Community Engagement in African American communities

[Laurie Sommers]

https://savingplaces.org/stories/community-engagement-preservation-organizations-and-saving-black-history?utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter&utm_campaign=weekly#.Yu58n6QpCDY 

More from National Trust. They say community engagement is now part of preservation.  ???

Is community engagement part of preservation training in the major programs?

[Jeremy Wells]

The question about whether “community engagement” is a part of historic preservation education (e.g., undergraduate and graduate degree programs) is complicated. The answer depends on how “community engagement” is defined.

For instance, the original historic preservation degree programs that various universities (e.g., Columbia University, Cornell University, University of Vermont) developed in the 1970s all had some kind of community engaged component. Cornell, in particular, emphasized planning with (white) communities. So, yes, there were students who would go into the field and work—to some extent—with the local people there, who were typically wealthy property owners. Sometimes these people were data sources (e.g., oral history) or would simply let the students enter their property to document it. All of this work has long been called “community engagement” in the preservation field.

If you define community engagement as the grass-roots/bottom up involvement of people from a broad socioeconomic/racial/ethnic demographic with an emphasis on redistribution of power, then this earlier “engagement” was anything but — it was exclusionary. The reason is that up until at least this century, nearly all such work in the field meant that students were engaging with white people who often had considerable wealth. It wasn’t until the past couple of decades or so that students would actually go to field sites associated with marginal communities. But, even in this latter case, the students would typically come in as experts and educate the local residents/property or business owners about their own history. In this situation, the students (often unknowingly) presented themselves as more qualified experts on the history of a local community than the local community members, themselves. 

Bottom-up engagement in which local residents from marginalized communities are considered to be civil experts and initiate and lead community engaged projects are still very rare in preservation education. This is slightly more common in archaeological education, but even so there’s still a lot of archaeology that takes place that is exclusionary to the very communities it purports to serve.

Let me give you an example from my own experience. In the program with which I used to be associated, there was an archaeologist that did “community engaged” work. He located a nearby neighborhood that has a long history of African American residents and, independently, chose where to start conducting an excavation. He reached out to a handful of local African American leaders and asked for permission to dig on the site, which he received. The summer field school, which this activity was largely focused, was attended by students who all self-identified as white and none of whom lived in the area. At no point were local African American residents in the neighborhood involved in the excavations, including decisions about where to excavate, how to excavate, or how to interpret. When the project was complete, the white students, who were in the role of conventional experts, “educated” the African American community about their own history. My program called this “community engaged” archaeology. There are many, similar examples for above ground projects as well.

This practice is de rigueur in nearly all historic preservation education programs who try to market themselves as “community centered” in their work. This was part of the reason why I left my program in that my fellow colleagues didn’t see the situation in the same light and were often quite self-centered in the reasons why they did their professional work and then justified what they did through a contrived “community” lens.

Whenever you see the phrase, “community engagement,” it’s vacuous without any specific context, especially in regard to the distribution of power between conventional and civil experts. If there is no attempt to empower civil experts, it’s just a bunch of marketing gibberish, and, in my assessment, an unethical continuation of traditional power structures.

-Jeremy

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Jeremy C. Wells, Ph.D. • Principal (he/him)  240.258.8032  jer...@heritagestudies.org  heritagestudies.org  7304 Carroll Ave., #190, Takoma Park, MD 20912 (USA)

[Gregory Hansen]

It’d be a little tricky to comment about community engagement within Heritage Studies, namely because there aren’t that many Heritage Studies programs here in the United States. We do have a class in HP within our program, and the focus includes responsiveness to a community’s interests and needs. The field schools that are also part of Heritage Studies also are created in response to interaction with community representatives. This discussion, of course, begs the big question “What is the community?” I think that it’s worthwhile to talk about the challenges in defining community – and some of the critiques of unreflective ideas about community. But – I don’t think that teaching a few courses that engage with HP is really going to resolve these challenges. Rather, a more useful approach is to set out these kinds of issues and show ways of working to resolve some of these challenges. Some of the projects have been grounded in regions with predominantly Black populations, and other projects have involved diverse communities.

 

I teach a fieldwork class as well as other courses that deal with public programming and various representations/presentations of culture. The writing that I use blends community engagement into a lot of the discussion. The structure of academic programming in which professors only work with students for one semester at a time also creates some problems with trying to engage with community interests.

 

One resources that has given us more of a long-term relationship with communities has been our Heritage Studies sites. Here’s a link:

 

https://arkansasheritagesites.astate.edu/

 

Although we have an A-State administrator who directs the program that encompasses all of these sites, there are directors of specific sites who work within the region. Many of those directors are people who live within the community. There is community involvement in a lot of the projects and programming, and I like how programming connected to HP has been grounded in community interests. One example was a survey project in Tyronza, Arkanas that was connected to the Southern Tenant Farmers Museum. Students from A-State worked within the community to document buildings. This project spun-off into other activities that were sparked by this initial survey-type work. Thinking of heritage more as process rather than product is  useful, here. The specific programs that emerge within the work actually are often just starting points for longer and more extensive projects that address some of the interests of community members over time. What’s interesting and important at one point in time within these sites will often change within a few years. The labor union was created in the 1930s and it was integrated and included woman in positions of leadership. Research and projects that have been developed within the past two decades have focused on engaging diverse community members in the research and programming.

 

These same kinds of activities happen at other sites – sometimes with mixed results. We’ve also explored how the initial efforts to engage the community don’t necessarily work out so well. Ruth Hawkins wrote a reflective essay about these Heritage Sites that Michelle Stefano and I published in the 2015 (Vol 37) issue of the Missouri Folklore Society Journal’s special issue on Folklore and Heritage Studies. One interesting point that she raised is that some of the local perspectives about the history might be at odds with the project coordinators’ interests. When A-State founded the Southern Tenant Farmers Museum, for example, some of the local attitudes within the community weren’t exactly supportive of the project. There was a vociferous segment of the population of the town that didn’t want the former HQ of the Southern Tenant Farmers Union to be preserved. There were even threats of arson as some noted that they’re rather see the building burned down rather than preserved. So – once again – we might want to add another layer of complexity to our ideas about community engagement. To make a long story (and e-mail) short, the tensions have largely been resolved. One of the site’s directors was from the area, knew the people, and eventually won over (most of) the nay-sayers. It just took some time and consciousness, engaged, work. Now, the general sentiment is that people value having this site in their town.

 

My take is that community-engagement would be hard to teach specifically within coursework, at least within the way that graduate education is structured. However – I do like how the writing on community engagement and collaborative fieldwork/programming is often blended into the scholarship that we can use in our classes.

 

Students and alumni who have moved into doing projects after they complete their coursework are good folks to talk to. A number of them have explained how some of the class discussion and reading didn’t become that relevant to them until they actually started working within various communities for their projects.

 

- Gregory

 

 

 

 

From: hp_...@googlegroups.com <hp_...@googlegroups.com> On Behalf Of Laurie Sommers
Sent: Saturday, August 6, 2022 9:41 AM
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Subject: [hp_folk] Community Engagement in African American communities

 

https:⁠​//savingplaces.⁠​org/stories/community-engagement-preservation-organizations-and-saving-black-history?utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter&utm_campaign=weekly#.⁠​Yu58n6QpCDY  More from National Trust.⁠​ They say community engagement

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[Ross Peterson-Veatch]

Gregory,

I think you are spot on with the issues related to working with students. It’s hard because of the semester-based calendar, and because getting better at engaging people can be a much more “affective” or emotional kind of learning than a cognitive kind. But many professional programs like teacher education, nursing, and social work have built-in training for working with communities in their programs. When Rory Turner built the Cultural Sustainability program he wanted to include a deep dive into “personal development” for the students.

 

The leadership course I built back in 2010 for the launch of that program addresses some of the challenges Jeremy was talking about and the ones below. It uses a “stance” in leadership as opposed to a “style”, and it’s called “The Partnering Stance”. The stance has three phases that overlap: 1) Learner (“listening” is the skill I develop with students), 2) Co-creator (“visioning in community” is the skill in this one), 3) Servant (“considered action” is the skill – that’s about helping to organize the work and also getting in there and doing what needs to be done).

 

Rory Turner and I are doing a workshop on it on the Wednesday afternoon before the official beginning of AFS in Tulsa this year. We thought it was a very important feature of the “training program” in Cultural Sustainability. I used the stance as the conceptual center for a leadership masters in Intercultural Leadership I started at my previous institution. 

 

These kinds of things, though, are very few and far between. Especially since we don’t do a lot of “apprenticeship”-type field work to teach our students. And, deep exploration of your personal experience and how it affects your ability to connect with people are not something we do that often in academia. I guess it feels too “squishy” for some in our judgement-oriented environment. But I believe it is critical as we continue to expand the work of community engagement.

 

Ross

 

Ross Peterson-Veatch, Ph.D.

Vice President for Academic Affairs and Dean of the College

Professor of Folklore

Southwestern College

100 College St.

Winfield, KS 67156

Ph: (620) 229-6090

ross.peter...@sckans.edu

 

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