Community Involvement

1. Guest Speakers

Bring the World to the Class

“I will always remember the trips we took and the people who came to our class. They gave up their time to talk to us. Tanya [Cromartie-Twaddle] was the bomb!”

Social Justice is a topic that inherently implies involving the world outside the classroom door. While the classroom certainly can be a microcosm of society and provide plenty to discuss, we found that connecting students with other youth and adults who are working in the field of social justice was critical for them to see that they can make a difference beyond their immediate environment.

We also believe that young people feel valued when other people give their time and expertise to them without compensation, simply because they care and want to relate to them. They benefit from hearing as many different world views and perspectives as possible, and you never know what can result. One of us had an experience where a visitor to the school she worked at ended up mentoring and providing a home for a student in need. Connections to the community are important for helping students know that they have a place in the world.

Here are some factors to consider when searching for and inviting guest speakers to your classroom:

1) Ability to connect with youth in an engaging way. We selected people who had experience with young people and would not just talk at them—they created interactive, experiential learning opportunities and led discussions in addition to providing information about a particular topic.

2) Connection with the subject material. You can have a fascinating and inspiring guest and everyone will have a good time, but if the presentation does not directly relate to the course topics and goals, it loses relevance.

3) Field of relatedness. We chose speakers who could relate to urban youth, and/or serve as realistic role models. Their favorite speaker was a dynamic young African-American woman from Milwaukee who could relate to their life experiences.

Here are some organizations that can help you find speakers:

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2. Community Events

Connecting Students with Community

Teaching young people how to involve themselves in their community is an important step in learning to work for Social Justice. Participating in an environment beyond the school serves many purposes such as providing incentive for positive behavior, creating a focus for classroom work, exposing students to ideas and people they may not normally encounter, and allowing them to learn about themselves through that exposure.

In our class, we chose UWM’s production of “A Raisin in the Sun” as a focus. We spent a lot of time before the play talking about the social themes in the play, learning about the place and times that the play was set in, identifying the motives of characters and finding ways to relate to them, and asking students what they would do the same or differently. On the day of the play, we had a pre-performance session with a theater professor who talked about the role of theater in society, and there was a talk-back after the play with the director.

We were thrilled to see that our group was the best behaved and asked the most questions, especially compared to suburban and private school groups. One factor in this success was that we attended the play toward the end of the semester after they learned other ways of behaving and relating to educators, and attending the play was a reward for all they accomplished so far. They knew us well enough to know that we had high expectations for them, and they rose above and beyond.

“I’ve never seen a play like that. I liked getting to talk to the cast after to get to know how it felt for them.”

Back at school, we had representatives from Black student organizations talk about academic and campus life as a college student, and they reinforced our high expectations by stressing their focus on leadership, community involvement and personal responsibility rather than the purely social aspects of the organizations.

To keep parents/guardians informed of our activities, we sent letters home explaining what we were doing, even though we had field trip permission slips signed already. Here is the letter we sent home.

There are many ways to find an event for your class. We used Google to search for +social justice +milwaukee and found several events going on. We looked at Campus Events at all local colleges (Marquette, Alverno, UWM, Carroll College, Cardinal Stritch, MATC) to see what was going on there, since we felt that having students experience a college campus was important.

The most important consideration, as with guest speakers, is to integrate the purpose and content of the event into the class instead of it being just a field trip to get out of school for the day.

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