Part III. Creating Space in Community for Real-World Learning
With renewed media attention on slumlord housing practices in the city, I feel challenged to share with our educators and schools that we need to teach children about housing practices in America. Period. Atlanta is the home and cradle of America’s great housing project experiment that no one teaches children about, but for some, they have to live through these horrible conditions.
So as the city’s own deadline looms this Friday, July 15th, to relocate all families out of Forest Cove Apartments, as I’ve witnessed this journey through the lens of children, I am heartbroken to know other kids in these other neighborhoods will not get the same relief to leave. They will have to endure and keep living in these deplorable conditions.
So teachers, how will you talk about this important history and present day housing policy practices thoughtfully with students?
I’ve shared some resources in my last post and I will share some more here today of what The New School + Teach X did to help students. One of the things we did to help students learn more about the present day context of this issue was we created space for them to be out in the field to learn about the issues first hand. I know this is super hard for larger schools, but just start with one class at a time and start small. I started with 15 students. I also had tons of help with partners who worked in the field as well.
So as I shared before, Rebecca, was a super connector and she had this amazing idea as a healthcare professional and professor at Emory to host a health resource fair. The fair would serve a two-fold purpose, a much needed wellness check for the residents of Forest Cove, and a safe learning ground for students to interact with the residents and record their stories. Just so everyone is clear, my original idea for the storytelling project was using a local school and inviting the residents to talk with kids for a gift card. This idea was 10 times better. It would be an understatement to say orchestrating safe field work is not hard in K-12 education. It is hard. But with the right partnerships and planning, we CAN get students out in the world.
Anyway, with so much uncertainty surrounding when the families had to vacate the property, because a court judgment said March 1st, we worked for 2 weeks planning this health fair and preparing students to be journalists in the field. HERE is one of the script tools we used to help students prepare. (Teacher side note: TNS project classes are two-2-hour blocks each week to give us time to plan and be in the field. So this may need to be a master schedule conversation too.)
After 2 weeks of planning and coordinating, our class had worked with over 10 different partners, designed advertisements for the event, called over 100 housing properties to provide housing resources at the fair, conducted a site visit of the space and prepped for the interviews with a real journalist from the AJC and other field health workers from Sister Love. It was these authentic voices from the community that became the backdrop of our work in the community and made this work feel less like the humdrum of a class and more like the messiness of the real world. This set the stage for our main event, in which we arrived on our bus to a protest by the residents of their unlivable conditions with the police standing by, as we prepared for our health fair.
Our students were excited for the opportunity to finally be out in the world after all that planning and meeting the real people. Families came out and were able to receive reproductive health services, essential healthcare screenings, vaccinations and other health-related services. But the main event was definitely the student’s storytelling project. In 2 short hours, students collected over 25 stories of loss, joy, heartbreak and fun. Students were surprised at how resilient and joyful the families were given their circumstances. We even let the neighborhood kids start interviewing each other as they played and shared their stories. You can hear some of the interviews HERE.
Special thanks to all our partners who we could not have done any of it without their support of our work and the greater Forest Cove community: Emory School of Nursing, Atlanta Harm Reduction Coalition, Sister Love, Atlanta Volunteer Lawyers Foundation, COR, Sydni Foster and Fulton County Board of Health. We organized this in just 2 weeks and that is truly because of our great partners.
But more than anything, our students were outraged by the injustice of their housing conditions and some even shared that in all their privilege they felt helpless in the face of so much despair. Now that we had this information and these stories, what do we do with them and how can we make their stories matter.
In our final Part IV, I will share what we did next. Stay tuned next week.