4-H renews its mission by cultivating diversity
Several years later, as an agent in Georgia, Heusel discovered that white adults were comfortable sharing their prejudices with him, assuming that, in this white man, they'd found a sympathetic ear. He began to realize that if 4-H really existed to promote individual and community development, then tolerance had to become as integral a component of the organization's programming as the familiar applied science, nutrition and public speaking.
4-H has been dedicated to helping youth aged 9 to 19 "learn by doing" for almost 100 years. Around the turn of the century, as afterschool agricultural clubs began springing up in rural communities across the country, the Department of Agriculture saw them as an ideal vehicle for introducing new farming and home economics practices. In 1914, the USDA formalized 4-H -- standing for "Head, Heart, Hands, Health" -- as part of the new Cooperative Extension Service, designed to make the educational resources and scientific advances of state land-grant universities available to communities at large.
Through the efforts of Gary Heusel and his colleagues nationwide, 4-H has, over the past decade, begun addressing multicultural issues through the same grassroots network that the program established for agricultural improvement nearly a century ago. The classic image of 4-H as a rural organization serving mostly white children was an accurate one for 75 years. But currently half of all 4-H participants live in towns and cities, and 28 percent are members of racial/ethnic minorities.
A Spectrum of Programs
In an effort to address the needs of a broader constituency, Heusel and six colleagues in the 1980s began training 4-H staffers using a program developed by a student-exchange organization that prepared host families and outbound exchangees for their intercultural experience. The 4-H curriculum that grew out of that endeavor -- Many Faces, One People -- illustrates the collaborative approach that leaders have used in making 4-H an advocate for tolerance. The curriculum has undergone significant expansion with input from other youth organizations, including Girl Scouts of America and Boys Club.
One of the program's first aims was to break down stereotypes and get local, predominantly white, 4-H volunteers to understand the benefits of working with people of diverse backgrounds. Heusel and his cohorts used the global aspects of their training program as a selling point.
"It was less threatening to people," says Heusel, "to start by looking at international audiences. The real issue was still how to get people who live next door to each other to work together, but by beginning that way we got more people to come take the course and participate."
Ginny Diem, a 4-H agent for Somerset County, N.J., with an extensive background in global education, concurs. Over a 10-year period, her county has seen a dramatic demographic shift: The local population of Asians and Pacific Islanders has increased from less than 3,000 to more than 10,000, and the number of Latinos has more than doubled.
Bubbling up from these changes have been racial slurs exchanged in school hallways and sometimes even insensitive comments from a teacher or administrator. When a school counselor who served on the 4-H advisory board invited Diem to help tackle the problem, Diem realized that many of the activities she'd used in international teacher training -- such as an analysis of stereotypes and a survey of cultural symbols -- would apply in her own community. She drew on these ideas again while editing the current version of Many Faces.
More recently, Diem has introduced her middle-school audiences to "True Colors," a commercial program that helps children identify their personality traits and find the "true color" assigned to their combination of characteristics: orange for outgoing adventurers, for example, and blue, gold or green for other temperaments. Youngsters choose from various word clusters -- "curious, ideas, questions" vs. "fun, action, contests," for example -- to fine-tune their personality profiles. By the end of the exercise, they also learn that their dominant, or "brightest," color represents only a portion of their complex selves.
The self-inventory and comparison of the results, says Diem, are good ways to refocus children's attention to similarity and difference based on traits other than skin color and ethnicity. Emphasis on personality traits as components of identity reveals new variations among friends and unexpected links with strangers. Individuals who wouldn't ordinarily talk to each other soon find themselves working well in teams.
At the heart of 4-H since its inception is the belief that children learn better from experience than from lectures or third-party demonstrations. Involvement draws them in and heightens their senses; deeper inquiry and the reapplication of information to other contexts come later. Forty years ago, a fruit-drying activity led to discussions of food safety and orchard pest control. Today, a workshop on the same topic might compare and contrast methods of food preservation around the world.
"When 4-H started," says Cathy Cox, head of the global and multicultural task force for the National Association for Extension 4-H Agents, "we looked at the society that kids lived in at that time. We were having great discoveries in agriculture, home economics and medicine, and the function of 4-H was to get that new subject matter dispersed through society so that kids could be effective as adults. It's similar today. We ask, 'What are today's kids going to need in order to be effective as adults 15, 20 years from now and beyond?' We look at diversity issues and do what we can to help."
Students of Angela Briscoe, a science teacher at Fairbanks Elementary in Detroit, learn about time-honored topics like nutrition, insects, composting and bridge construction in the 4-H activities Briscoe incorporates into her curriculum. Even if they've never ventured far from their high-rise apartment buildings, they may have petted a cow or sheep at a local farm show recently. Along the way, appreciation for diversity is a natural by-product: During a genealogy study, a student discovers that "nontraditional" families like hers are more widespread than she had thought. Children from far-flung cultural backgrounds swap home remedies or weather lore.
"The children enjoy the programs, number one," Briscoe says. "There's a sense of accomplishment and self-esteem. They're also more accepting and less critical of people who are different. Even just taking them out places, I can see that there's a big change in attitude."
One of the most ambitious examples of 4-H curriculum that combines traditional 4-H subject matter with multicultural themes is SPACES. Developed by Michigan State University Extension under a Kellogg grant, SPACES is divided into three components: "outer space," which emphasizes science and technology skills; "inner space," which focuses on personal development and self-esteem; and "shared space," which looks at such issues as stereotypes, prejudice, conflict resolution, friendship and environmental concerns. For interested schools, 4-H provides teacher training in implementing the curriculum.
One "shared space" activity called the Human Treasure Hunt invites children to search within their group to find individuals who fit certain descriptions -- e.g., someone who knows how to play chess, someone who has at least three pets, or someone who has ridden in a hot-air balloon. Limiting the number of characteristics that can come from any one person ensures that participants mingle and usually means that some people have to be reinterviewed so that categories can be shifted.
"There's always this wealth of characteristics in a group," says Janet Olsen, the state 4-H associate program leader for Michigan who helped develop SPACES and now serves as its project director. "Maybe somebody has 10 brothers and sisters, or has traveled around the world, or is into recycling. It also helps kids to recognize that people are similar and different in a lot of different ways."
Christy Hicks, a college senior and Americorps volunteer with the 4-H office in Pontiac, Mich., has used the Human Treasure Hunt at Crofoot Elementary. "It really forces the kids to learn something about others they might not normally consider their friends," Hicks observes. "There's a tendency for children to drift into particular groups that they're most comfortable with, whether they're on the bus with them or it's the person they sit next to in class. Without having a reason to reach out and learn something about someone else, they don't do it, and that's when the assumptions start to come in."
In another SPACES activity, called Purple People, participants create an ethnic group from the "Plum Planet," giving them physical characteristics, a language, traditions, jobs and homes. Then they explore what responses the Purple People might encounter in an unfamiliar culture. For example, they might get stared at a lot, have a hard time finding friends or experience discrimination. The students devise ways for the Purple People to cope with each situation.
At Crofoot Elementary, the hypothetical prejudice discussion led to an airing of real-life playground grievances. "Some of the girls," says leader Hicks, "complained that in gym class or free time, the boys would hog the basketballs and not want girls on teams." When someone asked, "Did every boy in the school do that to you?" the complaining girls realized that they had blamed a whole group for the actions of a few members.
Crofoot's 4-H connection originated with an after-school program, but last fall principal Donald Robinson enlisted 4-H volunteers to help reduce recess conflicts on the school's tiny playground. Initially, he invited some of the more rambunctious children to special lunchtime sessions for structured 4-H activity. Now, for 45 minutes twice a week under the guidance of 4-H agents, Christy Hicks and fellow students from nearby Oakland University present an array of programming, including SPACES, to what has become a highly popular 4-H club, open to all.
"The aggression and the referrals [from the playground] have come to a screeching halt," Robinson says emphatically. "The children are much more open and appropriate with each other, and I've noticed that there's a calming approach that they use with each other in terms of getting their needs met. Hey, it's good for all of us."
Reaching the Underserved
In 1991, 4-H's national office at the USDA initiated a broad spectrum of programming designed to give children in certain identified "risk" categories a chance to improve life skills and, at the same time, avoid the drug, gang and crime influences in their neighborhoods. Starting out with $7.5 million and slated to continue 5 years, the project eventually selected 96 communities around the country whose children met the target criteria, including low family income, high absenteeism from school and poor academic performance. 4-H leaders in each program make an effort to recruit diverse volunteers.
In one predominantly Asian-American community in Tacoma, Wash., children representing 10 different ethnic groups and languages have taken part in gardening and community cleanup projects. In a Newark, N.J., housing project, children receive after-school tutoring from neighborhood parents and teachers.
The "at-risk" label wears thin on some, including Gary Heusel, who says it was a term that helped secure program funding but should never have been used with the participants themselves. "I became sensitive to that term," Heusel says, "when I saw a young person get up on a stage and say, 'I'm a youth at risk.' I knew some adult had told him that." Heusel prefers to emphasize and build upon the assets each child possesses.
If labels chafe, the mission doesn't, says Heusel. "It's created an awareness that we weren't serving a representative part of the population of our country, and it's given a broader definition to diversity."
As a youngster in a small Illinois town, Heusel himself would have been considered "at risk" because of his family's circumstances. "It was the adults in 4-H who helped me gain a love for learning, stay involved and go to college," Heusel, now 48, remembers. "My 4-H project -- raising sheep -- helped me earn money to go to college."
Reaching the underserved, Heusel points out, was at the core of 4-H's original mission. What's new is a more inclusive definition of who has been left out. "We're still not reaching out to the extent that a lot of us would like to," he adds.
In 1996, as the state 4-H program leader for South Dakota, Heusel brought together a group of business and government leaders, school officials and service agencies to plan a multicultural center in Sioux Falls. In an area long dominated by Scandinavians and other northern Europeans -- 90 percent European American and 10 percent Native American -- Sioux Falls has recently become extremely diverse as industrial expansion has attracted new employees. Some 80 ethnic groups and more than 30 languages are now represented in the local school system.
So far, no intergroup clashes have occurred, and Heusel hopes 4-H can offer "positive prevention." The Sioux Falls center will have separate offices for the major cultural groups, surrounding a common area for recreational and educational activities. Diversity training has already begun for students and teachers.
In nearby Flandreau, Heusel's agency operates a before- and after-school center that serves mainly children of the local Santee Sioux tribe. Teachers say that, with parent support, the attendees' homework completion and school attendance have improved, and they're involved in fewer incidents of vandalism.
Now and then, leaders find more pointed evidence that the program is working. One boy, about 11, quit coming to the center, Heusel says, because his friends convinced him that he was too old and that 4-H was a sissy thing to do. "But when his friends tried to talk him into stealing a car, he came back. He said that now he understands where his real friends are."
Links:
[1] http://www.tolerance.org/magazine/number-11-spring-1997
[2] http://www.tolerance.org/author/marie-hofer