Introduction
Pull and Push Factors
The pull factor that drew me to this specific seminar and this unit topic is what brings me to nearly everything I teach: the places where my students' experiences and interests interact with the curricular content. I came across one such place when listening to a panel discussion for the "Race Out Loud" series on our local National Public Radio station, WBEZ, about the pernicious segregation that exists, often unchallenged, as a reality in our city and what can be done to address the issues of race, poverty, and distance in Chicago. After the panelists' comments were finished, it was time for questions, and a young person from the audience stepped to the microphone and nervously asked: "How can we get more white people to move into our neighborhood so that it will improve?" 1 The silence that followed was noticeable on the other end of the radio, and I assumed that the panelists were working their way through the complexity of the question–not the least of all the myriad assumptions that this young woman must have held for her notion to be true? I wondered about the possibility of creating a curricular experience that would enable students like her, my students, to challenge these assumptions and to redefine the story of a neighborhood to develop the agency to work for change themselves. I am pulled to try to create that unit for us.
The push factors that inspired the specific ideas that make up this unit came from the amazing conversations in seminar, in lunchtime discussions about the commonalities in topics across seminars, and in nightly collaboration in the common areas of the residence hall at Yale. A consistent through-line in our seminar has been the notion of access or lack of access in finding the consumer goods one wants and/or needs within their community and the currency or feelings of legitimacy (both monetary and social) that one brings to the moment of exchange. The seminar experience pushed me to think critically about using the very lens that I will ask my students to use when evaluating the sources and data that we find through our research; it was a great reminder of the importance of living the experience we are asking our students to live.
These push and pull factors are representative of the reflective teaching that is celebrated at the Yale Teacher Institute. Units are not archival documents to be pulled out, dusted off and used again just as they were written. They are living documents that are revisited and refined based on new faces and new understandings. This unit, written for a Human Geography class, is an examination of our neighborhood and the ideas for asset-based development that come from it can be used each succeeding year to create a layered model of how social studies can work for social change.
In this unit, we will explore the concept of consumer culture through three main foci: housing, retail/services, and education. By using these topics to explore the changes to the our local neighborhood, students will begin to see the root causes of the issues they experience every day. The consumer lens allows us to back away from the initial perceptions of the neighborhood and then to return to those perceptions with a more nuanced understanding.
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