Spring 2015_Adventure Six: Demonstration, Celebration, Pay it Forward!

By this point in your journey, you have accomplished some pretty powerful things.  You tried "on for size" some different ways of thinking, about you, about others, about place, and about change, .... and now it's time to breathe a little.

After watching the above video, read the following:

"If you're lucky enough to live without want, it's a natural impulse to help others in need. But, asks philosopher Peter Singer, what's the most effective way to give charitably? He talks through some surprising thought experiments to help you balance emotion and practicality -- and make the biggest impact with whatever you can share.

Sometimes controversial, always practical ethicist Peter Singer stirs public debate about morality, from animal welfare to global poverty.

Peter Singer may be, as The New Yorker calls him, the planet’s “most influential living philosopher.” The Australian academic specializes in applied ethics, to which he takes a secular, utilitarian approach -- minimize suffering, maximize well-being. He gained recognition in the 1970s with his groundbreaking book Animal Liberation: A New Ethics for Our Treatment of Animals, which questions society’s tendency to put human needs above those of members of other species. And he draws fire from critics who object to his fascinating argument in favor of an obligation to help the global poor that sets the bar so high that it means we are almost all living unethically. His defense of euthanasia and infanticide, in some circumstances, has led to protests against his lectures and to teaching position at Princeton.

But Singer’s collective body of work is more acclaimed than controversial. He has written the classic text Practical Ethics and many other books, with more in progress. He lectures at Princeton, where he is professor of bioethics, and the University of Melbourne, where he is a laureate professor. You can find dozens of brief, brilliant essays at Project Syndicate, where Singer examines the philosophical questions surrounding current topics like Obamacare, computer piracy and obesity."

Now it's time for your last prompts.

• Prompt One: Having been through this experience, what advice would you offer to next year's Learning Community students who are participating in the Better Place Projects?  Be really, really honest here.  Pay it Forward.  Truly.

• Prompt Two: How has Peter Singer's video impacted your understanding of making your place a better one?

Responses to this prompt is prior to the next Learning Community meeting time.

Spring 2015_Adventure Five: Looking Back, Leaning into Now, Moving Forward

Reflection is a particularly important component to Service Learning, so let's do a little bit of that now.  After watching the above videos, follow these steps:

Step One: Take a few moments to think (or reflect) back on your spring semester.

Step Two: Have you had a powerful learning experience that you encountered throughout the Better Place Project? Think back to "what happened" in those moments where you learned something. If you did not have a learning experience, how can you create a "take away" with this experience in mind?  

Step Three: Now place yourself in the position of the other people who shared the experience with you (the observers or other LC members) and imagine how they might describe it. 

Step Four: Having reflected on the experience and the differing perspectives of the people who shared it with you, describe what you learned from trying to view the experience from multiple perspectives. Share those descriptions below.

Step Five: Simon Sinek asks the question, "can you be your own observer?"  How would you respond to that?

Step Six: Courtney Spence states, "life lessons don't happen in the moment. They happen when you take the time to reflect on that moment."  How can you reflect on your "moments"?


Answers to this prompt are due by the beginning of Adventure Six.

Spring 2015_Adventure Four: Action, What happened, So What, and Who Cares?

After watching this video, take a few minutes to visit this webpage.  After familiarizing yourself with the site, make a list of things that you are thankful for.

Now, pick three of those things that you have used to serve others.  List those below.
Describe how this idea of "being grateful" and "serving others" is central to the work that you've done to make your place better.

Responses to this prompt are due at the beginning of Adventure Five. 

More about Brother Steindl-Rast (the speaker in the video):

Steindl-Rast was born and raised in Vienna, Austria. He received his MA degree from the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts and his Ph.D. in experimental psychology from the University of Vienna (1952). He emigrated to the United States in the same year and became a Benedictine monk in 1953 at Mt. Saviour Monastery in Pine City, New York, a newly founded Benedictine community. With permission of his abbot, Damasus Winzen, in 1966 he was officially delegated to pursue Buddhist-Christian dialogue and began to study Zen with masters Haku'un Yasutani, Soen Nakagawa, Shunryu Suzuki and Eido Tai Shimano.

He co-founded the Center for Spiritual Studies with Jewish, Buddhist, Hindu and Sufi teachers and is a member of the Lindisfarne Association. His writings include Gratefulness, the Heart of Prayer, The Music of Silence (with Sharon Lebell), Words of Common Sense and Belonging to the Universe (co-authored with Fritjof Capra). He also co-founded A Network for Grateful Living, an organization dedicated to gratefulness as a transformative influence for individuals and society.

Spring 2015_Adventure Three: What can you do, what do you want to do, and who can help?

As you are learning this semester, much of what we learn and do is built atop a finite amount of experiences, both academic and non-academic. At the beginning of every service learning experience, it could be said that we are simply creating some stuff that will help our communities (our "places") learn some stuff that will hopefully connect to other stuff that they already do and know.  In this way, we are creators, and so are they.  We give to each other, making one another "better".

We rarely do this alone, however.  In fact, we often have lots and lots of creative help all around us, and it could be argued that many of our friends, family, networks, teachers, peers, etc., are simply waiting for us to create something with them too.
The above video is about kids, and the students that you are surrounded by at the university are a bit older, but the lesson is salient.

According to Google, it takes about .46 seconds to find 13,000,000 results for the following search terms: globe's most pressing problems.  Bing found 35,300,000.  That's a lot. The first hit on both engines will lead to HERE.  It's interesting.  Take a look.


Now, think back to your Via Character Survey (if you have not done one just yet, click HERE, and begin to plan what it is that you are going to do to make your place a better one.  

Remember, as pointed out in the video, taking creative risks can be frightening!  But you must try, and trying is a major part of Mapping Your Plan.

To help with mapping your plan, take a few minutes to respond to the following prompts. Try to answer each prompt in just a few sentences:

• What is Servant Leadership?
• What is Service Learning and Civic Engagement?
• How does this work impact citizenship?

Responses to these prompts are due at the beginning of Adventure Four.

Spring 2015_Adventure Two: What is place, whose place is it, and whose place is it not?

By the time you arrive to this adventure, you will have begun to unpack the importance of place.  In particular, you will have been asked to think about the university, your specific college, and your city, and you will, perhaps more importantly have been asked to think about what defines a community of need and a community of promise.  

The fundamental question is, why is place important?  This exercise will help you further the journey down the road, and it will also help you understand how your place needs YOU, and people like you, to make it better.

Here are the words to Clint Smith's Spoken Word piece titled Place Matters, the one in the video above.  Play it again, but this time scroll down here to read the words.  Then, respond to the prompt below.

As a child, my father would tell me stories of ancient Egyptian warriors

Traveling for endless days and nights across infinite desert plains

Showing signs of endurance and bravery I could only dream of emulating.

He would tell me

That, upon their return home, these warriors would be welcomed with a feast

Worthy of their bravery on the battlefield.

Years later, as a teacher in ? Washington D.C.,

I do now find myself traversing a desert,

Though it is not the one I envisioned.

A food desert

Is categorized as a poor urban area where residents cannot afford

Or are not given access access to healthy foods and grocery stores.

Every day, at 2:45,

I watch my students hop onto this leaking submarine of a school bus,

Every block bringing them deeper into an ocean where the only fish they find are fried,

Where fruits and vegetables just can't be found because there are no grocery stores here;

Just liquor stores and Popeye's,

Dunkin' Donuts, and 7-11's, children born into a neighborhood that fills more pollution than solution.

It is then I realize

That I am not too far from the deserts I once dreamed of.

See whether Anacostia or the Sahara, it doesn't make much difference because the [whole foods?].

Southeast D.C. is no different than the Serengeti

To them, brown-skinned little boys like my students are nothing more than walking cacti.

Just a piece of scenery, this world who taught everyone to stay awake.

Brianna

Literally has a landfill in her backyard

So she has a hard

Time convincing herself

The world then just thinks she's trash.

Restaurants come and dump the remains of food she'll never be able to afford

To eat three steps from her back door.

Jose

Eats fast food five days a week

Because his mother works three jobs to take care of six kids

And only sees her son when she arrives home from work

At the same time he's leaving for school.

He has gotten so big

That the excess fat ? his skin puts added pressure on his joints.

His knees are literally crumbling under the weight of this world.

Olivia

Watched her father shot two feet from her front porch.

She wants nothing more

Than to go outside and play at the park after school,

But gun violence has made a merry-go-round feel more like Russian Roulette.

So she doesn't go outside,

Simply eats any processed food from the cabinets

That will last long enough to prevent her from leaving the house too often.

These are my students,

My warriors,

Fighting a battle against an enemy they cannot clearly see.

These kings and queens,

Meant to feast not to fester,

But their zip code has already told them that their life expectancies are 30 years shorter than the county seven miles away.

I can see the faults of my own ancestry shaking in their eyes.

Diabetes and high blood pressure run through the roots of my family tree.

Heart disease is as much a part of my history as shackles and segregation.

So from my father's kidney transplant to Oliva's asthma,

These things are more than mere coincidence.

Both grew up in places more accustomed to gunshots than gardens.

So tell me place doesn't matter,

That the neighborhoods that are predominately healthy aren't the same ones that aren't predominantly wealthy.

Because when you're not choosing between buying your medicine and your groceries, health doesn't have to be a luxury,

Doesn't have to be an abstract concept that are presented in academic journals and policy briefs.

My students overcome more every day than I will in my lifetime.

They are the roses that grew from the concrete,

The budding oasis in the heart of the desert.

And their lives are worth far much more than the things that this world has fed them.

Answer the following prompts with no more than three sentences each.

• Prompt One: Why do you think place matters?  
• Prompt Two: What is "place" anyway?
• Prompt Three: And who does it belong to?
• Prompt Four: And who should it belong to?

Answers to these prompts are due at the beginning of Adventure Three.

Spring 2015_Adventure One: Who are you now, and who do you want to be?

By the time you arrive to begin this leg of the journey, you will have already completed, or you will be working on completing three tasks, all of which will help you and your peers come to terms with who you are now and who you may want to become: 

• Via Character Survey
• 3 Significant Items
• Six Word Memoir

But how do we really decide who we are?  Identity is a complex array of experiences (good, bad, and in-between) along with a variety of relationships and networks, and like snowflakes, no two are alike, and they are ever-changing.  

So who do you think you are, and who do you want to be?

Going further, are you really who you claim to be?  Do you see yourself through "rose colored glasses" or do you perhaps have a harsh perspective of who you are?

After watching the above video, read a little about Hetain Patel's work below, then respond to the two prompts at the end of this post.

Hetain Patel's surprising performance plays with identity, language and accent -- and challenges you to think deeper than surface appearances. [This is a] delightful meditation on self, with performer Yuyu Rau, and inspired by Bruce Lee. In his compelling stage works, Hetain Patel uses powerful imagery and storytelling to examine questions of identity. "What determines our identities anyway?" asks Hetain Patel. As a child, Patel wanted to be like Spider-Man or Bruce Lee; later, he aimed to be more like his father, who displays a much different kind of bravery. From these ambitions, Patel's new show Be Like Water examines shifting identities of all kinds, using dance and bold imagery to power a story of self-examination and self-creation. As a conceptual artist, Patel has used photography, sculpture, installation and performance to challenge cultural identity. For his work, he has grown a mustache exactly like the one his father wore when he emigrated from India to the United Kingdom in the 1960s, and remixed the practice henna tattooing to incorporate English words and comics books. Patel's conclusion about identity: that it is an ever-shifting game of imitation.

Step One: Think about a time that you gave someone a pretty bad impression of who you are.  Perhaps their judgement about you was unfair, but that's not important for this exercise. Just pick one.  

>In 100 words or less, narrate how this person would describe who you are to others.  Be honest.  This might be a little painful, but it's important.

Step Two: Think about how you would liked that person to have "experienced" you.  (Remember, you are thinking about an experience where someone walked away with a bad impression of who you really are above).  If it would be possible to go back in time to change their perspective about you, what would be that perspective?  How would you want them to see you?

>In 100 words or less, narrate how this person should describe you, ... once they simply had the opportunity to know you better.  Be honest here too, and don't be shy.  Have this narrative "sing your praises".

These are two ends of a constructed identity, and the truth of the matter is that you are probably somewhere in the middle.  ... And, the middle is always shifting from left to right, or from up to down, sort of like a radio dial.  

In this exercise, you will begin to understand who you are now, and you will begin to identify who you want to be, so have some fun with this.

Be sure to complete this prompt (and feel free to write more) before the second lesson on the Better Place Project, Adventure Two.