Bonner Foundation  •  10 Mercer Street, Princeton, NJ 08540  •  609-924-6663 office  •  609-683-4626 fax  • info@bonner.org

In the third decade of the Bonner Program we must confront and transcend the simplicity that dominates student learning.  Simplicity is taking a subject and chopping it into bite-sized bits to ease learning. Simplicity is taking a community of people and classifying them into roles: teachers and learners, the helping and the helped. The simplifying of student learning into disconnected bits, of students’ social interactions into stratified and pre-determined patterns, and of students’ selves into separate pieces, fails to cultivate the potential of our students, and fails to respond to 21st century challenges and opportunities.

Innovative leadership and new solutions are going to come from individuals – and communities of individuals - who can embrace complexity of knowledge, experience, and interaction; who can draw upon and see connections in diverse knowledge and experiences; who can relish challenge, new experiences, and continued learning; and most importantly, who possess the courage and conviction to lead development of the complex web of changing roles and relationships that characterize any community.

We must also recognize that simplicity, through segmentation into disconnected parts, is endemic in many civic engagement efforts, contributing to limitations for student learning and for social progress.  There is often unquestioned segmentation of civic engagement into separate services and projects, into the distinctions of helpers or experts and those who are in need, and into separation of those who are part of civic discourse and decision-making and those who are not.  Such segmentation is blind to civic assets that are not part of the initial problem definition and fails to cultivate the collaborative potential of our diverse citizenry because it assigns fixed roles in an attempt to complete projects, leaving many with ill-fitting expectations or out of the picture entirely.

Simplicity through segmentation is emphasized in the way we define many civic engagement and community service projects – the mechanisms by which we typically organize students’ social change learning experiences.  We tend to select projects where “us” and “them” are as distinct as possible.  In doing so, we emphasize difference and “othering” right from the beginning.  This reinforces simplistic notions of social categories, and does not encourage students to realize the often-subtle, but very powerful complexities in social dynamics.  To understand the dynamics of oppression, one must also gain perspective on the dynamics of privilege.  No one is immune.  Indeed, most fundamentally, one must understand that there are dynamics involved.  Social categories are not static: people take on different roles across these categories, ideally they develop and grow beyond them.

How do we transcend the stultifying effects of simplicity through segmentation and embrace complexity in our work? Principally by three means:

First, we must recognize and then manage the importance and malleability of assuming roles in our learning communities.  Who associates with whom?  And who does NOT associate with whom?  Which students assume leadership roles on campus, and which do not?  Which students have access to special learning opportunities, and which do not?  Who is involved in community-engaged learning initiatives (on campus and off)?  Why?  Into what roles are these individuals and/or groups ascribed and by whom? Who is NOT part of such initiatives? Why not? How do the answers to these questions evolve over time within a program? This, then, is the undiscovered curriculum within our programs that introduces the full complexity of a learning community through making visible the process of assigning and developing roles. 

Second, don’t rush through relationship building just to get something done. Maximize the transformative power of relationship building, in addition to the promise and accomplishment of specific project outcomes.  The targeted action and results-oriented agenda of community-engaged learning is understandable and important. Specific projects, with defined outcomes, galvanize involvement and show results.  We all want to get something done.  Yet just as much emphasis should be placed on gathering around the table individuals who rarely, if ever, sit together and cultivating their relationships without pre-assigning them into simplistic roles. We know from cognitive psychology that one of the most powerful strategies for breaking down stereotypes is getting to know members of groups or categories as individuals. Let’s attack all of our stereotypes by being inclusive of the full complexity of the communities around us, not just focusing on finding those that we have pre-determined to be most “other” from ourselves. The destruction of the simplicity of our full set of stereotypes will make possible sophisticated and enduring relationship building (and, as a result, more successful project outcomes as well).

Third, embrace a concept of integrative learning that keeps the complexity of social dynamics at the forefront. We have recognized that interdisciplinary learning spaces that welcome different types of expertise and learners can facilitate collaboration for public good.  Such formal learning spaces may be team-taught courses, community-campus collaborative courses, series of courses over multiple semesters that may or may not culminate in a minor or certificate, or single-semester learning communities that organize a set of courses around a theme like “water” or “food” and that involve a diverse group of learners.  We need to create more such learning spaces – formally and informally.  How often do we prompt and support students in considering the intersections, juxtapositions, or even conflicts between and among their different learning experiences, their different life experiences, or the different components of their selves?  How often do adults model for students their own wrestling with complex ideas, issues, and challenges, and their own continual development as citizens? 

The Bonner Program is already a shining example of moving beyond the simplicities of the traditional classroom to embrace the full development of the student in community-engaged problem-based learning. We can now lead in the development of life-long learners that thrive in challenge, and lead by embracing the full complexity of community life.