By Trish Van Katwyk
Published in March 2016
Editors Note: This article was delivered as a speech at the Annual Local Democracy Graduation on November 18th 2015.
Education occurs always and everywhere. Each time we encounter something, we learn and are changed, even in the smallest way, changed by the impact of that encounter. When education becomes intentional, it is as if the change is being embraced, paths cleared to accommodate the change.
The exciting thing about The Working Centre’s Local Democracy Diploma is that the change that is embraced is personal, and also about your neighborhood and your community. It is about this world we share.
I feel strongly that places of learning need to be accessible. I believe that places of learning can be powerful and political places, which is why so many public learning spaces are hard to access. These learning spaces have become exclusive elitist social spaces, even as they are referred to as public space.
To counter these types of exclusions, I have become involved in a program called Humanities101, a free university course offered through Renison University College at the University of Waterloo. This program directly addresses the ways in which the social space that we are all entitled to becomes exclusive.
Expanding Our Understanding of Poverty
Social exclusion and poverty are increasingly understood as closely connected and it has become widely accepted that social inclusion is an effective anti-poverty strategy. Such work has opened up global conversations about poverty so that self-esteem is also being brought into consideration. By evolving our understanding of poverty in such a way, we can begin to see that the entirety of the poverty experience moves beyond the wallet, and different kinds of capital other than currency can be conceptualized – social capitol with its principals of reciprocity; cultural capital with resources such as learnedness, language, talents and experience; and symbolic capital which finds resources in a person’s expertise and knowledge base.
When I think about a conceptualization of poverty that acknowledges the impact of social exclusion, I think about the Local Democracy class’ collective summary thought piece. The class is describing ways of doing community that support reciprocal, valued and multiply-resourced relations.
Humanities101 runs every Spring term for 12 weeks, with a 3 hour class on Thursday nights, and a 2 hour study session on Tuesday evenings. There is a meal to begin each Thursday night class. Each week a different professor facilitates the class. While there is one theme for the course, “City”, each professor teaches about City from his or her discipline. The course has room for up to 25 students. The students must have experienced an obstacle to university education, with financial difficulties as the leading obstacle.
Each week, there are university-level readings and a presentation. The students are asked to bring together what they’ve learned from the assigned readings, from the presentation, from the classroom dialogue and then from their real life experience. This becomes a short reflective paper, due a week after each class. The students demonstrate what they are learning each week.
What I Learned from Humanities 101 Students
I have seen up close how social exclusion shames, blames and diminishes. And I learned that this makes absolutely no sense.
The students I have met in Humanities101 have great capacity to make change. They have been vibrant, intelligent, completely engaged individuals who have brought significant knowledge to our classrooms, so that each lecture became a rich, thought-provoking critical analysis.
If the impact of social exclusion is to shame, blame and diminish, I see then that social exclusion explicitly silences people, takes away the voices that can bring such significant change to our neighbourhoods, our communities….our world.
The Humanities101 classroom was, without fail:
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an environment of possibilities,
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a place of active citizenship,
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a model of community development,
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a site of deep connection.
The students tell me that Humanities101 is an important social space: a threshold or a portal, the entry point into a previously exclusive space.
Some of the students that I spoke to used metaphors like a key, an opening, a window, or a door, to describe the Humanities101 program they were about to enter. Here was a space that opened into a place of opportunity and possibility, opportunities that had previously been denied.
At first, after passing through the entry point into the university space, many of the students talked about feeling intimidated by one another, nervous about their own capacity to do things the way one is supposed to do things in this space, full of self doubt that they had the ability, convincing themselves that everyone else had what it takes and that they could never belong here.
And, then, very quickly, I saw how the students looked to each other and expressed the admiration they felt for one another. I saw how quickly a community could develop, how quickly a sense of belonging was nurtured and sustained, and how genuinely each student’s contributions were valued.
I also learned that it takes a supportive environment that recognizes people’s full humanity, seeing in each person their special interests and talents.
A student described to me a case worker who remembered being told how much she enjoyed elementary school as a child. Or the settlement worker who was impressed with the way in which the student was becoming proficient in English. Or the family member who could still see great intelligence even as mental illness seemed to obscure the person’s ability to feel confident and capable. All these acts of kindness opened the entry point that had seemed closed and exclusive.
There are these entry points everywhere. They could be understood to be portals, or liminal spaces, in-between spaces (between out and in) or thresholds. When privilege is attributed, these in-between spaces are entered with ease, hardly even noticeable, as we stride through, confidence guiding our movements and ways of taking space.
When privilege is withheld, these in-between spaces are encountered with hesitancy, self doubt, apology and uncertainty in our movements. This is how we carry exclusion, it pushes down on our shoulders, pours lead into our shoes, forces our eyes to the ground, squeezes our lungs so that we can barely breathe.
These are all the things I’ve learned from the students of Humanities101. I’ve learned about what it takes to approach an entry point, about the impact of belonging, the power of community, and what can happen when social inclusion occurs.
Other Benefits
One student spoke about how now she feels there are many social spaces she can enter – that now she can go to the free classical concerts offered each month at the performance hall, to the adult education classes offered to the community by a local church, to openings at art gallery shows.
Another student described what it was like to make a presentation at the city council, and to receive, in her words, an “unheard of” standing ovation.
Another student described a new relationship with her daughters who did not even know she could write an essay.
Students have described jobs, further learning goals and new volunteer opportunities that became available because of what they gained in Humanities 101.
A final word from another student is how I would like to end my talk today. She was describing a conversation she had had with her teen aged daughter. This is a woman who left her parents and siblings far behind to create a new life for her children, only to find herself in Canada abandoned by her sponsor, fearful of deportation, desperately poor, and raising children on her own.
Now, many years later, having put so many things in place for herself and her children, she participated in the Humanities 101 course, bringing her intelligence, her engagement with the learning and her critical reflections about her own experience. As she was describing to her daughter why she was doing this, and what she wanted to be able to give as a result of this, she said to her daughter, “Education is intangible but viable. Everything else they can take from you, but education, once you have it, it can never be taken away.”
I would suggest that this student was not only talking about what it is to have education, but also what it is to have access, what it is to move with some freedom and belonging in a social space, and what it is to appreciate, experience and understand inclusion.
Trish Van Katwyk is an assistant professor in the School of Social Work at Renison College University at the University of Waterloo.
