Community panel

Today was a special event in the PA timeline - our community panel!

The community panel is a way for the PA students, who've worked all year on their project, to make it public - that is, to articulate their passion to those who it will impact. In our case, this was mostly others who worked at CCSEL with us and Narnian school administrators.

As usual, I was in doubt over whether it would come together - a few minutes before class started, we had only two students, nervous and confused, who hadn't worked on their project all week. One, *Tom*, was a student who had been with us along - the rock who we could depend on to be there every week. The other was vocal, but a bit of a loose cannon who missed class a lot. I ran through what I could with them, but there was so much - I knew I was overwhelming them.

When the bell rang, a TON (a Narnian ton is about 10 people) of students came pouring in - some we'd never even had in class! There were also administrators that we hadn't invited on the panel. Typical day in Narnia there.

The excitement was much different than I had experienced in my previous years coaching - where students had simply seemed frustrated, these students seemed much more excited, though much less invested. I tried to serve the role of reassuring the students (and realized how much more confident I was coaching this year in the process of doing so - I wasn't as nervous as they were, for once!).

Although Tom did most of the talking, we were able to get a word from a lot of students (although some were a bit TOO honest about their past and present drug use). The highlight for me was that MY one-to-one mentee, the quiet and most dedicated student who SWORE he wouldn't speak at the panel, contributed!

All around, despite the fantastical oddities (candid drug references, random students stealing our food, and my co-coaching consuming a face-full of wet lettuce), it was an utterly successful, if Narnian day!

Introduction

I'm going to catch you up on a slew of thoughts I've been having about PA and life in general this week, but from here on out, I'll stick to 3 posts a week: a reflective post, a connecting-PA-to-my-life post, and a recap of the week at PA post.

Here is the reflection this week, in the form of an introduction to the kind of work I do with Public Achievement (PA). Public Achievement is a program that incorporates aspects of the Saul Alinsky Community Organizing Model, based on his books Rules for Radicals and Reveille for Radicals. Although there are other community organizing models, which I hope to explore in a future post, the Alinsky model is the one that made "community organizing" the buzz word that brought Barack Obama to the White House. 

The model involves coaches (college students like me) in high schools, where we go through four stages: relationship-building, issue identification, community-based research and project implementation. The goal is to create a space for students to discover their power to create tangible change in their community. That includes open discussions about social justice issues like privilege and oppression, as well as certain key activities like one-to-ones, world as it is - world as it should be, world cafes, and others from the PA handbook.  

I know - it's a lot of vocabulary to swallow at once. And honestly, it can feel that way for everyone involved. But under all that abstraction, there is something really magical about watching people work together (more on the magic to come). 

This year, I've been working at a high school that has been through a lot in a short time. The school was shut down due to a fervor of gang violence that swept Denver during the 1990s, and continued in that neighborhood - leading to poor grades and test scores as the least of their problems. Now, they've reopened and been building their programs for about five years. Needless to say, though, they are still lacking a lot in terms of infrastructure, and GPAs and graduation rates are a constant struggle.

Unlike most PA classrooms, ours doesn't actually have a teacher present, which has created a special role for us as far as enforcing attendance and dealing with other disciplinary situations. The school definitely has a unique culture that has required some acclimation - leading us to often refer to it as Narnia, the magical land of The Lion,the Witch and the Wardrobe. Just like Narnia, our school seems to operate on it's own time, and it often feels as though we are outsiders that simply fell through the wrong wardrobe. However, hopefully, we'll make our way in our own right. 

For simplicity's sake, I'll refer to our school as Narnia for the rest of the blog, as well as changing students names to protect them from internet fame (or infamy). 

That's probably all you have the patience to read - but hopefully you'll start to gather the landscape and historical "scrolls" of Narnia through the rest of the blog. 

Peace, 

Anita