The Custodian Project: inverting the pyramid

Students and custodians together, in no particular order, just friends. 

Dear readers

I participated in a community based learning project in my Leadership Class at American University in Cairo this semester. My students designed it. We developed it and implemented it together.

Community Based Learning is similar to Service Learning. According to Thomas Ehrlich

"Students learn best not by reading the Great Books in a closed room but by opening the doors and windows of experience."

CBL or service learning must respond to an expressed need in the community. It must support the students learning and address a community need. It must be reciprocal. 


In addition, the project must provide students with an opportunity for reflection. The instructor must help the students connect the service with academic and professional learning.


According to the Gerhart Center, the project must be aligned with course goals, it must empower the community, the community must be an equal partner, the project must embody civic responsibility, and the results must be disseminated.



I have set up a website in order to disseminate the results of this project. You can take a look at it here at the Custodian Project. Let me just say that my work was inspired by Yahia Shawkat's work, which I profiled in a previous post.  This project was also inspired by the Clinton School's emphasis on service learning, and by the Gerhart Center's work on the same. 

The gist of the project was that we wore custodian uniforms. We worked for two hours doing the custodians' jobs of cleaning the bathrooms and cleaning the classrooms. The custodians were the teachers and the supervisors, and we were the workers. They trained, we worked. We inverted the pyramid of class and privilege at our university for a short time.

Fatma, Hend, Seham and Hend training us about cleaning techniques. 

Students and professors listen intently as we are trained about how to clean bathrooms and classrooms. 

This project may not be very interesting in America where hard work can help you move up in life. Yet in Egypt, where there is a extremely strict class hierarchy as I have mentioned in previous posts, this project is potentially radical. 

The goal of the project was to embody the spirit of Tahrir's slogan: freedom, integrity, social justice. I think we at least were able to embody the last two ideas. 


The initial results have been positive. One of my students commented, 

It was a great experience. I learned that it is not enough to just feel sympathy about someone unless you put yourself into his/her situation. That is exactly what happened to me when I worked as a custodian for less than 2 hrs.

Their tolerance and patience to fulfill the tasks, as well as their efforts with us to teach the mechanism of work make me think that they themselves are the real leaders. Dear great and devoted custodians, in brief, our life without you is unbearable.

One of the custodians commented, 

I would like to thank you [] for what you did, and I want to tell that I  have a wonderful feeling of your interest in custodians and their work and thinking of them. I am really impressed of your act and it proves that not the whole community is avoiding us and there are some people who cares about our feelings and our efforts to serve the AUC community. In addition I wish to see other staff members and AUC students thinking the same way you did. Many Thanks.

Again, you can read more about this exciting project here

http://thecustodianproject.blogspot.com/

We still want to do a lot more work on dissemination. We have video, we want to make something for you tube. We want to set up a display on campus with our hundreds of photos. We are still working on reflection and analysis, but I wanted to let you in on this amazing educational experience. 

WMB

Pedagogy of the Oppressed

Dear readers

Do you ever have those days at work where you just feel like, "WOW, this is really where I want to be. I am doing the right thing with my life, and I am making a difference." Well, Ilhamdullilah, I am having one of those days.I read Paolo Freire's book Pedagogy of the Oppressed when I was in college, and it changed my life. Today, I saw someone teach it on the streets.

I went to a faculty conference about the Community-Based Learning Program at the John D. Gerhart Center  for Philanthropy and Civic Engagement at AUC today. A group of faculty sat around and thought of ways through which we could improve interaction between students and the community in Cairo and in Egypt through our classes.

One faculty member really impressed me. His name is Yahia Shawkat. He is an architect. He is teaching a class in the Performing and Visual arts department entitled Architecture: Art or Engineering? As part of this class, he asks the students to go find a "client," who the students can assist with their design skills. The students picked clients who were street vendors, security guards, tea salesman, and others at the bottom of Egypt's elaborate, and punishing social hierarchy.

So, Dr. Yahia's students then offered their design skills to these vendors. They helped them redesign their guard booths, their tea stands, their food trucks. The students worked on everything from raising the tea tables off the ground with cleverly made triangular shaped rests, to getting pillows for lumbar support, to enhancing the shade around the stand.

Dr. Yahia instructed them that the cost must be proportionate to the business cost, i.e. less than 100 pounds, or 20 dollars. He also instructed the students not to give the money themselves, they are not in the charity business, they are in the empowerment through design business. The students got feedback from the vendors themselves about what they needed, and often the vendors knew exactly what they needed, but not exactly how to do it. Finally, the students' were instructed to make the designs such that it optimized the work conditions, and helped the vendors to maximize their economic productivity of their business.

I could not believe it. Dr. Yahia perfectly integrated community action, teaching design, sustainability, and empowering the poor all at the same time! His work is radical, it is righteous, and it is revolutionary. Sign me up!

Now that is teaching with a purpose! Kudos! Bravo! Somebody give this guy tenure!