intervention and agency to an interaction with history that offered opportunities for evaluating individual and community experience. The publication was organized around ten themes that reveal aspects of the neighborhood’s history and that account for the complex fabric that comprises Roger’s Park both then and today. It is an introduction to vistas, passageways, structures, names, and institutions important in the growth and development of East Rogers Park. The thematic approach focused on neighborhood roots, streets, the “L,” homes, commercial life, recreation, faith communities, education, associational activity, and population. These themes, all keyed to the community’s natural and built environment, offered a useful way to explore the evolution, spatial arrangement, social fabric, economic structure, and community life of the neighborhood. It allowed readers to see how the small and the larger contexts intersected to create the current universe of East Rogers Park. ³⁸

The fourth goal of the project grew out of my belief, drawn initially from my interest in community organizing, that when students are actively engaged in the process of inquiry they are more committed to learning, work collaboratively toward a larger goal, and take ownership of the knowledge they are producing. This approach to education, now referred to primarily as engaged learning, entered the academy as active learning or inquiry-based learning and changed the dynamics of the college classroom. Drawing from the approach to learning set forth by John Dewey during the early years of the twentieth century, it gained new currency during the late 1980s and early 1990s. ³⁹ Peter J. Frederick, among others, illustrated how this could enter the History classroom. ⁴⁰ Insights from public history practice shaped this approach as well as they offered students an opportunity to see how outside interests can shift the focus of inquiry while the disciplinary process employed in a public audience product remains strikingly similar to what happens in the more formal academic setting.

Maximum feasible participation, part of the Community Action Program established by the 1964 Economic Opportunity Act, mandated that the poor should be part of the solution rather than just the beneficiaries of government programs. If the poor participated in the both the planning for programs to meet their needs and the implementation of the initiatives to address local improvements, they could become part of the process of social change. Additionally, this orientation reflected a belief that people who are engaged in working on problems and making a difference in their communities are invested in its well-being. ⁴¹ My interest in this approach to organizing influenced the way I thought about what should happen in the classroom. If students saw themselves as participants in the process, they were more likely to take ownership of the material and, in the case of a class organized around a specific project, the final product.

My experience with the Laboratory of American Civilization convinced me that structured research projects focused around defined topics allowed students to be knowledge producers who grew invested both in the process and the history they produced. The Laboratory in American Civilization was the brainchild of Zane L. Miller and Henry D. Shapiro of the University of Cincinnati, and I served as its first graduate assistant. Organized as a year-long undergraduate seminar utilizing local history as the focus, the seminar modeled itself on the scientific laboratory where students worked separately on specific tasks that ultimately brought the fruits of the labor together on a larger project. Miller and Shapiro’s goal was to create an environment “in which students would be led by the process of inquiry itself from one problem to another, and in so being led would develop their own skills in the identification and evaluation of problems for investigation, in research design, and also their own understanding of the processes of civilization, of human action in the past and in the present.” ⁴²

Because this was conceived as a public history project, the issues of reflective practice came into play. Inspired by Donald A. Schön’s work, The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action, ⁴³ this approach provides a framework for the integration of disciplinary knowledge with problems and issues generated by others. Public historians apply history-based thinking in a wide range of professional arenas. As Noel Stowe has pointed out, public historians “bring their historically based thinking and skills to bear on questions and work assignments” ⁴⁴ to questions posed by others and in situations that often demand collaboration. Students trained in this manner use the notion of history as inquiry and draw on disciplinary learning (method of historical research, theoretical approaches in history, ability to frame questions, understanding historiography and content, and ethical sensibilities) to produce knowledge for use by a variety of publics. ⁴⁵

With this as my background, the course offered an opportunity to take a request posed from outside—the production of a history of East Rogers Park—and to create a situation where students could learn how to use disciplinary knowledge to produce a useable product for an audience. Students received grounding in local history and in the basics of urban growth and development. Documentary exercises were used to increase their vocabulary to include an appreciation of the built environment. Students examined a range of other types of source material that took them from the RP/WRHS and the Chicago Historical Society to the Special Collections Department at the Chicago Public Library and the Illinois Regional Archives Depository at Northeastern Illinois University. As they grew familiar with the source material, they were able to have research discussions with one another and discuss the nature of the documents, sharing leads and testing ideas. The material became theirs as they worked through it and made sense of it in their research papers.

The nature of the project and the ability of the students to discuss their investigations and see the process of research as something larger than their small piece moved the students into collaboration. I believe that knowledge has power when it is used in the service of others and that it is not the preserve of the individual scholar but is developed in collaboration with others. Some of the best learning takes place in community where individuals learn from one another. It is a dynamic combination of experience, data, thought, analysis, reflection, and action. They learned to research questions driven by the needs of the project. What Schön has called “knowing in action” ⁴⁶ became a central piece of the ERPNHP.

The final goal centered on stewardship and reflected the Jesuit mission of social projection. In the case of history, stewardship implies a moral and ethical responsibility to ensure that the resources of the past, while entrusted to the present, are preserved for the future. The project allowed students to understand the role of agency in the preservation of evidence and how that preservation allowed for use by others. The project promised the production of a history of East Rogers Park and the intent of this tangible product was to provide something lasting to the RP/WRHS to further its mission of advancing the history of Rogers Park and West Ridge. The structure of the project facilitated an educational experience that moved them beyond just doing good work to seeing the relationship between “social consciousness and conscience” ⁴⁷ in terms of their community and their discipline.

Outcomes

Immediate and well as longer term outcomes exist for this project. In general, the East Rogers Park Neighborhood History Project was a success. Although the ERPNHP was not as fully developed as it could have been, it met the project’s basic goals as well as those of the funders. The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching defines community engagement as “the collaboration between institutions of higher education and their larger communities for the mutually beneficial exchange of knowledge and resources in a context of partnership and reciprocity.” ⁴⁸ Although this project took place well before the Carnegie engagement classification program emerged, the project captured its intent as well as its spirit and, once the program began, Loyola University Chicago became one of the institutions to achieve this designation in the 2008. Loyola has repeatedly been listed on the President’s Community Service Higher Education Honor Roll, including with distinction in 2009. In 2010, Loyola was honored as a Presidential Awardee, one of only six universities out of more than eight hundred named as such in the President’s Community Service Higher Education Honor Roll. In 2011, Loyola was honored as a Finalist for the same award, one of only fourteen universities. Although mostly related to efforts undertaken by faculty engaged in the History Department’s Public History Program, the department’s undergraduate offerings represent one of the sources for the engagement designation.

Most students in the summer 1992 class possessed little knowledge about East Rogers Park when the class began. One student had lived in the area at some point during her past but the others entered the neighborhood only to work or go to school. It was just the environment in which they spent part of their day. Their sense of place changed over the course of the class; it was not the community but their neighborhood. Their research topics explored the preannexation history of the area, annexation, the impact of transportation on community development, apartment living, entertainment and recreational venues, population growth and demographic change, and organizational life. In all of their research papers, the students had to pay attention to the interrelationship between the large and the small community.

Few history programs train students to decode the built environment, and their ability to look at the material world in new ways impacted them all. While some students were not convinced that the built environment represented “real” evidence, as the attachment to the paper documentary record was very strong for some of the members of the class, even these students grudgingly admitted that I had ruined them for life. Never again were they going to be able to look at the world around them and ignore what its materiality might be trying to tell them.

Students grew to appreciate the incomplete record left about the past and better understood the role of documentary preservation in shaping their ability to explore past actions. They began to see themselves as participants in the gathering of information and could talk about the importance of preserving the documentary record. They appreciated the role played by the Society and by the Illinois Regional Archives Depository in collecting and preserving documents. Students discussed their research with one another, shared sources, and interacted with the community through their research at the Rogers Park/West Ridge Historical Society.

As they “got inside” of their community, they began to see that the information they gathered and some of the conclusions they drew “worked” in the world, that is, what they learned did not remain their private knowledge and this knowledge possessed the power to change the way others might think about their community. They gained a broader range of understanding about the relationship between their training in history and the production of knowledge for audiences beyond the classroom. And they gave something back to their community rather than just took from it. In terms of the Jesuit mission, they achieved solidarity with the world; they could see, even if in only this clearly defined way, that they were a part of the world and played a role in its well-being.

The tradition of involvement by the History Department in its local community commenced with this project. In the years following the ERPNHP, other public history courses have integrated local community projects and graduate students have presented their research into local topics at various community meetings or have presented short research pieces to the public in the RP/WRHS’s newsletter. As the University expanded into Edgewater, a community located just south of the heart of the main campus, the Public History Program has engaged in other local community-based projects and the local history course has focused on the history of Edgewater as well as that of Rogers Park and West Ridge.

The RP/WRHS entered into the collaboration with the understanding that the students would find out new information about the community and that the university would develop a product that would benefit the Historical Society. ⁴⁹ Not only did the students generated a great deal of research that could inform the work of the RP/WRHS, the resulting publication, Reading Your Neighborhood: A Brief History of East Rogers Park, represented one of the very few studies that explored the history of the area and placed it into a larger context. The University donated the bulk of the publication to the RP/WRHS and it served as a small moneymaker that helped pump additional resources into the Society’s activities. The publication triggered a series of presentations that resulted in community members’ sharing information and documents with the Historical Society. Additionally, local interest in Reading Your Neighborhood stimulated a PR/WRHS publication project that had been under discussion for some time but that had not really gotten off the ground. The ERNHP helped move that initiative forward.

Did the project make a difference in the community at large? This is very hard to quantify. Informally, both the Historical Society and I received positive feedback. Readers of the volume commented on how they never knew that history could be presented in a way that did not read like a textbook. Some commented on the fact that they had never seen the material world as evidence of the past. At the very least, it stimulated discussion about the nature of the area’s historical experience.

And finally, the project represented an experience in engaged learning. It sharpened students’ appreciation of history as inquiry. They were actively involved in the creation of new knowledge. Class sessions not only provided information and allowed students to discuss their work but also provided a venue for critical reflection on the sources, the history produced, and on the process itself as well as provided a culminating experience with the papers that fed into the information and analysis used in Reading Your Neighborhood. In its spirit and approach to learning, it included many of the components now part of the engaged learning requirement that is part of Loyola’s undergraduate core curriculum. In case of the graduate students, especially those not in the Department’s Public History Program, this experience and others that have followed it provided opportunities to bring these students into the community, have them experience the dynamics of reflective practice, and expose them to engaged learning, all of which should serve them well wherever their career pathways take them.

Opportunities and Challenges

The East Rogers Park Neighborhood History Project provided a dynamic context within which to investigate the urban environment, confront the challenges of place and space, work in collaboration with the community, and produce a very tangible outcome. While not as fully integrated into the community as it could have been, the limitations of a six-week summer school course ensured that we had to work within temporal limits. The writing of the booklet took place after the class was completed and so this limited the students’ involvement to gathering material and writing it up as research papers as well as engaging in brainstorming sessions as part of the class. As a result, they did not get the opportunity to be involved in the intellectual or practical production of the publication. At the same time, the project demonstrated the opportunities and challenges that attend community-based collaborations.

Particularly in terms of the urban environment, engaged learning offers a wide range of possibilities for students to experience the dynamic tension between the acquisition of knowledge in the classroom and from sources outside of the traditional academic structure. Despite the tenacity of more traditional ways of approaching student learning and knowledge production, engaged learning in the urban setting infuses life into the meaning of the urban university and captures Schön’s notion of “actionable knowledge,” ⁵⁰ which privileges multiple sources of information, including practice-based insights drawn from the field. ⁵¹ This orientation builds upon the arguments made by Ernest Boyer, Eugene Rice, and Ernest Lynton, among others, who reenvisioned the nature of the university, the undergraduate experience, and the faculty role in the generation of new knowledge. ⁵² In this context, collaborative partnerships with the community hold promise for both sides of the equation and possess the opportunity to reshape the academic landscape in such a way as to legitimate within the university structure multiple ways to generate knowledge.

Making this promise into a reality, however, continues to face formidable challenges. Although the East Rogers Park Neighborhood History was not as fully developed as it could have been in terms of the production of the actual booklet, it turned students into knowledge producers rather than just consumers. They were actively engaged in the creation of new knowledge. Bringing academically trained researchers into the complexities of the outside world generates new questions and leads them down interesting pathways that ultimately adds to the larger fund of knowledge and stimulates original research into new areas. Taking into account the perspectives of those working in the field enhances the quality of the questions we ask and increases the number of places we might look for data. This more collaborative approach does not demand that the standards guiding research be set aside. Rather, it broadens the methodological repertoire available and, in so doing, strengthens our ability to simultaneously deepen the pool of knowledge and transform it into action. ⁵³

Knowledge produced in this manner, however, is not generally recognized by the university as anything but service and herein lies the rub. Universities have been very slow to recognize engaged scholarship as scholarship. Publications generated from an engaged process do not conform to traditional conceptions of knowledge creation. The announcement of the selection of the recipients of the 2010 Community Engagement Classification institutions pointed to the progress made on the engaged learning side of the engagement process. It noted, however, that areas of concern remained. In particular, the announcement indicated that an important area of improvement was in “faculty rewards for roles in community engagement and community-based achievements where there are still few institutions providing evidence for promotion and tenure that recognize and reward scholarship associated with community engagement.” ⁵⁴ The epistemological shift necessary to fully embrace engaged scholarship is underdeveloped and this fact will limit faculty involvement in engaged learning and suggest to graduate students who ultimately will shape future academic departments as they move into the professoriate that engage scholarship remains outside the pale. Additionally, this shortcoming ultimately hurts the communities served by our institutions because it limits the ability to address the full range of issues facing universities and their communities in the twenty-first century.

Conclusion

Community-based initiatives structured around engaged learning provide opportunities to get students into urban communities and to open new vistas for action and agency as well as knowledge production and interpretive reflection. Despite the challenges that remain in the area of engaged scholarship, these initiatives ensure that urban institutions take their communities and their needs into account. In terms of history education, civic engagement and engaged learning offer opportunities for students to appreciate the relationships among disciplinary knowledge, problem solving, and action. When tied to the notion of stewardship, they suggest the importance of historical understanding across time and space and the need to ensure that the knowledge and the items (documents, material culture, oral interviews, etc.) that are essential in its generation are interpreted to the present and preserved for the future.