Blog #5: What does good Citizenship mean to you?

Name the song represented by this
picture.

Nothing against Fox News, but
srsly now?  Re: Egypt.

Thinking about citizenship immediately conjures up thoughts of community service and being an active and engaged citizen and person within the communities we belong too.  For me, it is also the aspect of voting, of staying engaged in the political and social discourse of our community and nation, but only because I'm interested in politics and I don't mind getting riled up about national and international political issues (not so much state due to my constant moving, but very much for community as well only because I have contact wtih my local community daily I guess) or discussing social issues in our country for hours.  I also realize that citizenship for other folks does not mean the same because their interest in discussing politics or social issues is not up there on their ranking of interests, and I can often understand why when I get stressed with when hearing opinions I find mildly misinformed (and by mildly, I mean grossly).

OK, back to my original thought line of community service and how it relates in some way to good citizenship.  I'm taking a course on the administration of service learning and it has held a lot of interesting revelations about how good community service is, and it is good, but how our universities and  us, as individuals, should strive for opportunities around service learning, or service that involves some legitimate, measurable learning component, typically a class for credit.  The key to service learning though, that often differentiates it from community service, is the realization that the service aspect of the experience may very well only be a band-aid on the problem.  This is not to say its a bad thing, because service sites need volunteers badly often, such as soup kitchens, food pantries and youth centers.

However, the key theme that I have learned from this course and got me thinking around citizenship is that great service learning opportunities takes that band-aid experience of a temporary help and informs its participants about the need to solve the problem at its source.  So, in the case of a soup kitchen, the band-aid experience is serving meals to homeless community members and helping maintain the facility. However, the full experience (for both great service learning and great citizenship) should be including a serious discussion and education around the causes and facts around homelessness, dispelling myths and stereotypes, an examination of societal power structures and privilege that create homelessness, and a look at how to address or attack these problems from the get-go.

This, in the end, is what citizenship is to me, looking and working at things on both a micro and a macro level, working on applying a band-aid to help stop the temporary injury, but discovering and working to stop the source of the injury so that it may never return.  It involves making your community a better place in the short term - ie going out and volunteering and cleaning up that street, or tutoring a kid in a local elementary.  But it also means becoming deeply involved and discovering the underlying issues behind the problems you are addressing, as to why that street is so dirty, or why that kid needs tutoring from a stranger.  It's examining the deep societal and power/privilege that causes littering or causes a gap in achievement, student learning and student support.  It's making your community better now, better tomorrow, and better in the future.

We watched a documentary today in class called "The Garden" about the largest urban garden in the US, that had a lot to say about citizenship, what is the community, who determines the public good, and power and privilege.  It's not a pretty picture of America today, but when you really devote yourself to great citizenship, you have to take the good with the bad as you learn more and more about your culture, your community and your country.  There are things that we do good in the US and in this community, but there are some glaring problems, that often, we just want to gloss over.  I'll leave the trailer here and hope that you take an hour and half outta your weekend this quarter to check out the full documentary.

It's not good to just gloss over.  If we want change, we have to get down and dirty.