Poverty and Political Voice
City neighborhood serves as laboratory for political science students
December 16, 2009
Not all laboratories come equipped with petri dishes and test tubes. Just ask any student enrolled in Jennifer Erkulwater's spring 2009 political science course "Poverty and Political Voice."
Erkulwater had her students explore systemic poverty through reading assignments, a blog, classroom discussions and service-learning experiences in Highland Park, a low-income neighborhood in Northside Richmond.
"Students would be able to see — literally as they commuted to their sites and walked around their neighborhood — how Richmond's past, especially regarding race, is very much alive in the policy problems we grapple with today. And they would be able to understand that poverty isn't something separate from their own lives," she says.
With the help of Bonner Center for Civic Engagement staff, students found placements in Highland Park through Build It, the University's largest civic-engagement initiative, which is coordinated by the CCE and has built strong campus-community partnerships in Richmond's Northside. Students focused on four issue areas: work and family life, children and schools, crime and violence, and health and the environment.
They interacted with children and their parents in an afterschool tutoring and mentoring program; served as classroom aides and tutors at neighborhood schools; worked with ex-offenders and construction teams at a nonprofit dedicated to successful prisoner re-entry and neighborhood revitalization; assisted homeless individuals as they recovered from chronic illness and surgeries at a medical respite center; and volunteered at a city hospital.
For example, Russell Gong, '11, learned about health care associated with substandard housing when he worked on a construction team renovating dilapidated buildings in Highland Park. "It's important to get your hands on the issues rather than just reading about them in a textbook," Gong says.
Daniel Colosimo, '11, agrees. "Students at UR should be required to do some kind of community-based learning before they graduate," Colosimo says.
At the end of the course, students gave PowerPoint presentations on their research during a class period and at a CCE Brown Bag discussion. Community partners attended both sessions and requested copies of the PowerPoint presentations for use in refining and developing their outreach programs and in writing grants.
"The most meaningful thing I can do as a teacher is to get my students to care enough about a topic to challenge their old assumptions and seek answers to questions they pose themselves — not because I ask them to, but because they are curious about the world around them," Erkulwater says. "This course encouraged students not to think of themselves as passive vessels getting filled with whatever I chose to pour into them, but to get out in the real world, ask questions, and struggle with the uncertainties of real life. I see service learning as a stepping stone in that process."
