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Reflectionsby Tanya TarshaThis research project aimed to evaluate the effectiveness of community technology centers in Austin, Texas. In order to evaluate the centers we began our research by reading about issues related to community, more specifically relating to low-income communities that have less access to an array of opportunities in America than middle and higher income communities do, including access to advanced digital technology. These communities are often classified as suffering from the "digital divide." In our research we read about the bigger issues of racism; classicism; as well as separate and unequal education, economic opportunities, and housing. We assumed William Julius Wilson's theory that joblessness and cycles of poverty are not due to a culture of poverty but rather the isolation of these individuals and communities. From such readings we formed the working hypothesis that community based centers that engage community members assist in decreasing isolation and increasing community competence. In order to do participatory research, which we believed would yield more qualitatively sound data than if we were to analyze the community from a distance. We followed the lessons from past researches and assimilated the theory of pragmatism, which is, "the philosophy of common sense. It uses purposeful human inquiry as a focal point.[1]" Part of our process of human inquiry included visiting several Community Technology Centers (CTC's) in the Austin area. I visited several but in the end I focused my analysis on Foundation Communities. At Foundation Communities sites I observed teenage students develop safe relationships with each other, with their teacher, and other staff at the centers. I observed one teacher grow tremendously in relating to students on a personal level and relating the power and fun of advanced digital technology with the students. Within 8 weeks the classroom had integrated advanced digital technologies and safe and fun relationships with students and the teacher. The students' individual websites are fruits of this integrated, engaging, and exciting learning, which now include photos of themselves and their friends and families, music, and web streaming video of themselves and their neighborhood. I also observed that two students stopped coming to the class as a big basketball tournament caught their attention, the season of March Madness. I observed another teacher deliver the curriculum she tailored specifically for a Foundation Communities housing community. The result of her long-term work in the community and established relationships with community members was active class participation and an environment that encouraged students to inquire and understand the class material thoroughly. The class was taught in Spanish. The teacher not only taught the class material but also encouraged these students, whom she had previously taught ESL, to learn and remember the key English words when it was appropriate. Based in theory we accumulated from our readings on pragmatism, community development, racism, classicism, pedagogy and others we identified five working hypotheses:
The two working hypothesis that intrigued me the most were the social capital and learning opportunities hypothesis. Part of the definition of social capital is "the institutions, relationships, and norms that shape the quality and quantity of a society's social interactions.[2]" The notion of social capital is intriguing as it helps researchers inquire about the quality, quantity and implications of relationships. This is very much in line with pragmatic thinking as it is common sense that relationships matter. It is also pragmatic, common sense, that positive and supportive relationships assist individuals in realizing their true selves. Realizing their true selves implies realizing choices and making choices that increase an individual's intellectual, economic, human and social capital. The learning opportunities working hypothesis grabbed my interest after reading an interview with Lisa Delpit and in observing computer classes for teens. Delpit claimed that many children, especially non-mainstream children frequently lack access to "codes of power" and hence are prevented from fully understanding mainstream literacy processes. Delpit suggest that this barrier can be overcome if literacy strategies made conventions of the process explicit [3]. This thinking related to our hypotheses regarding learning opportunities, as we inquired about how community technology centers teach technology. Our inquiry about learning opportunities was related to the extent to which the learning was explicit to the point that non-mainstream participants could learn the "codes of power" including knowledge of technology and the use of technology to catapult life choices beyond isolation. Hence, acts of building community competence. Reflection on our processMargaret Wheatley's work in organizational theory and practice opened me up to applying new science discoveries to practical matters such as management and research. Her theory that Newtonian Physics that is often the theoretical foundation of organizations practice, specifically taking apart and analyzing the parts to calculate the sum, is no longer the best framework to use. This is supported by the fact that data from her work reveals 70% of corporate planning strategies to not achieve desired results [4]. It seems we took a somewhat Newtonian approach to gathering our cumulative information in that we hoped by individually interviewing parts; such as the executive director, staff and participants, that we would understand the effectiveness of each CTC better and from that we could project the competence of the community. From a new science perspective future research would do well to practice more holistic research. One specific recommendation is to gather as many key players in the community, that make up the community competence, in one room to dialogue about key issues. From such a dialogue I think valuable lessons could have been learned. We might have learned better questions to ask on our surveys from listening and being in dialogue with several key players at the same time. In addition, we could have aided in the networking of community technology centers with each other, which our data suggests is a real community need. Our presentation at the Barbara Jordan Forum was an effort toward this kind of dialogue but it lacked participation by all the CTC's, other key community members like representative from key funding agencies and decision makers from the government and private sectors. Bringing people together and facilitating the dialogue in an engaging way speaks volumes to each party about how important community based organizations are to healthy communities. More so than presenting academic research. Realizing how important presenting our research is, I recommend for future research groups that such a presentation would be better suited at the conclusion of the project. Such a conclusive presentation would also give researchers the opportunity to publicly showcase each CTC and give back to the community beyond our virtual gift of the website. In addition our presentation was more heavily focused on reporting our research rather than engaging the key players in dialogue. Though we made an effort to dialogue at the end, I feel more emphasis could have been placed on this portion of the meeting. |
Notes[1] Shields, Patricia, Getting Organized: A Pragmatic Tool for Writing
Graduate Papers, p. 10 this page last updated |
