Making Service-Learning Beneficial for the Giver and Receiver

By Francoise Heyden, Middle School Spanish Teacher at Carolina Friends School in Durham, North Carolina

What a gift this Nobis World service-learning trip to the Dominican Republic was!  And on so many levels!  This intense and powerful week immersed in cultural learning was well worth the effort of scraping together the funding for it!  The Nobis World program prepared us via carefully constructed e-learning to understand the historical background and social context of what we saw; once we were there, the program gave us plenty of tools for processing our experience with our colleagues; and the forum will stay open this academic year for discussion and sharing of materials.   Nonetheless, however well-prepared I thought I was, having traveled extensively in the past and dealt with issues of poverty in other places, I had to be on the island physically to appreciate the reality of the lives of the girls at the Mariposa Center for Girls in Cabarete.  The Nobis Big Ideas framework and various group activities helped me unpack what we experienced on our trips to the school and different communities and I enjoyed our group discussions as each teacher shared his or her impressions.  The intensity was both exhilarating and exhausting, making it challenging to provide the help we wanted to the school and to fully process how we would apply our service learning ideas to our own classrooms.  Ideally, we would have had a couple more days to spend time with the Mariposa teachers to see how to help them most effectively and to formulate our own plans for service learning once we returned home.   As a Spanish teacher at the Middle School level, I have lots of ideas for cultural exploration with my classes.  As someone very interested in promoting service learning at my school, I knew all about the challenges of engaging students (and staff, for that matter!) in meaningful community outreach.  While I did not find any easy answers to my questions, I did enjoy having the time to discuss and reflect on the plans I was starting to formulate.  They may not all be feasible for logistical reasons, but I am inspired to try supporting the Mariposa Center for Girls with lesson plans my students create to teach Dominican children’s stories (especially by Julia Alvarez) and with fund-raising.  More ambitious is a plan I have for an elective service class in which we would create a short documentary segment in the style of the Girl Rising stories about Alba Rosa, the eleven year old girl who teaches children in her neighborhood after attending Mariposa Center for Girls.

This amazing and thought-provoking trip strengthened my belief from working on a number of such school projects that service learning has to meet several criteria to make it meaningful for the givers and the receivers.  These include:  1)  a commitment to establishing a long-lasting relationship between schools (this requires deep listening to their needs, cultural sensitivity, and respect for their way of doing things), 2) personal contact, if not actually physically meeting each other or skyping, at least exchanging photos and letters, 3) solid understanding of how the center operates, what works well for them, what does not, good communication with the staff and parents, 4) assessment of the community resources, history, and relationship with, as well as support for the center, and 5) flexibility and patience as plans evolve.   The Nobis Global Action Model and program on the whole gave us a good foundation for elaborating our own school’s service learning projects by giving us a close-up view of helping address Dominican poverty through education at the Mariposa Center for Girls.

When You Start To See Home Differently

By Christen Clougherty

Nobis World teachers at the King-Tisdell Cottage

Nobis Project is based in Savannah, Georgia because that's were I call home. After college I wanted to live near the ocean, not too far from home (Durham, NC), in a smaller town were I could be engaged in community, and with a strong arts community. Savannah had all these things. My first introduction to Savannah was the movie, "Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil." The film captured a magical city untouched by time. And that is what visitors see. My husband calls it, "the theme park called the South" and my four year old now expects all cities to have horse-drawn carriages.

Over the 13 years that I have lived in Savannah I have come to see its many sides. Some are hidden gems off the beaten path, but more are hidden stories of a past that many would rather be forgotten. One such place is on a nearby barrier island in South Carolina, Daufuskie Island. I was interested in visiting the tabby ruins of dwellings where enslaved people once lived on the island. But when I arrived I learned that they were closed off to the public. And by closed off, I mean they are inside a wealthy private gated community. When I told a friend about my unsuccessful trip, she said, "we like to hide our uncomfortable pasts." And she is right. But that is not the world I want to live in. It is only when we face ourselves and our shared histories that we begin to see our interconnectedness and even our interdependence.

In the Nobis World program, Savannah, Ga & The Lowcountry: Preserving African-American and Gullah-Geechee History, I am (along with many Savannahians) able to share with teachers from all over the country some of these other pasts, other presents, and we pondered over potential futures. 
 

During the five-day program held annually in July, we explore the preservation of African-American history and culture in Savannah and Georgia's coastal islands. Teachers experience the historic city of Savannah, with its stunning architecture and grand live oaks dripping with Spanish moss, as well as the lovely Lowcountry coastal landscape, with its expansive marshes and refreshing sea breezes. Through a service-learning project and cultural immersion, teachers learn how different museums and heritage organizations preserve the history of African-Americans in the Lowcountry. We learn quickly that there is much more to Savannah than is first apparent.

The program focuses on the themes of race, slavery, and the sense of place. We consider the impact of geography, environment, and diaspora on the development of community values and culture by looking at two different experiences: the urban environment of Savannah and the rural Gullah-Geechee culture on the barrier island Sapelo. The Gullah-Geechee culture is distinctive and found only in the Lowcountry: the Gullah-Geechee people are descended from formerly enslaved people, primarily from the East Coast of Africa. 

During this program we work with the King-Tisdell Cottage Foundation in a service-learning project. Exploring together ways to bring the museum into the classroom in meaningful and relevant ways for today's learners.

We invite teachers to join us in summer 2015. Visit our website for details: www.nobisworld.org

And if you want to read more about the many sides to Savannah, check out the New York Times article that came out this past weekend: "Savannah, Both Sides."

I wonder what "uncomfortable pasts" are hidden in your town?

Where the heck is this school?

 Reflections by Jon DeGraff from Brooklyn Friends School
Jon attended the Nobis World - Dominican Republic program this summer where we worked with the Mariposa DR Foundation in a small Caribbean village situated on the rural, hilly north coast of the Dominican Republic (DR). Cabarete is home to two distinct and interdependent cultures. Cabarete’s breathtaking beaches and coastal sports attract a plethora of international visitors year-round.  And yet Cabarete is also home to a community of over 8,000 Dominican and Haitian men, women, and children who live in abject and extreme poverty.  These families struggle daily with hunger, lack of adequate health care, and inadequate education.  Mariposa DR Foundation works to unite these two seemingly divergent communities. Teachers in the Nobis World program worked with Mariposa DR Foundation and met with Cabarete community members including visits to a number of schools and visited with teachers and principals.

 
A group of us, all teachers from the States, visited a private school that Tuesday morning, and later in another part of town, we were in the barrio, Calle 6, on another school visit.
As we walked down a dirt road it led me to think that if it rains for too long here, these folks would be walking around ankle deep, more like sloshing around, for days in mud, dirt, and sewage. Yeah, it must really suck living here.

We went into a few homes of girls from Mariposa Foundation; all the while I was wondering: where the heck is this school that we've come to visit? The last home we stopped in, a home so dilapidated and deplorable that it questioned if our collective humanity made it to the modern era to allow people to live like this, stood at the end of a path. Inside, the roof and walls were so riddled with holes, polka dots of sunlight shining through, that it reminded me of a purposeful design pattern rather than reflecting the pervasive abject poverty of the barrio.

Behind us, at the opening of this short path, some volunteers from the Mariposa Foundation were setting up plastic chairs and one of them had 3 x 2 sized makeshift blackboard. Elementary school-aged children started to gather, congesting the alley and positioning the chairs. There was a buzz of what I soon recognized as anticipation.

Standing in the center of the setup of chairs and spirited souls stood Alva Rosa. Wearing a red tank top and pink skirt, she stood there in her bare feet, directing the unsettled little ones into chairs and then she took attendance. Behind her, propped into one of the chairs was the blackboard, with socks for erasers.

Hence, I found the school.

As chairs, and students and a chalkboard do not a school make, it took awhile for me to truly understand what I was witnessing. But when I finally did, it hit me to the core. Alva Rosa had taken it upon herself to take the lessons that she learned from Mariposa and teach them to the less privileged ones in her neighborhood. Without the support of adults, apparently disinterested adults, that were seated no more than 30 feet from her, it was fascinating to watch her command the moment, with such an authoritative presence, as it was clearly her school.

And oh, the punch line: Alva Rosa is only 11 years old!

Three bets!

This open-air school was not part of an initiative on the part of the Foundation. However, Alva Rosa was the fruit of the idea of Mariposa that laid fertile ground to nurture her “it,” her oomph, that special grit to create her own dynamic path in taking a stand to improve her community. I bet that she would hardly articulate what she does as playing an inspiring role in developing her community, or even comprehend the much bigger metaphor and potential that her actions represent. I would also bet that this impoverished, shoeless, “bossy” girl simply sees herself as someone who wants to be in charge of others and she created an attractive way to so. But lastly, I would bet that in a very short time, this little girl with her freckles, and her golden pigtails will understand her potential in an even more remarkable way than she does now. And then, watch out!

I shouldn’t have found it ironic that the mission of the Mariposa Foundation, mariposa, in incorporating the theme of the Girl Effect, an international movement to empower girls in poverty, should produce its own marvelous personification of the Butterfly Effect* in Alva Rosa.


*mariposa is butterfly in Spanish

Nobis World - Creating a Safe Place for Educators to Share Stories and Discuss Difficult Issues

by Debbie Bandy

                                                                        "Largest Slave Sale in Georgia History"

The Nobis World program, Savannah Ga & The Lowcountry: Preserving African-American & Gullah-Geechee Culture, created a safe place for educators from around the country to share our stories and discuss difficult issues. I want to remember these lessons in my own teaching.

One of the videos we watched before our trip was Slavery By Another Name, a PBS documentary.
“Slavery by Another Name is a 90-minute documentary that challenges one of Americans’ most cherished assumptions: the belief that slavery in this country ended with the Emancipation Proclamation. The film tells how even as chattel slavery came to an end in the South in 1865, thousands of African Americans were pulled back into forced labor with shocking force and brutality. It was a system in which men, often guilty of no crime at all, were arrested, compelled to work without pay, repeatedly bought and sold, and coerced to do the bidding of masters. Tolerated by both the North and South, forced labor lasted well into the 20th century.”

Before watching this video, I thought that slavery (though not prejudice and injustices) ended with the Emancipation Proclamation, and I was shocked by the brutality faced by black citizens, especially black men. This coercive system had a monetary incentive. No white landowner now wanted to pay wages to people that used to be property. That financial reason faded over time, but the practice of injustice towards black men became institutionalized, and most American (if they ever knew) forgot its origin. Black men were targeted for incarceration without cause, and the result continues to be disproportionate numbers of black men behind bars.

Modern targeting of black men by law enforcement was given a voice by one of the participants in the Nobis program in Savannah this summer. This man holds an administrative position in an elite Northern private school. As we were talking about power and privilege, he shared his discussion with his sons about how to interact with the police. I have had the same talk with my sons: always be respectful and tell the truth. His talk, however, included telling his sons to put their hands where they are clearly visible and make no sudden moves.

Then came the murder of Michael Brown this summer in Ferguson, MO. The police response could have been filmed in black and white; their methods were straight out of 1963 Birmingham. Some of the responses by white residents were, too. The brutality against black men seems to have no end point.

My experience with the Nobis World program challenged me to think differently when I watch the evening news. And I now ask myself, “What can I do as a white teacher in a predominately white, private school in Charleston, SC?” I have made two decisions at this point.  I joined the NAACP and have put a bumper sticker of my support for this organization on my car and will attend meetings to see what part I can play in the work in Charleston. I also want my 8th graders to work with the Avery Research Center (http://www.averyinstitute.us/) in writing a guidebook for some of the many antebellum houses within a mile of our campus. Their research will include information about the builders of these houses: enslaved people with specific skills such as carpenters, ironworkers, and builders. We will also include research about the white plantation owners and merchants who financed these homes, but I hope my students will gain a fuller and deeper history of the area than they typically receive. It is only when we start having these discussions about power, history and relationships that we can begin to move forward in creating the change we wish to see.

Seeing the World for the First Time

“In a way we are always traveling. It's only that as the scenery becomes familiar we cease to give it the attention and gaping awe that was once bestowed upon it in heaping armfuls. We travel so that when we return "home" we can see ourselves in a new light, with new clarity, and with new questions.”
–Christen Clougherty, Nobis Project Founder and Executive Director

The Nobis Project is an educational non-profit organization based out of Savannah, GA but with a reach across the world. Our mission is to support youth, educational and community leaders in building skills to analyze issues that impact our society and take actions towards initiating positive change.

This summer we launched a new program, Nobis World, a professional development program for K-12 teachers to travel domestically or abroad to experience cultures different from their own. The goal of the Nobis World program is to expand teachers' knowledge and experiences and, in turn, enrich their students' learning and global awareness.

We have decided to share our experiences, our learning, and our hopes through this Nobis World blog. Here we will showcase highlights from our travels, the connections we bring back into our classrooms, and resources for educators to learn more about the various Nobis World program themes.

We hope that you will follow our blog and that the stories shared here about transformation, social justice, and our shared humanity will inspire you to travel with Nobis World and experience the power of “returning home” and seeing the world again for the first time.