Format

Individual Presentation

First Presenter's Institution

Nobis Project

Second Presenter's Institution

NA

Third Presenter's Institution

NA

Fourth Presenter's Institution

NA

Fifth Presenter's Institution

NA

Location

Session 1 Breakouts

Strand #1

Heart: Social & Emotional Skills

Strand #2

Home: Family & Community Engagement

Relevance

This session explores how service-learning is a tool for student empowerment, cooperative learning, building 21st century skills, and developing a sense of empathy through civic engagement. The presented model understands the critical role of building relationships with students and community partners by listening to their stories. This approach recognizes that for students, or educators, to understand their social responsibility to engage in the world, they must first examine their personal experiences of power, history, and relationships. This session offers teachers the tools to nurture critical conversations between the students and their community-partner, conversations around the complexity of power and privilege, and sustaining relationships.

Brief Program Description

If we hear only a single story about a group, we risk a critical misunderstanding. In this session, learn to critically analyze assumptions of single stories and dominant narratives about community partners. Engage in hands-on activities to explore this issue as it relates to race, poverty, and social justice. Leave with classroom activities to take back to your classroom.

Summary

Novelist Adichie warns that if we hear only a single story about a group of people, we risk a critical misunderstanding. She argues, “The single story creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story.” How do we come to understand the interconnectedness of our lives and cultures? How do we overcome misconceptions and overgeneralizations?

During this interactive workshop participants hear stories from teachers on how they fold the above ideas into their service-learning work using the Nobis Global Action Service-Learning Model in their classrooms. The service-learning process often brings up conversations and dialogue within our schools, classrooms, and with community partners around social injustices and structural inequality. This presentation demonstrates tools for educators how to support students in talking about race, class, equity and power by examining dominate narratives. We recognize that you cannot talk about our interconnectedness and our social responsibility without first looking at our personal experiences of power, history, and relationships.

This workshop provides participants with tools to critically analyzing assumptions and social consciousness of single stories and dominant narratives that arise during community engagement. Participants explore the model through reflection, sharing practices, and brainstorming ways to change, or enhance, their curriculum.

Evidence

In our increasingly globalized society, young people need an education that prepares them to become informed, active, and responsible global citizens, both at home and abroad. Similarly, teachers struggle to have critical conversations about equity, inclusion, diversity and global justice in the classroom. In order to do this work, teacher need to know about the local, national, and global communities in which they live and work. As educators, we need to address the fundamental ‘why’ of teaching, the profound and transformative possibility that is education, and the moral imperative we have to effect such transformative classrooms. Andrew Delbanco argues that students “ . . . may still be deterred from sheer self-interest toward a life of enlarged sympathy and civic responsibility” (44). Educators need to make tangible students’ being “able to see the world through another’s eyes” (Delbanco). This session explores a service-learning model that builds educators’ skills and confidence in teaching and preparing students and teachers for these discussions.

The research-based and teacher-tested service-learning model presented in this session enables deep classroom discourse about poverty, race, class, power, and privilege through a global lens. What is unique about this presentation is its introduction to a process that fosters conversations and dialogue within our schools and classrooms around global citizenship. We recognize that you cannot talk about our global interconnectedness, our shared fate and our social responsibility without first looking at our personal experiences and understandings of power, history, and relationships. The approach shared in this session is beneficial for students, but also for educators and schools seeking to become more culturally responsive to their students as well as to their wider community. By using this method of self-discovery we challenge traditional ways of viewing the world and look for sustainable changes that benefit humanity.

The Nobis Global Action Model and the Nobis Big Ideas framework were collaboratively developed by educators, scholars, and community partners. These models and accompanying lesson plans are freely available to all and widely used by educators teaching pre-kindergarten through higher education throughout the United States.

Delbanco, Andrew. College: What It Was, Is, and Should Be. Princton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012.

Learning Objectives

  • Learn about the concept of single story and dominant narrative and strategies for identifying and undoing these tendencies in preparation for and during service-learning experiences.
  • Learn tools for fostering critical conversations about equity, inclusion, diversity, and social justice in our schools and classrooms.
  • Have conversations with other teachers about how to foster reflective and active listening between students and community partners as well as between teacher and community partner.
  • Participate in activities that engage students in addressing community challenges in a way that honors and celebrates cultural differences.

Biographical Sketch

Christen Clougherty, Ph.D. is the Founder and Executive Director of the Nobis Project, a non-profit educational organization that focuses on developing educators’ capacity to foster reciprocal and meaningful community partnerships, build cultural responsive classrooms, and promote a social justice approach to service-learning. Clougherty has over twenty years of experience as an educator and administrator in community organizations, K-12 public, charter and independent schools, and colleges/universities. Christen received her Ph.D. in Quaker Studies from the University of Birmingham in the United Kingdom where she completed her doctoral research on the synthesis of experiential education, service-learning, creative-process theory, and global citizenship education.

Keyword Descriptors

Structural inequality, race, power, privilege, social justice, service-learning, civic engagement, Nobis Project, dominate narrative, single story

Presentation Year

2021

Start Date

3-8-2021 10:20 AM

End Date

3-8-2021 11:20 AM

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Mar 8th, 10:20 AM Mar 8th, 11:20 AM

Myth, Power, and Justice: The Danger of a Single Story

Session 1 Breakouts

If we hear only a single story about a group, we risk a critical misunderstanding. In this session, learn to critically analyze assumptions of single stories and dominant narratives about community partners. Engage in hands-on activities to explore this issue as it relates to race, poverty, and social justice. Leave with classroom activities to take back to your classroom.