Chattanooga is Cool

http://www.wordle.net/show/wrdl/2936843/Chattanooga_is_cool”

Compare this view of community learning and change to the one sent yesterday. This is the view of a 24-yr-old white female. The words she says the most are the biggest.

Wordle.net gives a visual image in words of the content and meaning of a piece of text. It is a quick qualitative evaluation of language.

Try it.

Community change in art form

http://www.wordle.net/show/wrdl/2936880/Neighborhood_Change" 

Click on the above link to see an art form of Al's interview about community change.

Joel taught me how to do this. Thanks, Joel!
                    

Two Models of Community Engagement

This blog is the third in a series on the Theoretical Understanding of Community Engagement. Below are the experiences of two different people: Al is an older black man I mentioned in the previous blog and Bet is the younger white woman.  They each describe their involvement in a recent activity which was intended to create community change.

Al has been active in organizing a blues music festival in his inner-city neighborhood in the summer. The neighbors come together, young and old, dragging their own lawn chairs and blankets, hoisting picnic baskets and stretching out for an evening of blues music in the neighborhood park. Part of the purpose is to revive an interest in the blues genre, but the more important purpose is neighborhood cohesion and identity.  Al works through the local neighborhood association in traditional ways: volunteer committees get the work done and block captains spread the word. About 300 to 350 have come, and that’s enough, according to Al.

Bet helped organize a major, community-wide survey that asked questions about what people liked best, things that could be improved, and what they wanted to see happen in the community.  The survey was offered online, but when they realized that people weren’t going online to answer it, they adjusted their strategy and went where people were—all over the place—to farmers’ markets, neighborhood events, meetings and sometimes just catching people on the street. With face-to-face surveying, over 25,000 surveys were completed, making it the largest public participation project in the country. They sent the completed forms to a research firm that tabulated the results and sent back a huge pool of information that showed what people liked and didn’t like and wanted to see happen in the community. The data was made available online.

Which of these two engagement projects do you think:

1.) led to greater community learning?

2.) brought about change in the community? (or potentially could)

Why do you think so? Just give me a brief reaction. I’d like your thoughts.

Questions on Community Learning

Let me give you an idea of my research on community learning from a paper I just completed. I won’t share the whole paper but just a few insights from our own community here in Chattanooga. The paper is called Toward a Theoretical Understanding of Community Engagement. I used grounded theory research methodology, and I interviewed participants who are actively engaged in the community now. I choose people who came from different perspectives, particularly different ages.  I will share with you the reflections of two participants – a 62-year old African American male and a 24-year old white female. Both of them grew up here, left for education and other life events, and then moved back within the last three years. Both of them are active as volunteers and as staff of community organizations.

They started by describing an event or activity in which they were involved that led to change or intended to lead to change. Since the focus of my study was on community learning, I continually asked questions that kept the lens on the learning. Some of my questions were:

INTERVIEW QUESTIONS:

At the beginning, what did the community need to learn?

Was anything done intentionally to learn it?

What were the obstacles?

What did you learn from this experience?

What do you think the community learned?

What evidence do you have that the community learned?

Before I get into the results, let me know other questions that come to your mind about community learning.

Community Learning

I am taking a slightly different approach from my colleagues here. I am looking at learning from the perspective of the community. Is there something we could call community learning? If so, what makes it happen?  Where is it stored? How do we access it?  And how does community learning contribute to our overall well being and to economic prosperity?

Greg Laudeman, of course, always challenges me with his question, “Do communities learn?”  That question stems from the same source as the one, Do organizations learn? Peter Senge gave short shrift to that question in his book The Fifth Discipline (well, not exactly short shrift, but a thorough going over) by concluding that organizations that learn also excel.

So do you think the same is true for communities—that is, communities that learn also excel? Give me an example.