Art in Mart Photot

Community Art Practice in Joal, Senegal

Community Art practice - Joal, Sengal


Mosaic Path, Joal, Sengal



Community Art Practice in Mart, Texas

Text Poem Collages

Text Poem Collage #5


Text Poem Collage #4


Text Poem Collage #3


Text Poem Collage #2




Text Poem Collage #1

Reflective Practice

My first encounter with reflective practice was in 2000, working for WestEd and the State of California Department of Mental Health to infuse infant-preschool mental health practice in county mental health systems. We began with eight pilot counties, providing training to practitioners and administrators, technical support, and forming collaborations within each county, particularly between early childhood, special education and mental health. Bruce Perry’s groundbreaking research on brain development during the first three years of a child’s life provided evidence that early intervention needed to occur long before a child’s fifth, or even third, birthday. The results of his research set in motion relationship building mental health practice with parents and caregivers of infants and very young children, demonstrating the importance of interaction with infants. His visual depictions comparing the brain development of children in Romanian orphanages to children who experienced nurture, love, and frequent physical and emotional engagement was astounding – propelling mental health and early childhood into a new research and practice trajectory

As a member of the WestEd/Department of Mental Health team and liaison to three of the pilot counties, I was required to travel frequently and interact with county and community agencies. Shifting the paradigm on service delivery was no small feat – from the actual intervention to developing billing systems or as was often the case – finding ways to access existing ones. Our work included coordinating large and small sale trainings, facilitating meetings with community and agency representatives, and faculty in psychology and psychiatry from local universities into the collaborations. We often found ourselves mitigating the obstacles inherent to new partnerships and old resentments. Mental health professionals in some county systems liked to joke – are we going to put babies on couches and do therapy?

The model of reflective practice and reflective supervision was implemented as part of our work with the counties and in our individual supervision. Reflective practice and supervision was a new concept to me; however, most notable was the way I experienced supervision compared to my previous jobs. Reflective supervision was more of an exchange and problem solving session, not punitive. I had not read Schön's work; however, what resonated with me at that time was a more intuitive and natural way to practice, supervise, and be supervised that allowed for discovery.

A reflective practitioner, according to Schön (1983), “allows himself to experience surprise, puzzlement, or confusion in a situation which he finds uncertain or unique. He reflects on the phenomenon before him, and on the prior understandings which have been implicit in his behavior. He carries out an experiment, which serves to generate both a new understanding of the phenomenon and a change in the situation. (p.68). I realize this is dated material; however, I take issue with his use of the masculine rather being gender neutral – it was written in 1983, not 1963. (Had to say that before I continue) He further states, “when a practitioner makes sense of a situation he perceives to be unique, he sees it as something already present in his repertoire. To see this site as that one is not to subsume the first under a familiar category or rule…the familiar situation functions as a precedent, or a metaphor, or…an exemplar for the unfamiliar one” (p.138).

In Mart, my work has been confusing, full of surprise and discovery. It has been an experiment of sorts; however, I have relied upon my past experiences to help formulate a new and refined approach, inviting engagement with the phenomenon or situation at hand. In the Knight and Schwartzman (2006) CRAFT model that I use with my students, reflection is an important step; however, in the throws of action – and often the reality of community work eclipses reflection. I have had to dial back their urgency to complete a project for the sake of having a finished product in an artificial time period of a semester. Several of my students have expressed an appreciation of the two-hour drive as critical time for planning on the way and reflection on the return to Austin. What seemed like a burden in the beginning of the semester has become a relished time for reflection and process. Schön (1983) states, “When someone reflects in action, he becomes a researcher in the practice context. He is not dependent on the categories of established theory and technique, but constructs a new theory of the unique case” (p.68).

My students’ work in Mart has redefined their previous concept of research – they now define their encounters with residents, and time spent mingling at cafes, grocery store and schools as research. I like how Schön (1983) describes a practitioner who reflects in action, “ a practitioner in action tends to question the definition of his task, the theories in action that he brings to it, and the measures of performance by which he is controlled. And as he questions these things, he also questions elements of the organizational knowledge structure in which his functions are embedded” (p.337). I see my graduate students coming to similar junctures in their Mart work, broadening their definition of research, fieldwork, and successful community engagement. The ensuing discourse that has evolved on the student blogs between the students and my co-instructor has created an exchange of ideas and candid reflections. Schon (1983) refers to “reciprocal reflection-in-action, something unlikely to be discovered by “ordinary social science which tends to direct, and treat as reality, the patterns of institutionalized contention and limited learning which individuals transcend, if at all, only on rare occasions” (p.354). I believe our experience in Mart is a rare occasion as far as the academy and typical pedagogy go. The territory is largely unfamiliar for most of my students – the pronounced racial polarization in this day and age, the way those with power and privilege still dictate the agenda - even in the midst of Mart’s spiraling decay, and the degree of rural poverty that remains off the grid for many Americans.

Knight, K. S., M. (2006). Beginner's guide to community-based arts. Oakland: New Village Press.
Schön, Donald (1983). Educating the Reflective Practitioner. Basic Books.

Leavers and Stayers: Thoughts on the Diaspora

While conducting a community needs assessment for San Francisco Head Start in 2005, I reviewed data that took my breath away. I could have sworn the number of African American children in foster care was a misprint, the percentages were simply too high to believe. When analyzing secondary data, it is important to go “beyond” the numbers to understand the dynamics and causes of a phenomenon. To perform my due diligence as a consultant, my responsibility extended beyond creating a document with charts and tables, I had to make sense of the trends revealing themselves in the data to propose recommendations for services. Upon further examination that included many phone calls and meetings with data analysts from the City and County of San Francisco, social services, residents of the impacted communities, and others who knew the history of these neighborhoods with “shifting demographics” I was able to piece together the puzzle – or find the story.

The story in San Francisco was one of immigration over time, propelled by a variety of factors attached to the larger American theme that has built this melting pot nation. For the African American community in San Francisco, Oakland and Richmond it was the shipyards that became the magnet for what Isabel Wilkerson terms I her new book, The Warmth of Other Suns, “America’s great migration”. The shipyards were located in the Hunters Point neighborhood off Third Street, and many African American workers bought homes there and raised their families. There were other enclaves of African Americans – Western Addition with its lovely Victorians, and Bay View in close proximity to Hunter’s Point. Gentrification saw the end to a string African American presenle in the Western Addition; those homes were bought up and sent folks packing to Ingelside and beyond the city limits. Bay View became more of a mixed neighborhood with Samoan immigrants in the 1950s, and later the wave of Southeast Asian immigrants and refugees populated the community along with a simmering of tensions and resentments about allocations of resources and the purchase of homes by multiple family members of Southeast Asians. Neighborhood residents changed, were gentrified, the more wealthy stayed much the same; however, Hunters Point with its beautiful views of the downtown skyline and warm micro climate weather fell in further decline. Even the new light rail line along Third Street did not do much to change landscape of Hunters Point. Perhaps it was just a matter of time until the neighborhood experienced the predicted renaissance, though in 2005 I faced troubling data and a community in crisis.

One of my neighbors in my Easy Bay neighborhood was raised in Hunters Point, and until early 2000, her mother still lived in the family home. She described a vibrant working class neighborhood with close relations and community pride. She is my age - born in 1957, therefore she witnessed desegregation, the political movements of the sixties, wore an Afro in high school where she was a cheer leader, and sadly the decline that took place in the late 1970s with a shift in the manufacturing base taking good paying jobs overseas, crack cocaine epidemic, and people who had the means during those turbulent times sold and left for greener pastures – Ingleside District and the suburbs of the Bay Area. A dispersion, another leg of the journey for the African American Diaspora that began for most in West Africa, or what Paul Gilroy termed the “Black Atlantic” to the slave holding American South and for those who made the epic journey of the great migration north, Midwest, and west.

While working on the community assessment I had lengthy conversations with the head analyst for the Department of Social Services who introduced the concept of “leavers and stayers” to me. He helped me get my arms around the number of African American youth in foster care, and it really boiled down to migration. The once vibrant family centered working class neighborhood described by my friend (and many, many others) had dispersed beginning in the late 1970s. Families were separated by means, and those who had the ability left Hunters Point, and those without were the same families ravaged by joblessness, neighborhood decline and loss of professionals and businesses, and perhaps most devastating in the 1980s – crack cocaine. During a brief stint in Child Protective Services in Alameda County in 1988, I saw first hand the residual of crack on African American families. In fact, I did not need to look even that far, friends of ours who held good jobs in the SF transit system with homes and kids in private school lost it all and tragically some never made it back. The children who by then were called “crack babies” were often raised by grandmothers or in foster care. A knife had come and sliced communities apart. Driving through West or East Oakland, Hunters Point, or similar neighborhoods, it was not uncommon to see hollowed out addicts who resided in abandoned “crack houses” gathering on corners or roaming the streets.

If I was looking for an answer to the question of why so many African American kids in foster care, I could trace it on a map. GIS mapping was the rage then and I could view hot spots and accompanying data. The leavers, who might, and as they have in other times provided the support and resources to sustain though a crack epidemic, were gone. The stayers of those African American families who arrived in Hunters Point, full of hope and ready to work in the expanding shipyards during the war, were left to their own devices in a declining neighborhood despite the promise of better times (gentrification?) with the light rail line and new housing developments they could not afford. There was no mystery in the obvious city wide economic changes, loss of manufacturing jobs replaced by designer showcases and condos that had happened throughout the nation. The failure of urban renewal and the razing of communities and historical structures were evident in the built environment. But it is the stories that lend meaning and render us heartbroken. Included in my final documents were excerpts from those stories and brief histories of the communities from their inception. Context is everything when analyzing data and developing services for the children and families that reside in the communities the data represents. We are obligated to present a full picture.

In Mart I have observed a similar phenomenon. A good example is my husband’s journey to California, typical of many other Mart residents, and in particular African American males of his generation. He graduated high school and immediately joined the Navy where he was stationed in San Diego before shipping out to Japan. When he was discharged three years later, he spent a brief time in San Diego before heading to San Francisco where his older brother lived. He took the test for the Post Office where he worked before going to the transit system, MUNI. He worked for MUNI for 30 years, as a cable car grip man, then a manger after graduating San Francisco State University on the GI Bill. He left Mart and essentially never looked back; however, he spun tales of Mart for years and although racism was palpable, he descriptions of a vibrant black community were powerful and moving. He remained in contact with his family, visiting for funerals and always available to send money when needed. When the family reunions began in 2002, Mart was a shell of its former self, a decaying town that held far different fates for the leavers and the stayers.

Wahlbeck (2002)discusses the concept of Diaspora as a transnational social organization that relates to both country of origin and the society of settlement, and proposes this concept as an analytical tool for study of refugees in their country of exile. Wahlbeck warns that when using the Diaspora concept, “one must avoid generating a disregard of phenomena such as racism, discrimination, and exclusion, which are connected to the social structures in the country of settlement” (p.233). Using Wahlbeck’s definition of “ideal type” as a “form of social organization though for analytical purposes only” (p.230), and although Wahlbeack is referring to international dispersion of refugees, and cites an empirical study of Kurdish refuges, it begs the question when applying this analytical tool to the African American Diaspora and (Re)Diaspora - Are we refugees in our own country? When faced with social problems of epic proportions perhaps there is such a thing as social refugees dispersed or bound to remain depending on your means? How can our layered analysis uncover the soul of the Diaspora? As the grandchild of Jewish immigrants who made the trek across the Atlantic through Ellis Island to escape pogroms in search of a better life, I can best describe that experience through the eyes of my grandmother, sixteen years old, frightened, leaving her family and all she knew. Her journey to America and her life once here was one of constant hardship. Yet here I am, the result of one Diaspora creating new dispersions from the East Coast to the West, my children a fusion of the Black Atlantic, Great Migration, Eastern European Jewish Migration of the early 1900s, and the mobile society post 1960s. The “duel orientation” (p.234) that Wahlbeck (2002) refers to towards the society of origin and settlement may be even more than that as migration is multifaceted and includes (re)settlement and attachment in several waves. To grasp the full extent of data and trends that baffle and confound, a closer look into the stories, hearts and souls of the Diasporic experience reveal a significant piece of the puzzle.

Wahlbeck, O. (2002). The concept of diaspora as an analytical tool in the study of refugee communities. Journal of Ethnic and Refugee Studies, 28(2), 221-238.

Method to My Madness

As my project this semester, I have chosen autoethnography as a method to explore community building and public scholarship in Mart, Texas from my multiple vantage points - white member of a black family, teacher, researcher, and project coordinator. Although ethnography originates in anthropology as a mode of inquiry to study culture, it is now used in many social science disciplines for qualitative research. The purpose, definition, and approaches of ethnography are continually debated and modified to fit a necessary context (Creswell, 2007) and once such modification of the ethnographic method is autoethnography – the study of culture through the self. My reading on autoethnography includes several examples of how autoethnography was used to document and describe a variety of investigations including methodological questions (Borochowitz, 2005), a sociology of the academy (Pelias, 2003), research about blindness (Pfau, 2007), artistic encounters (Kumsa, 2007), and a frame work for qualitative research (Watson, 2008). I also read an article on the use of personal narrative as a means of representing the role of a hospital social worker (Craig, 2007) that struck me as being a close relation of autoethnography. Also included in my readings are articles that examine the method and its potential and challenges (Denzin, 2006; O'Byrne, 2007; Taber, 2010) as a mode of inquiry in qualitative research. O’Byrne (2007) demarcates ethnography and autoethnography and discusses the advantages and disadvantages of mixed method research that uses these methods concurrently. What may seem like a mainstream approach in one discipline may not be mainstream outside of previous boundaries. He advocates for recognition of “the social nature of ethnographic research, with its multiple approaches and schools of thought, which have appropriated and redefine the original applications at all phases of research projects” (p.1389).



Denzin (2006) dissects various forms of autoethnography; analytic, narrative genres closely linked to ethnography (as seen in Craig’s article) that include more artistic expression – fiction, poetry, performance texts, comedy, layered accounts and other mixed genres. Creative methods in autoethnography are defined by Richardson and Pierre (2005) as creative analytical practices (CAP). I thought back to my text poems and the collage portrait method I developed last semester as part of a narrative thematic pilot study while reading the analysis Denzin wrote of between the two schools of thought in autoethnography, I found merit in both; however, as an artist who has chronicled my experience along with the experiences of others through visual work, I am drawn to CAP. Denzin further states;
The work of a good realist ethnographer has always been to study and understand a social setting, a social group, or a social problem. Good ethnographers have always believed in documenting and analyzing those phenomena for fellow scholars. They have gone for the best data, never loosing sight of their research focus, even when studying insider meanings, including their own (p.421).


Collage Portrait of JB



As a second year doctoral student who spent the entirety of my first year in methods and data analysis classes, I have listened to countless debates and critiques of qualitative and quantitative methods. Qualitative methods speak to the questions and research I intend to pursue; however, as a writer of community assessments and major grant applications, I have relied on secondary data and outcomes of quantitative studies in addition to qualitative data from focus groups, interviews, and observation. The context of my work in Mart feels best suited to autoethnography as a method to access the rapidly unfolding events and change process occurring in the community between and with the residents, students, and built environment. I make this choice in accordance with post-modern critical theory, and its assumption that “researches are the tools of research and thus construct their findings, which, in turn, allows them to act in two different roles simultaneously” (O’Byrne, 2007, p.1389). Denzin (2006) posits, “Ethnography is not an innocent practice. Our research practices are performative, pedagogical, and political. Through our writing and our talk, we enact the worlds we study. These performances are messy and pedagogical. They instruct our readers about this world and how we see it. The pedagogical is always moral and political; by enacting a way of seeing and being, it challenges, contests, or endorses the official, hegemonic ways of seeing and representing” (p.422).


UT students with Mart residents Janet Bridgewater and Mrs. Handy (103 years old and former teacher in integrated and segregated schools in Mart)


UT students with Mart High students


When I consider my role as researcher and teacher, I see the wisdom in Denzin’s perspective. I assist my students in interpreting the phenomena in Mart - be it racial, political, or historical. My work in Mart states a position to enact change while striving to engage the community as a whole. We brush against resistance to change as well as those who embrace it. In the course of one day my UT students met with community members who while stating an intention to engage in an act of change are still reluctant (library commons project) and high school students who approach them, eager to talk and share their visions of change in Mart – and better yet, offering themselves up to work towards the goal of bettering their community. The constant unfolding of stories and instances that reflect the experiences of Mart residents who are now meeting the UT students they have read about in the local paper, who watched Muhsana Ali labor daily on a magical mosaic mural and perhaps took the step to approach her and add their touch in some way, grandparents and parents who sat proudly as they viewed documentaries made by their children during the media camp, and even those who have tried to stymie the change that has slowly gained momentum in ways big and small are all part of the equation and converging worlds of a community-university partnership.


References

Borochowitz, D. Y. (2005). Teaching a Qualitative Research Seminar on Sensitive Issues. Qualitative Social Work, 4(3), 347-362.
Craig, R. W. (2007). A Day in the Life of a Hospital Social Worker: Presenting our Role Through the Personal Narrative. Qualitative Social Work, 6(4), 431-446.
Creswell, J. W. (2007). Qualitative Inquiry & Research Design, Choosing Among Five Approaches Thousand Oaks: Sage.
Denzin, N. K. (2006). Analytic Autoethnography, or Deja Vu all Over Again. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, 35(4), 419-428.
Kumsa, M. K. (2007). The Space in-Between. Qualitative Social Work, 6(4), 489-493.
O'Byrne, P. (2007). The Advantages and Disadvantages of Mixing Methods: An Analysis of Combining Traditional and Autoethnographic Approaches. Qualitative Health Research, 17(10), 1381-1391.
Pelias, R. (2003). The Academic tourist: An Auto Ethnography. Qualatative Inquiry, 9(3), 369-373.
Pfau, H. (2007). To Know Me Now. Qualitative Social Work, 6(4), 397-410.
Richardson, Laurel and elizabeth Adams St. Pierre. 2005 Writing: A method of inquiry. In Handbook of Qualitative Research. 3rd ed., ed. N.K. Denzin and Y.S. Linclon (959-78). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Taber, N. (2010). Institutional ehtnography, autoethnography, and narrative: an argument for incorporating multiple methods. Qualitative Research, 10(1), 05-25.
Watson, C. (2008). Picturing Validity: Autoethnography and the Representation of Self? Qualitative Inquiry, 15(3), 526-544.

Reflections on Public Scholarship: Afterthoughts from the Imagining America Conference in Seattle

I spent three days among some of the most innovative public scholars in the nation. From panel presentations to poster sessions, I learned of exciting academy-community partnerships, fresh approaches to the pedagogy of service learning, and the challenges faced in implementation – both in the community, and the academy. With the backdrop of recent readings for this class and my struggles as an instructor and community practitioner, I arrived at IA in hopes of learning new strategies to further my development as an engaged scholar, and perhaps refine my understanding of what public scholarship is and its potential to facilitate sustainable community development.



The sessions offered a variety of program examples, their successes and challenges. There were opportunities to discuss the integration of critical theory, reflection, scholarship, and engaged practice. I was invited to share my Mart experiences in a closed seminar on equity and mutual benefit within community-university partnerships. As with most gatherings of this kind, there were standout moments and programs that ignited and inspired – sending my brain to overdrive mode. The conversations and networking that occurred outside the sessions was as much or more valuable than the sessions themselves. The more candid discussions revealed the frustrations of doing public scholarship, meaningful service learning projects, and community engagement work in the academy, particularly R-1 universities who, in some institutions - not all, view service learning as a means of collecting data and conducting “research” rather than promote sustainable change and student learning through reciprocal and reflective practice (thanks Jen Saffron for the articulation ). We also dared to tread in the murky area of mistakes and challenges, burnout, and how hard this work really is when putting theory to practice. Simply put, this is messy stuff all the way around.



I was inspired by many of programs happening around the country in urban and rural areas, on campuses, in storefronts, with school districts, and those embedded in and directed by the community with the academy in a more peripheral relationship. IA is spearheading several innovative initiatives including a tenure initiative, and more recently a mixed method study to develop profiles of public scholars at the graduate and early career stage. (visit http://www.imaginingamerica.org/) The gathering of folks doing this work from all over the country helps with perspective, support, and generates lots of new ideas. I hope to see more of the community partners in the future. Last year in New Orleans I presented the Mart work on a panel with Stephen Sloan from Baylor University Oral History Institute and Janet Bridgewater, a Mart resident. Everyone was interested in Janet's stories and perspective – far more than Stephen’s and mine (as it should be). As with most organizations these days, IA functions on a limited budget; however, supporting residents from the communities we work in partnership with to attend is invaluable.


Stephen Sloan, Janet Bridgewater, Paula Gerstenblatt - Imagining America Conference 2009


I also think about how building sustainable communities has to include the academy and sustainable public scholarship and service learning programs built on the principals of reciprocity and reflection – not just the collection of data for research and publication in journals that most of the folks we work in communities will never read or perhaps even fail to be advanced by. This is ever present in my mind as the semester proceeds with our students in Mart and the refinement of the course for next semester and beyond. I am also giving great thought to my multiple roles and if my attempt at functioning in this capacity is way too ambitious and perhaps even impossible. The Capra piece on leadership was helpful; however, the particulars of my multiple role quandary may prevent me from being effective, therefore, I am evaluating the best course for the project, my research, and my place in Mart as extended family member. More to come on that dilemma!