One recent November, a discussion about plants as a food source led Cowley's first-grade class to talk about hunger. The class decided to bake pies and cookies to deliver to a local church's Thanksgiving dinner for homeless and low-income residents. A massive snow storm canceled school that day, but her students persisted. They met with the mayor and a homeless advocate to learn about the causes of homelessness and the stresses of living in poverty. Then they delivered their baked goods to the church, where they volunteered to help set up and serve the meal.
In many ways, our pie project would seem to reflect the spirit of caring for others and remembering those in need at the holidays, which seems central to the American values promoted in our schools. Teachers are often looking for community service-learning projects that will demonstrate that spirit of care and engage their students, but I feel the need to look critically at each and every project I undertake.
Consider the typical model of the school food drive, usually held during the holiday season. Sometimes these drives involve a competition between classrooms to collect the largest number of cans, which really reflects how much disposable income, more than how much concern, the families of that class have. A parent told me of a food drive at another school in which the students of the class that brought the most cans were rewarded with a pizza party. There are mixed messages there. Although school food drives are well-meaning, they may inadvertently be:
- Reinforcing stereotypes about poor people,
- Oversimplifying the problem and the solution,
- Failing to teach an understanding of the causes of poverty or local efforts to improve conditions, and
- Further stigmatizing low-income children in the school.
I don't want children to think that a turkey dinner or a pumpkin pie will solve the problems of a homeless person or an unemployed family. Without a doubt, the holidays are hard and stressful for low-income people, but the reality is that things get a whole lot more miserable in January, February and March when the seasonal jobs disappear and heating costs increase, along with medical costs and days of work lost to sickness.
When kids collect canned goods for "poor people," it makes "poor people" seem like a permanent, almost genetic condition. The children have no idea where the food goes after they drop the cans their mothers bought into the box. If we leave it at that, it is a child's imitation of an adult's token gesture of charity: tossing a coin in a beggar's cup. Does the tossed coin absolve the adult of responsibility of addressing the societal contradictions that create such poverty even here, in the richest country in the world?
A "give the helpless a handout" approach does nothing to increase children's understanding of the complex reasons why people go hungry or cannot afford housing. By oversimplifying the problem – i.e., they are hungry because they are poor – it oversimplifies the solution: a bag of food. It stereotypes low-income people as passively "in need." Although young children are less aware of (and should not be taught) them, society is burdened with a slew of stereotypes about poor people being lazy, unintelligent, dirty and so forth. It fails to acknowledge the creative problem-solving, resourcefulness, resilience, persistence and enduring spirit of people who take nothing for granted. Perhaps most painfully, the traditional school food drive can further stigmatize low-income children in the class by reinforcing these stereotypes.
… So how do teachers find ways to approach this complex sociopolitical realm, to nurture empathy and take action, without stigmatizing families who are less fortunate than ourselves at this time? Food drives can be a developmentally appropriate activity for young children when used as a vehicle to do the following:
- Challenge stereotypes
- Teach understanding of the complexity of the causes of poverty
- Introduce local activists and organizers as role models addressing needs and working for long-term solutions
- Empower children to take responsibility in their community
- Remove the stigma of poverty
I always must assume that there are some families in my class struggling economically, even if I do not know who they are. Even knowing the occupations, addresses and free/reduced-price lunch status of my students and their families doesn't give me the whole story. With the huge mortgages and credit-card debt carried by many middle-class families, sudden job loss can spell financial disaster. Because of the stigma surrounding it, especially in our materialistic culture, great pains are often take to mask poverty. My point is not to identify or single out low-income students, but to be respectful of and sensitive to economic diversity in my class, the school and the community.
One way I challenge stereotypes is by telling stories from my own life, stories that focus on creativity, compassion and problem-solving, as well as persistence, conservation and resourcefulness. For example, I tell them a story about when I worked for a large bookstore chain as a department manager earning minimum wage. I earned so little money that I was eligible for a day care subsidy and $80 worth of food stamps each month. I explain that my take-home pay was about $625 a month and that the rent for the basement studio I shared with my son (and an oil burner) was $600 a month. That left me $25 a month to by diapers, soap and gasoline, and use the Laundromat.
One month I lost my food stamps on my way to work. I arrived very upset and planned to ask if I could pick up some extra hours. I was shocked to look at the work schedule and see that I had been cut from 40 hours per week to 30, because the holidays were over. When I explained the situation about the lost food stamps to my boss and asked if I could possibly work more hours, she rolled her eyes and sighed, "Hours are an issue with everyone," then turned away. I spent my lunch hour retracing my route from work to the day care center to home and back, to no avail. When I left work that afternoon, I found two bags of groceries on the front seat of my old car, that some of my coworkers, who earned as little as I did, had chipped in on, because they understood it could have happened to them.
As a teacher, I find it is powerful to draw on and speak from my own experiences: having grown up in a struggling family, having been a community organizer, having been a single mother working a minimum-wage job. Obviously not every teacher has a trunk-load of those same stories to tell. Volunteering with local community organizing efforts is another way to gain more personal understanding of poverty. I also look for good children's stories that address maters of class. Here are some that I regularly in the course of a year.
The Hundred Dresses by Eleanor Estes is a classic story about a Polish immigrant girl who is teased for saying she has 100 dresses, when she wears the same, faded old dress every day. It is told from the perspective of the teaser's friend. I read this story aloud over the course of a week, engaging the children during and after each reading in a philosophical discussion about the ethical dilemma of being a silent bystander.
The Streets Are Free by Karusa is a bilingual story about children in a Venezuelan barrio who organize and protest the lack of a playground in their neighborhood and the eventual community action that builds it. Children can retell and then make captioned drawings to illustrate a story of community organizing told by a "guest activist" visitor to the classroom. Theirs can be displayed, then bound into a class book.
The Lady in the Box by Ann McGovern is about two children who notice and then befriend a homeless woman living in their neighborhood. Fly Away Home by Eve Bunting is about a homeless boy and his father who live at an airport. I use both of these books to help children see beyond the "shopping bag lady" stereotype of homelessness, to recognize that people of all ages and circumstances can become homeless for a brief or longer period of time, for a variety of reasons, and that shelters are not solutions in themselves. Especially for older students, these discussions can be a springboard for mathematical investigations (using the classified pages of the local newspaper and the phone books) into the take-home pay of minimum-wage workers, the cost of a doctor's office or emergency room visit without health insurance, the cost of rental housing, the location and availability of public transportation. Even for younger students, who find it meaningful to collect survival items such as lip balm, hand lotion, socks, blankets and warm jackets, organizing a "job interview clothing drive" can help them understand the idea of helping people help themselves.
My first graders worked hard and enjoyed making the pumpkin pies and cookies for the Thanksgiving dinner. Not only did they know where the food was going, but they were committed to delivering it themselves come hell or high snow. They and their families learned about how people can become homeless and what can help prevent it (affordable housing, higher-wage jobs with health care benefits, reliable public transportation), what services exist for homeless people locally, and different ways we as individuals, families, classes, and schools can help. In a small way, they learned that although donations are good, it means even more to volunteer. One family went back the next day to serve dinner, and others helped with delivering meals. My daughter wanted to bake cookies and bring them down herself, and this has become a family tradition each Thanksgiving. My son's fifth-grade teacher, Margie Riddle, does a similar apple pie project, integrating science and math curriculum. As a follow-up activity, she asks her students to bring in different ingredients each month throughout the winer so the class can prepare a meal for a shelter kitchen.
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