Building Communities of Generative Interdependence

Abstract

Since the late 1990’s, colleges and universities have implemented mutually beneficial community engagement as a core dimension of educating students to develop professional skills grounded in working with communities to address pressing issues of social inequality and environmental regeneration. Such community-based learning programs are being expanded to counter rising authoritarianism, white nationalism, and violent extremism and to support generative, interdependent forms of democracy. In this essay, I explore how such programs could benefit by learning from the ethical insights of Indigenous traditions. I give examples of such work in theological education, and in middle school through higher education.

Keywords:

• Community-engaged learning
• generative democracy
• Indigenous traditions

Notes

1 The Global State of Democracy, p. ix https://www.idea.int/gsod/sites/default/files/2021-11/the-global-state-of-democracy-2021_0.pdf, p. vii. (accessed November 22, 2021).

2 See the following histories of white supremacy and racial injustice: Carol Anderson, White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide (New York: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2016); Edward E. Baptist, The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism, (New York: Basic Books, 2014); Ben Crump, Open Season: Legalized Genocide of Colored People (New York: Amistad, 2019); Stephanie Jones-Rogers, They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019); David F. Krugler, 1919, The Year of Racial Violence: How African Americans Fought Back. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015); Nicolas Lemann, Redemption: The Last Battle of the Civil War. (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2006); Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, (New York: Random House, 2020).

3 Macori, Marco, David Ibsen, Lara Pham, Hans-Jakob Schindler, Alexander Ritzmann, Kacper Rekawek, Joshua Fisher-Birch, Jean-Yves Camus, Morgan Finnsio, Tommi Kotonen, Graham David Macklin, Shaun McDaid, Fabian Rasem, “Violent Right-Wing Extremism and Terrorism – Transnational Connectivity, Definitions, Incidents, Structures and Countermeasures,” Counter Extremism Project Germany, November 2020., p. 10. https://www.counterextremism.com/sites/default/files/CEP%20Study_Violent%20Right-Wing%20Extremism%20and%20Terrorism_Nov%202020.pdf (accessed December 1, 2020).

4 Ibid.

5 Preventing Violent Extremism: New Entry Points for Collective Action. Expert Roundtable. May 5, 2021. 2021 Stockholm Forum on Peace and Development). For a study of these dynamics in the United States see Alice Jardina, White Identity Politics (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2019).

6 Willie James Jennings, After Whiteness: An Education in Belonging (Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans, 2020), pp. 20, 112.

7 Jennings, pp. 40-42.

8 Ibid., p. 118. Much can also be learned from Engaged Buddhism about the power of knowing and nonknowing and its relevance for social activism. I address this in After Empire: the Art and Ethos of Enduring Peace (Minneapolis Fortress Press, 2004) pp.154-157.

9 Stanley Deetz, the former Director of the Center for the Study of Conflict, Collaboration and Creative Governance and the Peace and Conflict Studies Program at the University of Colorado, Boulder, describes the nature of generative democracies in “Disarticulation and Conflict Transformation: Interactive Design, Collaborative Processes, and Generative Democracy in Thomas G. Matyok and Peter Kellett (eds). Communication and conflict transformation through local, regional and global engagement. Lexington books. 2016 pp.4, 14. See also https://www.standeetz.org/generative-democracy (Accessed February 18, 2024).

10 “The Civic Learning and Democracy Engagement Coalition (CLDE Coalition) includes education and policy organizations committed to making college students’ civic learning for an engaged democracy a priority across higher education and in public policy. The coalition is led by the American Association of Colleges and Universities, Campus Compact, College Promise, Complete College America, and State Higher Education Executive Officers. The coalition is working in partnership with more than 70 higher education and student success organizations, including several state systems, and all seven institutional accreditors.” https://www.collegeciviclearning.org/(accessed February 6, 2023) .

11 Ibid.

12 Benny Y.T. Tai, “From past to future: Hong Kong’s democratic movement,” Citizenship, Identity and Social Movements in the New Hong Kong: Localism After the Umbrella Movement. Edited by Wai-man Lam and Luke Cooper. (New York: Routledge. 2018) p. 155.

13 Ibid., p. 164.

14 Ibid., p.156.

15 https://www.collegeciviclearning.org/.

16 https://www.luminafoundation.org/resource/high-impact-practices-and-gains-in-student-learning/ (accessed February 8, 2023).

17 https://www.luminafoundation.org/news-and-views/community-based-programs-first-year-seminars-learning-communities-how-to-assure-equity-and-quality-in-higher-ed/ (accessed February 8, 2023).

18 https://communityengagedlearning.msu.edu/about/defining-community-engaged-learning-at-msu (Accessed February 9, 2024).

19 Ibid.

20 https://communityengagement.uncg.edu/definitions/(Accessed February 9, 2024).

21 https://www.wpi.edu/project-based-learning/project-based-education/global-project-program (Accessed February 14, 2024) Sarah Stanlick, “Experiential Extractivism in Service-Learning and Community Engagement: What We Take and What We Leave Behind”. Metropolitan Universities Journal, (Forthcoming), pp. 3, 2, 12, 1.

22 https://resources.depaul.edu/abcd-institute/Pages/default.aspx (Accessed February 14, 2024).

23 Carol Lee Sanchez, “Animal, Vegetable, & Mineral: The Sacred Connection” in Carol J. Adams (editor), Ecofeminism and the Sacred (New York: Continuum Press, 1993) pp. 215-218.

24 Ibid., 221-227.

25 Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants (Minneapolis, MN: Milkweed Editions, 2013) p.7. I explore the work of Sanchez and Kimmerer and its implications for multiple forms of constructive social engagement in more detail in After the Protests are Heard: Enacting Civic Engagement and Social Transformation (New York: New York University Press, 2019).

26 Ibid., pp. 304-306.

27 Ibid., p. 307.

28 Ibid.

29 Ibid., p. 304.

30 Ibid., p.375.

31 Ibid., p. 336.

32 Ibid., pp. 327-328.

33 Ibid., p.371.

34 Ibid., p.384.

35 Ibid., p.129.

36 Ibid., p.134.

37 Devon A. Mihesuah and Elizabeth Hoover, editors, Indigenous Food Sovereignty in the United States: Restoring Cultural Knowledge, Protecting Environments, and Regaining Health (Norman, Oklahoma: University of Oklahoma Press, 2019), 336.

38 For those of us who are white, part of this work is that of reparations. David Moore states that while the specifics of land rights are up for negotiation, the negotiations must be undertaken from a position of reciprocity, respect, and acknowledgment of the abuses of the past. Moore also challenges us to move past the strictures of “a binary colonial mind” and imagine, and create, a “multicultural state” that encompasses “coexistent tribal sovereignties.” To negotiate land claims fairly, to develop a social contract that recognizes Native rights and our mutual obligations, Native activists and scholars challenge Euro-Americans to understand the significance and meaning of land, religion, and community for Native peoples, and to begin to live ourselves with land and with others in relationships of reciprocity and responsibility. David L. Moore, “Return of the Buffalo: Cultural Representation as Cultural Property,” In Native American Representation: First Encounters, Distorted Images, and Literary Appropriations, ed. Gretchen M. Bataille (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2001), p.66.

39 I was provost at Meadville Lombard from 2007-2017. For a further description of our educational model see Michael S. Hogue, “From Resistance to Resurrection: Meadville Lombard’s TouchPoint Model of Theological Education,” Theological Education, Volume 48, Number 2 (2014): 33-41. See as well a revised essay that includes the result of an external assessment of our program “From Resistance to Resurrection: Meadville Lombard’s TouchPoint Model of Theological Education.” Michael S. Hogue and Sharon D. Welch, Looking Forward with Hope: Reflections on the Present State and Future of Theological Education. Edited by Benjamin Valentin. Wipf and Stock Publishers. 2019 and Sharon D. Welch, After the Protests are Heard: Enacting Civic Engagement and Social Transformation (New York: New York University Press, 2019, chapter five).

40 Carol Lee Sanchez, “Animal, Vegetable, & Mineral: The Sacred Connection” in Carol J. Adams (editor), Ecofeminism and the sacred (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993) pp. 207-228.

41 For an exploration of the complexity of this work see Mihesuah and Hoover, “Introduction,” Indigenous Food Sovereignty in the United States, pp.3-25.

42 Daniel Kahneman won the Nobel Prize in 2002 in Economic Sciences for his work with Amos Tversky on the importance of being aware of likely forms of mistaken reasoning. He describes that work in Thinking: Fast and Slow (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011).

43 “In October 2016, we submitted to the Association of Theological Schools the results of our systematic programmatic assessment of the new model… . For those who graduated in 2014 – 2015, 87.5% stated that their seminary education was effective in providing for their development in personal and spiritual formation. 87.5% also found that their education was effective in helping them develop and lead effective community partnerships (e.g., multi-faith engagement, multicultural and racial justice, issues of gender equity, and other forms of political engagement).

In spite of these high levels of satisfaction, we are currently involved in a major study of how we can best meet the needs of increasing numbers of students of color.… For our students of color, most of them will be serving largely white congregations in which the people that they serve have widely varying understandings of the history and ongoing significance of racialized identities.” Hogue and Welch, “From Resistance to Resurrection,” p. 40.

44 For an indepth exploration of the complexity of service learning that is mutually empowerment see Learning Through Serving: A Student Guidebook for Service-learning and Civic Engagement across Academic Disciplines and Cultural Communities, edited by Christine M. Cress, Peter J. Collier, Vicki L. Reitenauer, and Associates (Sterling, Virginia: Stylus Publishing, 2013) the studies published in the Journal of Community Engagement and Scholarship, and the conferences hosted by the Engagement Scholarship Consortium https://engagementscholarship.org/(accessed April 19, 2023) and by the Civic Learning and Democracy Engagement Coalition https://www.collegeciviclearning.org/(accessed April 19, 2023).

45 https://edibleschoolyard.org/ https://eleducation.org/who-we-are/history https://eleducation.org/.

46 CARE, Creating Active and Reflective Educators for a Democratic Engagement is a teacher training program at Ohio University. For a description of this program see Rosalie Romano and Catherine H. Glascock, Hungry Minds in Hard Times: Educating for Complexity for Students of Poverty (New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2002), pp.152-170.

47 Ibid., p. 25.

48 Ibid., chapter two.

49 Ibid., p. 100.