Teaching Fear

This week in North Philly Notes, Nicole Rader, author of Teaching Fear explains how parents’ fear of crime influences how they (think they) protect their children.

Parents who watch the news regularly see images of kidnapping and homicide victims and hear about school and mass shootings. Most recently, parents were bombarded with images of four young college students at the University of Idaho who were brutally murdered while sleeping.  These horrific and fear-producing crimes make parents think twice about sending their children to school, activities outside the home, or anywhere. Parents teach kids how to protect themselves from crime when they are away from home and provide a variety of lessons about stranger danger. Studies have found that up to 70% of parents are afraid of crime for their children. A recent Gallup poll study found that one in three parents recently said that they were worried about their children being a victim of a school shooting. Fear of crime is high on the list of things parents worry about for their children.

Parents may be surprised to hear that most of their fears for their children are based on myths passed down from generation to generation and reinforced by the media. These myths emphasize a fear of strangers, a fear for young, white girls, and a belief that if one tries hard enough, victimization can be prevented.

Most parents are surprised to learn that strangers rarely hurt children. When children are victimized, they are typically victimized by a family member. 

Parents are also surprised to hear that children are rarely kidnapped, and a known offender typically takes those children who are kidnapped.

Finally, research has found that school shootings are sporadic and that children are actually safer at school than almost anywhere else, including the home.  

In other words, the reality of crimes against children looks quite different from what most parents have been taught to believe about crime and victimization. What this means for parents is that they often worry about the wrong types of crimes, people, and locations of crimes happening to their children. Crime myths, then, fuel fears of strangers, fears of kidnapping, fears of school shootings, and fears of public spaces, but, ultimately, when children are kidnapped or hurt by others, it is almost always a known person in a private location (like a home). 

Parents operating with misinformation make choices on keeping children safe by taking a litany of precautions that will have little payoff in protecting children from crime. Because of fears related to stranger danger, parents avoid public locations, restrict children from being alone outside (even in the front yard), track children on their phones, and expect constant communication with their children when they are unsupervised. This exhaustive list becomes the gold standard for protecting our children. 

What this list does not include are actionable items parents can take to arm their children with accurate knowledge about crime and victimization.  The conversations with children about how to talk to others if someone they know hurts them or how to seek help when they know about friends who are being hurt by loved ones are lacking by most parents. These conversations seem harder to most parents than talking about stranger danger.  

Teaching Fear examines where parents learn crime myths—from socialization agents like parents to school, and the media—and how these agents influence what parents teach their own children. I spent 20 years researching fear of crime and safety precautions, and did a deep dive into other research, public policy, and public opinion on crime to not only outline the problem of how we teach fear to children today, but also provides parents with the tools to “teach fear better.”  

What’s a mother to do?

This week in North Philly Notes, Leah Ruppanner, author of Motherlands, writes about women who are forced to choose between working and child care.

Emily Tatro is a paralegal working full-time while balancing the demands of three school aged kids. School closures mean she is learning Seesaw, Google classroom, IXL, and RazKids while also writing up legal briefs. She is at the end of her rope.

Emily said: “My everything is suffering and I’m not sure how much longer we can keep this up. As soon as the kids are asleep, I pass out because I’m always bone tired. But, I also feel this pressure to keep up a happy-it’s-all-good face so the kids don’t feel bad or sad or scared because none of it is their fault and I don’t want them to see this pressure.”

Without the support of her mother, she would drop out of work altogether. Working full-time job on top of school closures is unsustainable.

What happens when state governments close schools to stop the spread of a deadly pathogen?

The same as before: mothers step out of employment to manage the care.

My book, Motherlands: How States Push Mothers Out of Employment, shows these patterns are nothing new. Prior to the pandemic, California had some of the highest childcare costs in the nation and some of the shortest school days. Afterschool care? Forget about it—many Californian families need but cannot access afterschool care. These structural impediments mean mothers often reduce work to part-time or drop out altogether.

As Emily says, “Childcare was always hard and now it’s just impossible. In summer, I pay someone to watch the kids and I would lose money on these days.”

These patterns are distinct to many of the states in the heartland where childcare gobbles up less of the family budget, school days are longer and afterschool care is more accessible. The result? More mothers are employed, in part, because they can access more affordable childcare.

As Motherlands shows, California is a gender progressive state and is one of the leaders in the country in empowering women. When women do work, they make more money and have access to higher level professional positions. More women are voted into California’s state legislature and California is one of the few states in the nation that provides its constituents paid parental leave.

So, what is happening here? How can California be both progressive in its gender policies but have some of the worst childcare outcomes?

Motherlands shows states tend to cluster on one of these metrics or the other—either facilitating mother’s employment through childcare resources or empowering women through policies and access to better economic markets. Only a handful of states do both—empower women and provide childcare resources. This means even the progressive states that aim to empower women must do more to support them when they become mothers.

And, now seems to be the time because women like Emily are suffering with closed schools and limited childcare support.

We need employers and governments to invest in, advocate for and execute comprehensive and effective childcare policies.

The pandemic and its impending recession is a major crisis. Within these crises, if we are smart, can come change. Putting childcare as a central policy solution is the only way forward.

Go “Back to School” with Temple University Press books

This week in North Philly Notes, we celebrate the start of the fall semester with some of our favorite education titles.

In Journeys of Sociology: From First Encounters to Fulfilling Retirements, edited by Rosalyn Benjamin Darling and Peter J. Stein, twenty-two eminent retired sociologists reflect on their lives and their career choices.

For most sociologists, their life’s work does not end with retirement. Many professors and practitioners continue to teach, publish, or explore related activities after leaving academia. They also connect with others in the field to lessen the isolation they sometimes feel outside the ivory tower or an applied work setting.

The editors and twenty contributors to the essential anthology Journeys in Sociology use a life-course perspective to address the role of sociology in their lives. The power of their personal experiences—during the Great Depression, World War II, or the student protests and social movements in the 1960s and ’70s—magnify how and why social change prompted these men and women to study sociology. Moreover, all of the contributors include a discussion of their activities in retirement.

From Bob Perrucci, Tuck Green, and Wendell Bell, who write about issues of class, to Debra Kaufman and Elinore Lurie, who explain how gender played a role in their careers, the diverse entries in Journeys in Sociology provide a fascinating look at both the influence of their lives on the discipline and the discipline on these sociologists’ lives.

Addressing Violence Against Women on College Campuses, edited by Catherine Kaukinen, Michelle Hughes Miller, and Ráchael A. Powers, considers what we know, what we are doing, and how we can improve our prevention of and response to violence against women on college campuses.

Violence against women on college campuses has remained underreported and often under addressed by both campus security and local law enforcement, as well as campus administrators. The researchers, practitioners, and activists who contribute to the pertinent volume Addressing Violence Against Women on College Campuses examine the extent, nature, dynamic and contexts of violence against women at institutions of higher education.

This book is designed to facilitate an ongoing discussion and provide direction on how best to prevent and investigate violence against women, and intervene to assist victims while reducing the impact of these crimes. Chapters detail the necessary changes and implications that are part of Title IX and other federal legislation and initiatives as well as the effect these changes have had for higher education actors, including campus administrators, victim advocates, and student activists. The contributors also explore the importance of campus efforts to estimate the extent of violence against women; educating young men and women on the nature of sexual and dating violence; and shifting efforts to both make offenders accountable for their crimes and prompt all bystanders to act.

Addressing Violence Against Women on College Campuses urgently argues to make violence prevention not separate from but rather an integral part of the student experience.

Knowledge for Social Change: Bacon Dewey, and the Revolutionary Transformation of Research Universities in the Twenty-First Century, by Lee Benson, Ira Harkavy, John Puckett, Matthew Hartley, Rita A. Hodges, Frances E. Johnston, and Joann Weeks, argues for and proposes concrete means to radically transform research universities to function as democratic, civic, and community-engaged institutions.

Employing history, social theory, and a detailed contemporary case study, Knowledge for Social Change argues for fundamentally reshaping research universities to function as democratic, civic, and community-engaged institutions dedicated to advancing learning and knowledge for social change. The authors focus on significant contributions to learning made by Francis Bacon, Benjamin Franklin, Seth Low, Jane Addams, William Rainey Harper, and John Dewey—as well as their own work at Penn’s Netter Center for Community Partnerships to help create and sustain democratically engaged colleges and universities for the public good.

Knowledge for Social Change highlights university-assisted community schools to effect a thoroughgoing change of research universities that will contribute to more democratic schools, communities, and societies. The authors also call on democratic-minded academics to create and sustain a global movement dedicated to advancing learning for the “relief of man’s estate”—an iconic phrase by Francis Bacon that emphasized the continuous betterment of the human condition—and to realize Dewey’s vision of an organic “Great Community” composed of participatory, democratic, collaborative, and interdependent societies.

Race and Class Matters at an Elite College, by Elizabeth Aries, considers how race and class collide at a prestigious liberal arts college. Aries provides a rare glimpse into the challenges faced by black and white college students from widely different class backgrounds as they come to live together as freshmen. Based on an intensive study Aries conducted with 58 students at Amherst College during the 2005-2006 academic year, this book offers a uniquely personal look at the day-to-day thoughts and feelings of students as they experience racial and economic diversity firsthand, some for the first time.

Through online questionnaires and face-to-face interviews, Aries followed four groups of students throughout their first year of college: affluent whites, affluent blacks, less financially advantaged whites from families with more limited education, and less financially advantaged blacks from the same background. Drawing heavily on the voices of these freshmen, Aries chronicles what they learned from racial and class diversity—and what colleges might do to help their students learn more.

Speaking of Race and Class: The Student Experience at an Elite College, by Elizabeth Aries with Richard Berman, examines the challenges of diversity from freshman orientation to graduation. This follow-up volume to Race and Class Matters at an Elite College, completes a four-year study of diversity at a prestigious liberal arts college. Here the fifty-five affluent black, affluent white, lower-income black, and lower-income white Amherst students whom Aries interviewed in their freshmen and senior years provide a complete picture of what (and how) each group learned about issues of race and class.

Aries presents the students’ personal perceptions of their experiences. She reveals the extent to which learning from diversity takes place on campus, and examines the distinct challenges that arise for students living in this heterogeneous community. Aries also looks more broadly at how colleges and universities across the country are addressing the challenges surrounding diversity. Speaking of Race and Class testifies to the programming and practices that have proven successful.

Liberating Services Learning and the Rest of Higher Education Civic Engagement, by Randy Stoecker, challenges—and changing—our thinking about higher education community engagement.

Randy Stoecker has been “practicing” forms of community-engaged scholarship, including service learning, for thirty years now, and he readily admits, “Practice does not make perfect.” In his highly personal critique, Liberating Service Learning and the Rest of Higher Education Civic Engagement, the author worries about the contradictions, unrealized potential, and unrecognized urgency of the causes as well as the risks and rewards of this work.

Here, Stoecker questions the prioritization and theoretical/philosophical underpinnings of the core concepts of service learning: 1. learning, 2. service, 3. community, and 4. change. By “liberating” service learning, he suggests reversing the prioritization of the concepts, starting with change, then community, then service, and then learning. In doing so, he clarifies the benefits and purpose of this work, arguing that it will create greater pedagogical and community impact.

Liberating Service Learning and the Rest of Higher Education Civic Engagement challenges—and hopefully will change—our thinking about higher education community engagement.

Incidental Racialization: Performative Assimilation in Law School, by Yung-Yi Diana Pan, examines racialization, inequality, and professional socialization.

Despite the growing number of Asian American and Latino/a law students, many panethnic students still feel as if they do not belong in this elite microcosm, which reflects the racial inequalities in mainstream American society. While in law school, these students—often from immigrant families, and often the first to go to college—have to fight against racialized and gendered stereotypes. In Incidental Racialization, Diana Pan rigorously explores how systemic inequalities are produced and sustained in law schools.
Through interviews with more than 100 law students and participant observations at two law schools, Pan examines how racialization happens alongside professional socialization. She investigates how panethnic students negotiate their identities, race, and gender in an institutional context. She also considers how their lived experiences factor into their student organization association choices and career paths.

Incidental Racialization sheds light on how race operates in a law school setting for both students of color and in the minds of white students. It also provides broader insights regarding racial inequalities in society in general.

 

University-Community Partnerships for the Public Good: A Democratic Imperative

This week in North Philly Notes, Ira Harkavy, John Puckett, Matthew Hartley, Rita A. Hodges, Francis E. Johnston, and Joann Weeks, the co-authors of Knowledge for Social Change, discuss the importance and mutual benefits of local partnerships involving the university and the community. 

Martin Luther King used the phrase “fierce urgency of now” and called for immediate “vigorous and positive action” to end segregation and the unequal treatment of African-Americans. Given the severe dysfunction of the American political system—as well as many political systems throughout the world—vigorous and positive action is also required  at this time. In particular, universities have an increased and increasing responsibility to contribute to the advancement of knowledge and improvement of the human condition.

Colleges and universities, as former Harvard University President Derek Bok and others have emphasized, have become the central societal institutions in the modern world. The path to power and success for the vast majority of leaders in science, health care, business, law—indeed, in nearly every area of American life—passes through colleges and universities. They have become the primary engines of growth for an increasingly knowledge-based global economy. Colleges and universities have also come to play a key role in their local environments as anchor institutions. They possess enormous resources (especially human resources), develop and transmit new knowledge, educate for careers and advancement, function as centers of artistic and cultural creativity, and have a powerful influence on the norms, values, and practices of the pre-K–12 schooling system. They are catalysts and hubs for local and regional economies as employers, real estate developers, clients for area vendors, and incubators for business and technology.

In the past several decades, enlightened self-interest has prompted many colleges and universities to respond to external pressures from government, foundations, and public opinion by partnering in local community economic development efforts to help solve pressing problems including poverty, crime, violence, and physical deterioration. These partnerships also manifest a renewed commitment to the historic civic and democratic purposes of higher education.

In Knowledge for Social Change, we focus on significant contributions to learning made by Francis Bacon, Benjamin Franklin, Seth Low, Jane Addams, William Rainey Harper, and John Dewey—as well as our own work at Penn’s Netter Center for Community Partnerships—to help create and sustain democratically engaged colleges and universities for the public good. We particularly highlight our model of university-assisted community schools to effect a thoroughgoing change of research universities that will contribute to more-democratic schools, communities, and societies.

We argue, however, that universities, including our own, have not fulfilled their promise.

What strategic step might help engage Penn, as well as other universities, to embrace that democratic vision actively as well as rhetorically? In one of his most important propositions, John Dewey stated, “Democracy must begin at home, and its home is the neighborly community.” Democracy, he emphasized, has to be built on face-to-face interactions in which human beings work together cooperatively to solve the ongoing problems of life. We are updating Dewey and advocating the following proposition: Democracy must begin at home, and its home is the engaged neighborly college or university and its local community partners. Neighborliness, we contend, is the primary indicator that an institution is working for the public good.

The benefits of a local community focus for college and university civic engagement programs are manifold. Ongoing, continuous interaction is facilitated through work in an easily accessible location. Relationships of trust, so essential for effective partnerships and effective learning, are also built through day-to-day work on problems and issues of mutual concern. In addition, the local community provides a convenient setting in which service learning courses, community-based research courses, and related courses in different disciplines can work together on a complex problem to produce substantive results. Work in a university’s local community, since it facilitates interaction across schools and disciplines, can also create interdisciplinary learning opportunities. Finally, the local community is a real-world learning site in which community members and academics can pragmatically determine whether the work is making a real difference and whether both the neighborhood and the institution are better as a result of common efforts.

For Dewey, knowledge and learning are most effectively advanced when human beings work collaboratively to solve specific, significant real-world problems in “a forked road situation, a situation that is ambiguous, that presents a dilemma, which poses alternatives.” Focusing on universal problems—for example, poverty, poor schooling, and inadequate healthcare—that are manifested locally is, in our judgment, the best way to apply Dewey’s brilliant proposition. A focus on local engagement is an extraordinarily promising strategy for realizing institutional mission and purpose.

“Only connect!” The powerful, evocative epigraph to E. M. Forster’s Howard’s End captures the essence of our argument—namely, that the necessary revolutionary transformation of research universities is most likely to occur in the crucible of significant, serious, sustained engagement with local public schools and their communities.

Knowledge for Social Change concludes by calling on democratic-minded academics to create and sustain a global movement dedicated to radically transforming research universities to realize Bacon’s goal of advancing knowledge for “the relief of man’s estate”—that is, the continuous improvement of humanity—as well as Dewey’s utopian vision of an organic “Great Community” composed of truly participatory, democratic, collaborative, and interdependent societies.

Temple University Press is having a Back-to-School SALE!

Addressing the dynamics of bullying on screen and in schools

This week in North Philly Notes, Laura Martocci, author of Bullying, pens an open letter about the recent film A Girl Like Her about teenage bullying. 

To Whom It May Concern:

Bullying is hardly a new topic—in fact, it is so well-worn that most teens roll their eyes at the word. They know what we want to hear, and what answers they need to give before we’ll let them go back to their iPhones.

Perhaps this is because we try to speak, without ever really having listened.
Amy Weber, writer/director of A Girl Like Her, listened—and it is obvious in the movie she made and the characters she created.

Avery (Hunter King), Brian (Jimmy Bennett), and Jessica (Lexi Ainsworth), cast in the roles of bully, bystander, and victim, respectively, bring complex, often conflicting motivations to their characters. As viewers, we get to watch the drama unfold from each of their perspectives. Ms. Weber garners sympathy for the “over-the-top” behavior of her antagonist (bully) through a plot device that puts a video-diary in her hands. We not only get a glimpse of how Avery sees things (mostly, her narcissism doesn’t allow her to see them at all) but also come to understand her choices through the context of her family. While this may not be enough to exonerate her, it does make her much more than a mouthpiece, and situates her choices as important “talking points” in the movie. 

Do her choices ring true?

What would the bully at your school do?

Similar questions surface around Brian, Jessica’s supportive friend. Brian not only listens, he enables Jessica to take actions that document the bullying. Hidden-camera videos at first help sustain Jessica by preventing her from slipping into denial about the abuse. However, Jessica ultimately cannot negotiate the onslaught, and takes drastic action. Attempting to come to terms with what Jessica has done, Brian is torn between his loyalty to her and a community desperately seeking answers.

Bystanders do not need to witness a drastic action in order to wonder what they should do, whom they might tell, and what/how much they should say. How they think about and sort these questions is another important talking point that is facilitated by the film. Is telling someone “tattling” or “supporting the victim”?

Finally, there is Jessica, the victim. We see her torment, and in itself, this is a talking point. Would anyone at your school ever be victimized like this? (Hint, the ready answer is, of course, “No.” “No” is the start of the conversation.)

A Girl Like Her understands that bullying is not only—or even primarily—about specific bad behaviors, but about the dynamics that support these behaviors, the conflicts that paralyze action, and the nuances through which teen dramas are played out.  Our children cannot engage bullying as a topic unless the conversation around it is authentic. Weber’s film captures the complexities that signal authenticity, making it a very good place to start that conversation.

This is an important movie, one I would not only want my daughters to see, but to see in an environment that would facilitate discussion around it.

Sincerely,

Laura Martocci

Sizing it up

Garrett Delavan, author of The Teacher’s Attention, explains what prompted him to write a book about class size—and why smaller is better.

When I set out to write The Teacher’s Attention I’d been teaching for about six years in a second-chance high school. I was always amazed when teachers from other schools said how difficult that must be and how they admired me. I loved my job and couldn’t believe I got paid to hang out with these amazing young people.

But that got me thinking about why some classes were harder than others and why these other teachers thought my job was so much harder. I figured out that the difference was class size, which varied immensely in my school. These were frustrating (and frustrated) kids when my classes were large, which is the only size the teachers at the traditional schools ever got.

So I started out looking to read a book—not write one—about why small classes are better than big, and to explain why most everyone you talk to finds this obvious. It might also be a book that would then try to change the reader’s mind about the other thing most everyone thinks needs no further discussion: They’re too expensive. It turned out the books out there on class size focused primarily on test scores (and grades K-3) and not the positive relationships that make teaching more enjoyable and compulsory schooling more ethical.

Eventually my research led me to include school size and the length of time teachers and students stay together as just as important factors for cultivating mentoring relationships. I decided to opt out of the myth that our schools are academic failures (on average) and focus instead on school’s participation in American childrearing and racial injustice. What the book became was a school reform proposal that disputes the need for better average test scores and argues instead for a straightforward path to raising better-mentored kids and equalizing achievement.

While the book was in its final edits, I moved to a traditional middle school to gain more perspective on the system I’m criticizing. Yesterday I was at work getting set up in our new building and several teachers remarked with laughter that the new computer lab had only 30 computers. “What do we do with the rest of the class?” Last year I had to add two more desks to the thirty-six I started with. I asked the counselor my numbers this year and none was over thirty. I breathed a sigh of relief. He told me not to sigh yet because there was still a registration day coming up.

I may be ranting and raving this year on A Small Class Size Blog at www.classsize.org/blog.