The Neglect U(We) Give...tnug life?
As I mentioned in my October Blog Post last month, make the day all that it is to be..., I’ll expand on some of the connections I saw in the movie/book, The Hate U Give, (George Tillman, Jr., Audrey Wells, and Angie Thomas.)
The reason I love talking about connections is that I seek system's thinking. The phrase surfaces almost daily as I work as a Senior Fellow. The term dates back to antiquity as people sought connections between processes or methods. It is interesting to see Systems Thinking as just one of 7 components to Complex Systems. I mentioned Peter Senge back in a 5/17 post titled, The 4Cs Locally/Nationally/Globally. I haven't mentioned much of him, but see his connections to education and management as important to all aspects of living. Looking back to 1 year ago with the 11/15/17 release of the Harrisburg Comprehensive Plan Draft, I see the links between personal development of the individual connected to the community development of neighborhoods / districts / and cities. (REF: 12/17 Blog Post - Between the 1,000 and the 1.)
But before all that, let's hear about some of the amazing Making happening within the High School Campuses of John Harris and SciTech.
STEAM Making @ John Harris Campus High School
SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY, ENGINEERING, MATHEMATICS:
STEM Lab (Mr. Gigac)
As Mr. Gigac entered into the Second Marking Period, he moved students into concepts of 3D Printing. They use a Dremel 3D40. Students were to work in groups of two to find a 3D model on Thingiverse. Two students found a 118db whistle by jzisa and they wanted to print it when Mr. Gigac was absent.
If you are new to 3D printing, it has been in the news for quite some time. I remember first seeing it back when I was attending MIT. The Dean of Architecture, William (Bill) J. Mitchell (15 December 1944 – 11 June 2010). I remember visiting the office one day and Dean Mitchell was showing everyone a 3D printed greek temple object. Looking back, I wish I had a photo of the moment. That was back in 1997 or 1998, when digital cameras were very expensive. I was still using a film SLR. MIT had purchased a 3D printer that used FFF (Fused Filament Fabrication) technology and FDM (Fused Deposition Modeling) is trademarked by Stratasys), which is based off of stereolithography developed by Charles Hull, who started 3D Systems. After that time, MIT was working on Three Dimensional Printing - 3DP, which allowed for the use of other types of materials such as composites, polymers, ceramics and even metals in a powder binding method.
ARTS:
A/V Studio Lab (Mr. Williams & Mr. Burns)
The month of November was a time of group dynamic building. For the month's prior, Mr. Burns was teaching students to work as one voice in reciting a group poem - "don't quit." They are working it out as a video project to be edited through December. In the process, both Mr. Williams and Mr. Burns worked out the ideas of storyboarding and scriptwriting as well as telling one's own story. The latter fell into the primary focus of Mr. Burn's class, Public Speaking and Communications. They also worked in groups to record their own stories on the Newtek Tricaster and greenscreen. This was a challenging task because students who were normally very chatty in class, became silent in front of the cameras. The students practiced entering in their stories in the form of scrips into the teleprompter. They worked on pacing and reciting words correctly. If students had problems reading on the teleprompter, they were given time to memorize their script.
A more recent exercise involved empathy during a 11/29/18 visit. Students were given a script of someone that they had to represent. This could be that of another race, age or background. Other students provided ways that they might typically approach that person, including some internal bias. This was a teaching lesson of knowing your audience. You needed to understand how to address many different types of people of many different backgrounds. It also helped to change student's perspectives so that they would put themselves into someone else's shoes. The students were given a closing 5 minute assignment, which asked them to answer questions, including how they felt during the interaction. They were able to use the webcam on the laptops to record the reactions. This was happening when Mr. Williams and I were talking about his goals to move around the AV Studio. Mr. Burns interrupted our discussion to tell us both an amazing interaction that had taken place. He saw one of his students typing away at her phone like she was texting and Mr. Burns went over to help her refocus. When he did, she told him that she was not texting, but using her phone to type up her script that she was going to record. She was excited and showed it to him. Mr. Burns was ecstatic because this one student was operating with her own workflow and time management process. This is a strong foundational shift into the completion of personal work. I congratulated him on that conversation and encouraged him and the student on that effort.
Mr. Williams also mentioned that this was the whole goal of slowly going through to teach students to think as a group and to take it slow. If the students learned a strong foundation on process, they could adapt that to any situation in the AV Studio. I agreed and said that this can be reinforced at each stage of the process. It was exciting to see Mr. Burns see some of his hard work pay off in a positive student reaction. This is not easy and getting to this point takes time. The AV Studio can build on this and allow students to take responsibility of the process, and ultimately that builds into their own story-telling. It becomes more about Morning Announcements, and more about critical thinking built on a replicated process and team collaboration. This is a good place to be in for developing the News Magazine for next year.
STEAM Making @ SciTech Campus High School
TECHNOLOGY:
SciBots (Mrs. Worful, Mr. Group, Mr. Green)
As we entered into November, the looming competition deadline of Oxford Open - Saturday, November 17th, was on everyone's mind. The students were trying to get to a stage where their robots were operational. It was apparent by Thursday, November 15th, that the team wouldn't have operational robots. While this was a disappointment with most of the students, it was okay to let it go and reflect on what needed to be done. We recognized that we didn't have capacity with students who knew programming from previous years. The spotty attendance from student's busy schedules also impacted the effort. Lastly, there was an impact of an early record breaking snowstorm on Thursday, November 15th for Winter Storm Avery. Harrisburg received 8.3" of snow (1911 and 1947 record dates.)
Students then returned from the Thanksgiving Vacation break on November 27th with a loss of motivation. There was a recap of potential adjustments. There was even talk about how some teachers might meet students at the December 1st, event to have the team experience a competition environment. While I was away for the holiday, I was able to work on the BOE-BOT (Board of Education Bot) that I found out about back in 2014. Penn State Middletown and HACC have been sponsoring an annual robotics competition, South Central PA Robotics Competition for high school students for 8 years. This was held on Saturday, November 17th. I wasn't able to visit this event because I was traveling out of the area. This seems like a good way for the high school students to connect with local sponsors, some of which were IEEE, Phoenix Contact, RG Group, and Johnson Controls.
ARTS:
Podcasting (Mr. Elo)
On Thursday, November 8th, the students at SciTech kicked off their first official podcast recording. I was the test subject. Overall, the recording took about 30 minutes. For me personally it was different. I had been interviewed in many ways over the years, but not for "radio" where I had to wear headphones as a monitor. I have worked in small instances in side monitoring, but not to this extent. I have to say that the experience was really professional. The student who interviewed me was very good in reading the questions from the script that they created as a group. He did have some hesitation with reading the intro and exits, and I told him that he just need to practice them a bit more before recording.
The biggest takeaway for me was that when I started many of the students were on their phones doing other work, but by the middle, they were actively watching the process. I think that they were drawn into the questions that were asked. Some of it was attributed to the information that I was providing about the Foundry Makerspace. We have a different approach in really looking at the after graduation picture. In light of automation and changes to our economy, it is a bit frightening. I admit this because there are unknowns, but I presented all of this in the thinking of the 4Cs of 21st Century life - Communication, Collaboration, Critical-Thinking and Creativity. This is the basis of all the Project Based Learning (Buck Institute for Education Definition: PBL = a teaching method in which students gain knowledge and skills by working for an extended period of time to investigate and respond to an authentic, engaging, and complex question, problem, or challenge") work in STEAM.
So to link up the movie and The Hate U Give and and any work that have done and continue to do in communities, is weaved together through trauma. The Term THUG LIFE is discussed in the movie, which stands for The Hate U Give Infants F's Everyone. This term was pulled together in the 1990s by Tupac Shakur (language). Another good discussion about the movie as it relates to Tupac / 2Pac was published in Epicreads.com on April 2017 when the book was first released. It represents a way of thinking to survive (language), but later in life, he was speaking about how society's hate is cyclical.
After seeing the film, I kept repeating that line in my head, but the word "neglect" kept popping in, instead of "hate." While "neglect" isn't as strong, in terms of some of the systemic racism and hate that continues to surface. I look at how this connects to Cognitive Behavioral Therapy and Attachment Theory. This is the type of therapy that identifies negative or inaccurate thinking that we might produce in our minds. It is an extremely beneficial tool in any person's life. It showed up in two books that I was reading during November - Hold Me Tight, but Dr. Sue Johnson and The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind and Body in the Healing of Trauma, by Dr. Bessel van der Kolk. I never put the two together, until I saw the name of Psychologist, Dr. John Bowlby, who pioneered the work of Attachment Theory.
So in my mind working at the Neighborhood Center long ago from 2/2013-7/2016, I was involved in the Circle of Security Facilitator's Training. This is when I first met Camelia Maianu (Cami) at Harrisburg Area Community College. In becoming a COS Facilitator in 2014, I was given the tools to understand how to better serve the needs of students at the Neighborhood Center. I am grateful that I had the opportunity to become educated in this process. It has been so useful and when I saw the current books referencing topics from 4 years ago, it was exciting. I started to think about how at a larger scale, trauma and cognition worked in "group think." In my background of urban design, I studied multiple topics of community development, environmental psychology, urban housing, urban issues and basic sociology. I've also visited and lived in a myriad fabric of place - urban and suburban, high need, local, national and global. I've seen many places that are neglected - both man-made and natural. In looking back to Biblical text (Gen 1:1–2:4,) there is instruction that we are to be stewards. That is to be responsible for... to care for... to tend. I think of this as being everything that is on, within, around, or above the Earth, and also anything connected through relationship. This is why the process of making is important because of the link to creating. We can partake of a process that is outside ourselves.
Okay, I am a bit off track from the word neglect and the movie, The Hate U Give. So if there is neglect within the individual (not being responsible) and at the community level (not being responsible for the larger connectivity) we should not expect a positive result. So as I wander around Harrisburg, I’ve talked about the Triple Bottom Line (1706, In 77 days… “Go & Make” and the Three Horizons (1802, Another year another Sweet 16 . I see sustained urban growth as being all 3 items in balance - people, place, and economics. If one is neglected, things will not thrive. This is done through disinvestment. I believe that there are two ways of disinvestment (this is a working theory.) It could be a willful act of redirecting funds elsewhere, sometimes this is out of necessity because of limits to funds. Which leads to the second way, through just not enough funds. I see the first in action when there are schools that receive funding and have access because of policy that favors that area. An imbalance occurs and something has to give. The second, hits more at home, as a homeowner. My wife and I have only a set number of monthly revenue that needs to be allocated to survive keep systems alive. We’ve downsized many times to survive, which means that our family goes into a state of survival.
So how do we not neglect either individuals or our neighborhoods? It is through seeing the invisible. These are systems that are at work, that are interrelated. That is why the William Edwards Deming quote at the beginning is so important. He focused on Systems Thinking and Systems Theory (here is a great link to Deming's life). I see his Core Learning Capabilities for Team stool (see the above diagram from Peter Senge’s The Fifth Discipline), that just like the Triple Bottom Line thinking, needs each of the three legs to continue to stand. I believe our communities might benefit from this type of thinking. At the Foundry Makerspace, we talk about Professional Learning Communities, and that is really how this acts. As Peter Senge noted…
“Deming’s idea that a common
'system of management'
governed modern institutions, and
in particular formed a
deep connection between
work and school.”
(Senge, xiii)
Senge continues to talk about the Deming's wisdom in light of work and school and I included emphasis by breaking the text into three parts...
“People failed, he realized, because they had been socialized in ways of thinking and acting that were embedded in their most formative institutional experiences. ‘The relationship between a boss and subordinate is the same as the relationship between a teacher and student,’ he said.
The teacher sets the aims, the student responds to those aims. The teacher has the answer, the student works to get the answer. Students know when they have succeeded because the teacher tells them.
By the time all children are 10 they know what it takes to get ahead in school and please the teacher - a lesson they carry forward through their careers of ‘pleasing bosses and failing to improve the system that serves customers.”
(Senge, xiii)
This is profound because if we neglect the individual, we can expect because of the school / work connection, that our environments will fail. There is no desire to become better, but to achieve a specific single answer. To finish a finish line, whatever that might be established. So if the goal is a new development to make a certain projected level of profit, then once this occurs, we move on to something else. With a new piece of technology, we work to produce a final product, and that becomes celebrated as an end. The answer.
I think we tend to think of that with people. We quickly look at people and judge them for their current state. We forget all the nuisance of story, the amount of experiences that are stacked upon the years, which comprise an individual.
This is what happens in the movie The Hate U Give, because of neglect, we look at things in a singularity instead of innumerable. I believe that this is our human curse. We are always processing things, but when we recall items, it seems to happen in a singular. It takes an effort to break out, through messy means to connect, so to speak “in the gray.” It isn’t black or white, but ambiguous. The both. We might think of the Yin and Yang, but I think that isn’t a good representation of the condition because things are fuzzy. We are complex beings that are ever evolving and growing.
So if we know that there are systems that are invisible and intangible, what is it that we can see. I think that is in social capital, which is scalable. Social capital happens within just two people because they are in relationship. It might not be strong, but the intangible is what the other person has to provide. If we look at things in an abundance mindset, we can see an additive process to build together. This is why the act of making, while is extremely singular, it helps when the connection is with someone else in validation - “let me show you what I did” or “let me show you what I created.” I think this ties back to the idea of Deming’s idea of teacher/student. This could be a carry over from the institutionalized educational system.
At the larger scale, the more people, the more your network grows, and so should your social capital. At the very least, knowing of someone is low connectivity or in a Casual Relationship - this is exhibited in social media networks. High connectivity is operating in your Core Relationships. Look up the 6/2018 Blog Post, Story/Story, Building/Building, Street/Street, where I discussed Dunbar’s Number (150).
If we have many Core Relationships, I believe it is hard to find neglect. I don’t believe it can be present because of the hourly / daily personal interactions. People check in. The same happens in a neighborhood. If we don’t have Core Relationships with our physical structures, neglect is established. We treat our streets / buildings / blocks as used resources with no inherent value, except for extraction or in transaction. The first is in property development where the lowest common use is applied, until the market drives up the cost. For an empty property it could go from a parking lot or gas station in a city, until trust is built and risk can be overcome to put money into a property. The second is similar as transactional, but this is more like absentee landowners who trade properties as a commodity without understanding contextualism of urban fabric. Buildings on a block are deeply connected and have value. When one building is neglected (not weatherproofed / mothballed) and left for deterioration, it affects the adjoining properties.
“No city has ever demolished itself back to social, economical or fiscal health. San Francisco, Boston and Washington all were once plagued by abandonment and blight. They have largely filled their vacant housing stock and have done so much better than cities which currently focus on demolition, that it is easy to forget how far down on their heels those flagship cities had been as well. Now they have become symbols for the affordability crisis and economic displacement. As such they are just like their rustbelt brethren a case for the large capital needs for affordable housing.”
(NOTE: Why is this done in Harrisburg? - the word neglect surfaces, as does the idea of devaluation / disinvestment)
Urban buildings cannot be seen as objects they way that they are seen in suburbia. This was the point of Matthew Frederick’s discussion on 180421. His premise was about the Copernican Revolution. He states in the summary…
“Indeed, America’s 'successful' cities are beset by runaway rents, over-scaled buildings, the displacement of low-income residents, and a loss of authenticity. The truly successful cities of the 21st century will pursue a different course. They will eschew today’s top-down, developer-centric fixations and will re-engage the organic, bottom-up processes that once built and sustained them.”
So where does this lead us?
How could we stop neglect at any scale?
I think some of the answer is in another book that I stumbled upon in November. I picked up the Kindle version before the Thanksgiving Holiday - Eric Klinenberg, Palaces for the People: How Social Infrastructure Can Help Fight Inequality, Polarization, and the Decline of Civic Life.
"Social infrastructure is not "social capital" - a concept commonly used to measure people's relationships and interpersonal networks - but the physical conditions that determine whether social capital develops. When social infrastructure is robust, it foster contact, mutual support, and collaboration among friends and neighbors; when degraded, it inhibits social activity, leaving families and individuals to fend for themselves. Social infrastructure is crucially important, because local, face-to-face interactions - at the school, the playground, and the corner diner - are the building blocks of all public life. People forge bonds in places that have healthy social infrastructures - not because they set out to build community, but because when people engage in sustained, recurrent interaction, particularly while doing things they enjoy, relationships inevitably grow."
(Eric Klinenberg, Palaces for the People: How Social Infrastructure Can Help Fight Inequality, Polarization, and the Decline of Civic Life)
This will be an important book, because it provides the language to help people understand some of the intangible ideas that I experience in both working with people and working with places. In life I couldn’t care about the economics of the situation, because I believe that if I leave that to the connectivity of people and place, it will naturally grow, and I know, wholeheartedly, that I will be sustained.
For next month's blog post, I hope to bring some information about Social Infrastructure as it connects to Maker Shift and the Maker Ecosystem / FabLab. I think there might be some philosophical discussion into systems and Integral Theory - Ken Wilber & Jean Gebser - Stages of Consciousness.
(REF: Intergral Theorist - Ken Wilber)
Epilogue:
One element that surfaced through October / November and the discussion of The Hate U Give movie was the term "racial literacy."
I caught this term during the 1A broadcast on Wednesday, Oct 24, 2018, Lesson Not Learned: "America to Me" Documents Why Race Has Everything To Do With Education.
The broadcast focused the need for white folks to become more knowledgeable (literate) about systemic issues (Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness and Beverly Daniel Tatum's Why AreAll The Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?: And Other Conversations About Race) to push into their own perceptions of race. Ultimately a working knowledge (literate) providing a language to talk about the issues. Conversely, the broadcast noted that African Americans are well versed (extremely racially literate) because of every day personal experience. Seeing the movie The Hate U Give highlighted this disconnect - helped to spark some of my discussions in/around Harrisburg
It was also good to hear George Tillman Jr. discussing the process of directing the film The Hate U Give, which was posted on The Directors Cut Soundcloud page from the the October 14, 2018 Directors Guild of America Q&A in Los Angeles.
Tangentially, on November 5th, WBUR's Hear & Now, had a broadcast, 'Dawnland' Documents Maine's Effort To Reconcile Indian Child Removal, that related to race and connected locally to personal discussions I have had with friends & family members about the Carlisle Industrial Indian School.
Finally, for future reference, here is the PDF copy of Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 30th Anniversary Edition.
(Dr. William Edwards Deming, as quoted in Peter Senge's The Fifth Discipline: The Art & Practice of the Learning Organization, with my separation into five groups of text.)
LAST WORD: This was another trailing thought going back to how we see each other and work to build healthy social capital.
Obsession with success (see Deming's quote above) leads us to "pedestalize" (to put on a pedestal, exalt higher than others) people or objects that we should be like, instead of doing the necessary work, walking through life looking at how we can compare ourselves with our previous self. With the ultimate goal of becoming better. Sweden's Museum of Failure can help us keep the mindset that every event is a step through life.
