Talking about ‘Unheard Voices’ with Ali Carr-Chellman. Interview by Jason Engerman.
Dr. Carr-Chellman is department chair of Learning and Performance Systems in the College of Education at Penn State University. In this interview, hear about her research on “Unheard Voices.” This project asks the question, What do those who have not been asked in the past about school change have to tell us about ideal schools?
She asks prisoners, homeless, working poor, and migrant workers to tell us what an ideal school would look like, in an attempt to invite those lacking social capital to the conversation. The interview questions cover her observations so far, the role that educators and researchers play in actively including these populations in their practice and research, and what it means to be a social systems researcher.
PART 1. BRINGING ‘UNHEARD VOICES’ TO THE DISCUSSION
Much of your work has included what most in the academic world would consider unusual. Among them is “Unheard Voices.” Can you describe this project and what makes it so unusual?
The project really seeks to engage, what we think of as, people who have never had a seat at the table for educational reform discussions. These include the homeless, working poor, prisoners and, migrant workers. Those are four populations and there are probably more populations than that.
Typically if you look at, say the Chicago or the Kentucky large scale school reforms that happened in those areas where they have involved parent groups, they also tried to get some other stakeholders involved. They would make sure that teachers, principles and policy makers were involved. Then they decided, “Well maybe we should have somebody from our church. Maybe we should have somebody from a local business that employs a lot of these graduates.” They tried to open discussion up to the community.
What they didn’t say was, “Well maybe we should have a migrant worker here, maybe we should have a parent who has flunked out, and maybe we should try to find out what prisoners think about this.” They’re basically not considered appropriate for dialoguing about how schools could change.
So we decided to try and take the unusual tack of talking to those people and finding out what would an ideal school look like for them. If they were to design a school, what would it look like? This is really hard for most of these people to think of, because for the most part these are people who haven’t had dignity walking down the halls of their own school in high school or elementary school when they were little. And so it was very interesting to try and find out what they thought schools maybe, could be or should be.
That was really the purpose of that project. Most people when they read it wondered, “So are we trying to build schools for prisoners? Or what are we trying to do here?” And that really wasn’t the point. The point was to try and include these voices that had not been a part of the discussion to that point.
The things that they wanted were dramatically different than the things that educational researchers are looking for. Educational researchers were advocating things like constructivist-learning environments, learner based learning environment, mobile learning, online learning. These people didn’t feel that way at all. They wanted lots of structure from the teacher. The number one thing they wanted, above everything else, was a caring teacher! That was the one thing they wanted and that’s not something we’re hitting in schools of education right now!
We sort of assume that all teachers are caring. We don’t work on that as an explicit agenda for instance. So it was pretty dramatic, the differences between these voices and the voices we usually hear in that dialogue.
What have been some of the most surprising outcomes so far from this study?
I think one of the things that was sort of interesting for the prisoners in particular was that they were looking for more structure in schools. They wanted to find a way somehow to decrease the violence in the lives of these kids. I think they had been victims of a variety of violence as children. So they wanted to figure out how to control that, how to eliminate bullying, how to control the amount of violence that was happening outside the school.
And they were having a hard time, just like we all are, with figuring out how to do that. It’s not really the school’s job to police the rest of the community, or the parents, or the families, or the siblings, or the classmates who are bullying or who are not taking care of the kids. It tends not to be the schools responsibility to do that, but they also recognize that there is a huge interplay there. So they were looking at more structure. They were looking at school uniforms.
They wanted, what I would think of as, not mundane things, but definitely not the kinds of things we talk about in cutting edge research. They wanted more control in the lunchroom. They said that was a place that was rife with uncomfortable, unhappy memories for many of them.
Again, the most important thing was that they have a caring teacher in all of it. They wanted a caring teacher, above all else. There were also a lot of them who had been placed in special education who were very uncomfortable and unhappy about their special education experiences.
What future do you see for the field of education, as a result of opening up the dialogue to these “Unheard Voices”?
I do think that we’re going to end up creating schools that are more responsive to all stake holders as opposed to schools that are responsive to just a few stakeholders. And I do think that in the long run, if we do that, we’re going to be more successful at building schools locally that answer local challenges and local problems.
