Listening to Students: Building Curriculum Activity Around Community Problems That Matter 

By Lew Zipin & Marie Brennan, University of South Australia; Victoria University 

lew.zipin@vu.edu.au; marie.brennan@vu.edu.au  

 

To begin: let’s listen and learn 

Our one-semester Year 10 experimental class, at a school we call Fringe City College – in an area of inner-city suburbs that we call Fringe City (near to an Australian capital city centre) – was facilitated by Lew, an academic at a nearby university, and a Fringe City College teacher. It involved small groups of students researching problems they deemed to matter for futures of local communities with which they identified. We will soon explain the experimental class; but let’s begin by listening to voices of students from one of the groups. This group researched changing racial relations in the wider area as some suburbs gentrify relative to other suburbs nearby. Lew worked closely with this group. We hear first from a Sudanese refugee boy, Eaman, addressing a question from Arlene, an Indigenous Professor whom Lew invited for a lunch conversation with the group, to talk with them about their race-relational experiences in the area. (Note: all names, except for Lew’s, are pseudonyms.) 

Arlene: Eaman, Lew was telling me about [you] going in shops and stuff? 

Eaman: I went into a shop [in a gentrifying suburb] and was actually buying stuff, and they kept following me … [while] another guy was actually filling his shirt under his pants. And they kept searching my bag but they let the White guy go.... If I have an argument with them and get kicked out, I am proud of it. I have got used to it; it’s normal to me. 

Geri: You shouldn’t think that is normal. 

Eaman: What am I supposed to do about it? 

Eaman then spoke of the suburb where his family lives in a tower of small apartments filled by African refugees and immigrants. There, said Eaman, if two or more Black African boys walk streets, police often trail them. He continued: 

Eaman: Something happened to my cousin, he got killed. He got murdered.   

Arlene:  No! 

Eaman: Yeah. But a week before he died he got bashed by cops…. They took him to a corner and bashed him. 

Arlene: How old? 

Eaman:  He was twenty. I reckon the police have covered everything up, because when they found him in the river, cops said to his mum that nothing happened to him. And then when she went and checked, his eyes were, like, out and everything. 

Shortly after, Eaman arranged a lunch visit for the group, including Lew, at an Ethiopian restaurant near Fringe City College. The students talked with the mum-and-dad owners, who warmly treated them and Lew to a cultural coffee-and-cake ceremony. Afterward, the group and Lew talked among themselves. Geri, recalling Eaman’s shop-surveillance experiences, highlighted a contrast: 

Geri: But not if you go into a shop where someone’s of the same colour as you? 

Eaman: From an African shop, no. 

Geri: Yeah … they [were] like: ‘Hey, how are you going?’ … [And] I feel like I am intruding, like, ‘Oh my God, I am White!’ 

Eaman: But they never follow you. 

Geri: They give you that benefit of a doubt. They don’t stereotype us, so I don’t understand why we have to do it to them. They are not racist to us.  

From experiences as a Black African refugee in Australia, Eaman developed painfully astute ‘spatial-geographic’ knowledge of how racism plays out differently across diverse suburbs. His White-identified classmate, Geri, joined in analysing racial inequalities, which she then applied to the school. 

Geri: The Ethiopian girls that are here; they’re really, really smart, intelligent girls, but they can’t express themselves. 

Tanya: They’re always so quiet…. They don’t get help.   

Geri: Alright, now, I have got to say this: There is no area for them to express what they know…. This school is classed as a ‘multi-cultural learning’ school. That is complete and utter b-s because it is not multi-cultural learning.  

Lew: No, the curriculum is not. 

The experimental class included four migrant Ethiopian students – three girls and a boy. They formed a group to research how rising rents in Fringe City commerce zones push Ethiopian small-family businesses – restaurants, bakeries, barber shops, etc. – to close or move to peripheral areas, affecting livelihoods. Talking with the girls, Geri learned from their intelligent accounts of cultural histories and analyses of lived experiences, fuelling her critique that, while marginalised students can speak their knowledges – and articulate intelligently – mainstream classrooms are not prepared to listen. 

 

The Fringe City College experimental class: our Funds of Knowledge approach 

Our Year-10 class at the College took up the funds of knowledge approach (explained in the first article in this issue). In doing so, we applied an innovation we had developed in earlier funds of knowledge projects: students as researchers into matters for futures in their locales. As Moll (2014: 143) comments: 

[A]lthough conceptually aligned with the original funds-of-knowledge work, Zipin [and colleagues] applied a different methodology … for teachers to negotiate curriculum units with students that [quoting Zipin, 2009, p. 320] ‘connected meaningfully to lifeworld locales: in effect, putting students to work as researchersof their own lifeworlds.’ 

Students in the class formed five small affinity groups to research issues they identified as mattering for futures in the Fringe City area.  

  • Four friends – Eaman, Iaka (a Māori boy from New Zealand), Geri and Tanya (White girls from economically poor families) – researched changing race relations as some Fringe City suburbs gentrify relative to others.  

  • Four immigrant Ethiopians – three female; one male – researched gentrification effects on family small-business and life futures in the Fringe City area. 

  • Four White students – two male; two female – from an ‘underclass’ suburb into which many facing cost and race issues in gentrifying suburbs were moving, as well as migrants ‘of colour’ from overseas, researched drug-selling and use, and other emerging street safety concerns. 

  • Four Asian male students – three Vietnamese; one Indian – researched whether their generation will be able to afford housing in Fringe City locales where their families lived, having arrived in Australia as migrants when housing was more affordable. 

  • Five White students – three male; two female – whose parents were first-generation in their families to gain university degrees, researched how ‘yuppification’ of Fringe City locales affects working-class identities in relation to ‘new-gentry’ in the area. 

Note: Only students in the latter two groups of the experimental class had been in the Years 7-9 accelerated program. 

As the class began, Lew and the teacher explained that research topics should address issues that matter for futures in Fringe City-area local-communities. But the students – not Lew and the teacher – decided the topics around which groups formed. Of significance, then, is that topics diversely converged around what Brazilian educator Paolo Freire (1993/1970) called a ‘generative theme’: in this case, gentrification effects in Fringe City-area communities.  

Given the one-semester class duration, and school schedules, time to research in lifeworld spaces was limited during school hours. However, students also researched in after-school hours. In group dialogues around their research, lifeworld funds of knowledge gained articulate expression that, if more of the school was open to hearing, Lew and the teacher felt could connect meaningfully into a multi-disciplinary range of school subject areas. 

We hoped our class doings would reach wider school staff and leadership ears, encouraging more teachers to engage more students in Funds of Knowledge activity over time. Alas, this was not to be. While Fringe City College leadership allowed a semester’s experimental space for other-than-usual curriculum activity, our activities were isolated from most Fringe City College teachers’ earshot (save brief lunchroom chats). We asked the school principal for conversation about what we were doing and ‘where to go from here’. We had in mind a workshop session with fuller school staff. The principal said ‘yes’, but no appointment was made (and Lew received no reply to two follow-up emails). 

We dare now to imagine a more robustly collaborative project design, in which students, teachers, academics and local-community people bring their diverse knowledges together in dialogue and research to address lifeworld-based problems that matter

 

A Problems That Matter approach: putting diverse knowledges to work on lifeworld problems  

This section explains a Problems That Matter approach at two levels: design principles; and ‘pragmatic-radical’ strategies to put them into practice. We take the concept ‘pragmatic-radical’ from Australian educator Garth Boomer (1999). ‘Pragmatic’ means doing what works within constraints of current school contexts. ‘Radical’ means prioritising ethical root-purposes for education. The hyphenated term means: doing what works to pave ways to pursue what is worth working towards. We begin by stating an ethical root-purpose which pervades all design principles and pragmatic strategies that follow: re-purpose curriculum as collaborative knowledge activity that, across diversities, inclusively engages and builds young peoples’ capacities for agency to live the present towards sustainable and socially-just futures. 

 

Design principles (numbered) and pragmatic-radical strategies (dot points)

1. Prior to forming a class, identify a generative theme – a mattering problem of global-in-local significance – from across students’ diverse community lifeworlds. 

  • In Semester 2 of a Fringe City College school year, a university academic team hosts focus-group dialogues with diverse Year 9 students. Encouraging students to talk about family issues of future concern, the academics gain trust by showing students they are there to listen and learn. (Let’s assume the issues, and affinity groups that form around them, are those that emerged in the Fringe City College experimental class.) 

  • Towards semester’s end, the students bring the academics, and relevant Fringe City College teachers whom the academics enlist, into their homes and other lifeworld spaces (e.g. the towers where Eaman lives, etc.). The academics also enlist future teachers in pre-service study at the local university. In dialogue with lifeworld residents, the educators (teachers and academics) listen for further aspects of issues students had raised, and for their convergence in a generative Problems That Matter theme (in this case, gentrification effects.) 

  • The Year 9 students involved in this preliminary lifeworld research are invited to join a Year 10 class. Two academics, and two Fringe City College teachers from relevant subject areas, act as class facilitators. They negotiate with school leadership to schedule a two-semester Year 10 class: classroom-based in Semester 1, expanding to lifeworld-situated research in Semester 2. 

 

 

2. In the Problems That Matter-based class, promote inclusive student-led dialogue that shares funds of knowledge from students’ diverse community lifeworlds. 

  • At the outset, the educators encourage real dialogue: they  

  • recap the issues students raised, and state the generative Problems That Matter theme as the main focus;  

  • explain the ‘funds of knowledge’ concept and assure they will listen and learn from students about lifeworld funds of knowledge in relation to the generative problem that matters; and  

  • emphasise that, whatever power inequalities exist across students’ diverse social-cultural positions, and however well or poorly they had been listened to in prior school classrooms, in this class all have equal voice. 

  • Time for both small-group and full-class dialogues are planned. For the latter, affinity groups rotate as class discussion leaders, foregrounding their issues and associated funds of knowledge, for other students and the educators to hear and learn. In the process, dialogue opens to everyone’s voice, learning-and-teaching with (not against) each other. As educators gain students’ trust that they are listening, they can take on the role of pinpointing further aspects of the mattering problem that emerge in student-led dialogues.  

  • As students gain comfort in leading dialogues, they invite family/community residents into the classroom as funds-of-knowledge sharers. The educators invite timely visits from other Fringe City College teachers, community activists, pre-service university students, and academics with knowledge that links local-lifeworld problems to globally-broader causations. Relevant readings – which all who participate can contribute – also gain dialogic space. 

 

3. Initiate 2-way movement of knowledge activity across lifeworld and school-world spaces, centring students as action-researchers into the problem that matters, with substantive collaboration from educators and community residents. 

  • In Semester 1, students and community people brought lifeworld knowledges into the classroom. While this continues in Semester 2, curricular knowledge activity now also expands out to lifeworld spaces through student-led action research on half days that the educators timetabled with school leaders. Having participated in Year 9 preliminary research, the students return to researching their lifeworlds, now more fully and deeply informed by diverse knowledges relevant to gentrification issues, thanks to Semester 1’s dialogic learning-and-teaching across a diversity of students, community people and educators. 

  • Since the student’s inhabit both lifeworlds and the school-world, they are positioned to lead research projects of knowledge exchange in their lifeworlds. Yet they do not do so on their own: they bring Fringe City College teachers, pre-service teachers, university academics and community activists with them as collaborators. In this, the educators benefit from first-hand learning from community residents who teach them about how the mattering problem affects their lives, and how their funds of knowledge build around that lifeworld problem.  

  • Dialogue in classroom sessions shares learnings from across the range of researched lifeworlds, with growing focus on pro-active ways for students, community residents, activists and educators to collaborate towards remedying gentrification effects. 

 

 

4. Build educator professional community around the Problems That Matter approach and its ethical re-purposing of curriculum. 

  • From midway in Semester 1, continuing into Semester 2, small groups of students from the Problems That Matter class take rotating turns to report at staff meetings on their knowledge activities and learnings.  

  • From this initial catalyst – also catalysed among Fringe City College teachers who had visited the class – professional community develops around the Problems That Matter curricular approach and its ethically-expansive purposes. 

  • The academics’ local university sets up a program for teacher-educators to work with Fringe City College teachers on professional-community development. Pre-service students join. During Semester 2, volunteer in-service and pre-service teachers go with students into their lifeworlds on research days. 

 

5. Mediate to wider audiences how the class contributes to local communities, and work towards expanding beyond one class, one year, and one school. 

  • As class activities gather speed in Semester 2, the school alerts appropriate media about how the collaborative research engages and contributes to local-community needs for sustainable and socially-just futures. 

  • Towards the end of Year 10, Fringe City College hosts a public presentation open to all students and teachers at Fringe City College and other Fringe City-area schools. Media and government policy people are invited, with understanding that they are there to listen and learn before chiming in. Students, community people and educators who collaborated in the class project explain how knowledge-sharing across classroom and lifeworld spaces developed their capacities for pro-active agency to address problems that matter. 

  • During the year a volunteer committee forms, involving students, community people, teachers and academics. It meets regularly and has timely interactions with the class. The committee might consider: further Problems That Matter involving more students and collaborators; ways for Fringe City College and other schools nearby to work together on Problems That Matter rather than market-compete; how action-research could extend into Years 11 and 12; and more. 

Conclusion: the vital educational importance of ears to hear 

We argue it is an ethical obligation, but no easy matter, for educators to expand curriculum activity beyond the selective narrowness that governing policies impose. African-American educator Lisa Delpit (1988: 297, with original emphasis) suggests, in a hopeful tone: ‘Teachers are in an ideal position … to initiate true dialogue’. Yet, well-aware of obstacles, she adds: 

This can only be done, however, by seeking out those whose perspectives may differ most, by learning to give their words complete attention … to listen, no, to hear, what they say…. [T]he results of such interactions may be the most powerful and empowering yet seen in the educational realm – for all teachers and for all the students they teach. 

We know of schools where teachers and leaders comprise a professional community at the ready for such hearing and empowering of an expansively diverse ‘all’. (See Milne, 2020, and Daniels in this issue, as examples). Yet most ‘poor cousin’ schools, like Fringe City College, need to build an ethics of professional readiness to work beyond unequal power relations and policy-dictates that narrow curricular activity. We have proposed design principles and pragmatic-radical strategies for doing so. They begin with inclusive dialogue and deep listening and hearing. This expands to collaborative action-research in which Problems That Matter draw together the knowledges – and the knowledgeabilities – of diverse students, community people and educators. In the process, educator professional community builds readiness for curricular engagement with local communities. 

To conclude, we stress the vital importance of curricular activity that empowers young people with ethical and knowledgeable agency to proact towards better futures. In current times, existing and looming global-in-local crises – climate change; racial aggravations; costs of living; breakdowns in health, food and other infrastructures, and more – threaten sustainable and socially just futures. These Problems That Matter are both existent and emergent; and so younger generations need collaborative capacities both to gather diverse knowledges around the mattering problems they face going forward, and to generate expansively new knowledge to address those expanding emergencies. Curriculum that prioritises narrow and static knowledge content cannot suffice. Curriculum must instead prioritise knowledge-in-action. 
 

References 

Boomer G (1999) Pragmatic radical teaching and the disadvantaged schools program in Green B (ed) Designs on Learning: Essays on curriculum and teaching, 49–58, Australian Curriculum Studies Association.  

Delpit L (1988) The silenced dialogue: Power and pedagogy in educating other people’s children, Harvard Educational Review, 53(3): 280–298. 

Freire P (1993/1970) Pedagogy of the Oppressed, The Continuum International Publishing Group Inc.  

Milne A (2020) Colouring in the white spaces: The warrior-researchers of Kia Aroha College, Curriculum Perspectives, 40: 87–91. 

Moll L (2014) L.S. Vygotsky and Education, Taylor & Francis. 

Zipin L (2009) Dark funds of knowledge, deep funds of pedagogy: Exploring boundaries between lifeworlds and schools, Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 30: 317–331. 

 

For fuller elaboration of the PTM approach, see: 

Zipin L (2020) Building curriculum knowledge work around community-based ‘Problems That Matter’: Let’s dare to imagine, Curriculum Perspectives, 40(1): 111–115. 

Zipin L & Brennan M (2023) Opening school walls to Funds of Knowledge: Students researching Problems that Matter in Australian communities in Esteban-Guitart M (ed) Funds of Knowledge and Identity Pedagogies for Social Justice: International Perspectives and Praxis from Communities, Classrooms, and Curriculum, Abingdon, Oxon & New York: Routledge.  

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‘Not one day did I ever learn anything about African heritage or cultures’: The Mis/Non-Representation of African Cultures in Australian Schools