Why Service Learning? Why New Orleans? Student Voices.

Linzey 2014

Ashli 2014

Karl 2014

Massa 2014

Tobi 2014

Carlson 2014

Carlos 2014

Bonnie 2014

Moriah 2014

Zhane’a 2014

Ana 2015

Eleni 2015

Vivian 2015

Valeria 2016

Live Music, Great Time & Support a Great Cause

I am really excited and grateful to announce that the Second Line Social Aid and Pleasure Society Brass Band, a 30 piece “raucous, stomp-your-foot-and-belt-out-the-choruses” New Orleans-style street band based in Somerville & Cambridge, will play a full set of amazing music in our fundraiser. 

They combine music with social action; slamming out the sounds of the legendary Crescent City for peace rallies, street festivals, parades, and OUR BENEFIT TO PAY FOR 14 O’Bryant students to go to New Orleans during their April Vacation to build homes for people who were displaced because of Hurricane Katrina. 

8 Years later 100,000 people (mostly people of color), have not yet returned to their home city and thanks to people such as the Second Line Social Aid and Pleasure Society Brass Band, the Baseball Tavern, Higs Tickets, Salvarore’s Restaurant, Mr. Craig Goldschmidt, Mr. Charlie Kim and Ms. Susan Bell, our students will be able to join the amazing work being done by thousands of volunteers via Habitat for Humanity to allow many to reclaim their hometown. 

We are especially thankful for the Second Line Social Aid and Pleasure Society Brass Band as we are donating funds to the general building of affordable homes for the people of New Orleans and matching the mandatory donation that volunteers have to pay to help the New Orleans Habitat for Humanity to the Habitat for Humanity’s New Orleans Musician Village a neighborhood designed to preserve the musical heritage of New Orleans, which consists of 72 single-family homes, five elder friendly duplexes, a toddle-friendly pocket park and the amazing Ellis Marsalis Center for Music.

Bring your dancing shoes, come have a wonderful time and help empower my students to make a difference in New Orleans and a difference in our own city!

If you can’t come, but would like to donate, you can either click HERE to donate online or send a check to:

John D. O’Bryant School of Math & Science

55 Malcolm X. Blvd

Roxbury, MA 02120

Attn: Paul Pitts-Dilley (Team New Orleans)

P.S. All contributions are tax deductible.  

Fundraiser: March 7th at the Baseball Tavern

The great people at the Baseball Tavern will be hosting our fundraiser again this year. Admission to this event is $20 and it includes a raffle ticket for a door prize and buffet. This year we are trying to get a live band and we will also have more raffle prizes and silent auction.

The fundraiser will be on Friday, March 7th from 7PM to 11PM.  

Baseball Tavern
1270 Boylston St.
Boston, Ma 02215

Prizes:

1 pair of tickets to Bulls @ Celtics (Loge): Sunday, March 30th @ 7PM
1 pair of tickets to Flyers @ Bruins: Saturday, April 5th @1PM
1 pair of tickets to Indians @ Redsox: Friday, June 13th @ 7PM 
1 Pair of tickets to 76ers @ Celtics: Friday, April 4th @7:30PM
1 Pair of tickets to Bobcats @ Celtics: Friday, April 11th @7:30PM

$50 gift certificate to Salvatori’s Restaurant.

If you can’t come, but would like to donate, you can send a check to the “John D. O’Bryant School of Math & Science” (tax deductible) or click here to submit a donation online.

John D. O’Bryant School of Math & Science

55 Malcolm X. Blvd

Roxbury, MA 02120

Attn: Paul Pitts-Dilley (Team New Orleans)

Why Service Learning? Why New Orleans?

In the next few weeks, we will be publishing the students own responses to why they are going to New Orleans to work with Habitat for Humanity (as well as working with the Boston and Lawrence branches), but as an educator who values service-learning and service-learning trips, I also wanted to explain why I am part of this journey to New Orleans.

This will be my 5th service-learning trip, but the first in the continental United States. But I was convinced that I would not lead another trip until at least April 2015 (if budget cuts were/are not to remove all non-AP elective courses at the O’Bryant as this trip will be part of my senior elective) to build homes for poor and marginalized single women (“peasants"), whom live in Recife (the land of the great and late educator Paulo Freire), Brazil (Northeast), because this past August, my wife gave birth to our first child (a beautiful baby girl named Harper).

As a father for the first time,  I was convinced that I would at least take an additional year or wait until Harper was old enough to join me in working for a better world, before I would lead another trip.  However, once I returned from paternity leave, one of my former students who went with me to teach the children of poor coffee “peasants" in Nicaragua (two years ago), talked with me for over an hour about how service-learning changed her and why I should do another service-learning trip.  I had to agree with Ana (she is one of the students going to New Orleans this year and Brazil next year) as there is simply nothing that I can do in the classroom that can compare to what teachers and students can learn from service-learning opportunities.

Service-Learning allows us to move from the abstract and work towards the world that we all hope for and as Freire called in his Pedagogy of the Oppressed it allows students to learn the “world" and the “word”.  Moreover, students come back from these trips with a new focus of social justice and the tools to carry on the struggle for a better planet right here at home in our country, state, city and school!  Service-Learning allows students to travel nationally or internationally to rediscover themselves and the true power of education (not some silly multiple choice high stakes assessments)!

But why New Orleans?

8 years ago Hurricane Katrina “destroyed” New Orleans and showed to the world and to our nation how many Americans struggle with poverty.  8 Years later New Orleans is still a city divided between the “haves” and “have nots” and many poor folks and especially people of color not only have lost their homes, but also their home-city as nearly 100,000 people have left New Orleans.

This is one of the two reasons why I chose New Orleans.  The second reason (really why New Orleans chose us) is that I want my students to see how powerful resilience can be and I want my students to learn from the local population that we must never give up and that hope and resilience can transform and reshape America and revive the American Dream that America used to be famous for.

This is why I am part of this journey, where 14 young men and women and 3 educators can spend 6 days working with amazing people, who have not given up, so we can come back ready to make the John D. O’Bryant School of Math & Science, the Trotter K-5, Roxbury, Boston, Massachusetts, the United States and this planet, the truly democratic place that I want Harper to grow up in.      

Paul Pitts-Dilley
John D. O’Bryant School of Math & Science
History Department
ppittsdilley@bostonpublicschools.org

Preparing for New Orleans:

It is extremely important to prepare students for the service-learning journey ahead.  One cannot expect anyone to magically put on his or her “hero” hat and embark on a journey to serve others.  Collaboration and teamwork is much more powerful than individual “heroism” and this can only be achieved via preparation and service learning itself and at home. We are not seeking “heroism”, what we are seeking is to rethink education and our world via service learning.     

Moreover, this entire journey is a teaching and learning social activism and leadership process that needs to start before the actual trip and become a life long odyssey.  We want our students to realize their full potentials, re-imagine themselves, New Orleans and the world so they can make a difference in a globalized and unified community and bring this new social justice lens and leadership to our city, our neighborhoods and our school. 

The Preparation:

All of the 14 students who are participating in this trip have committed to either volunteering once a weak as a writing tutor at the Trotter Elementary School in Roxbury or volunteering on Saturdays at the Habitat for Humanity’s Boston Re-Store in West Roxbury.  The students and I will also be working with the local Habitat for Humanity to help build a home for one day in March. 

The students who want to embark in the journey to Recife, Brazil in 2015 will have to do the same from March 2014 to March 2015.   

We & They Course

I am very excited about what we have developed at the John D. O’Bryant School of Math & Science. We have a new course called “We and They: Globalization & the Human Condition Via Critical Dialogue & Service Learning”.  My students and I are piloting this course and the course asks students to critically think about the problems that people face abroad and at home and to break down the myths created by the “fictitious lines” (borders) that have shaped an economic globalized world where its peoples remain separated and divided.  Moreover, this division leads to the concept of “we” vs. “them” and isolation, indifference, conflict and war.  The students are also looking at how this division happens within our own borders and create regionalism, racism and a “we” vs. “them” attitude within our own country, state (Massachusetts) and city (Boston).  The following are some of the topics and materials that we discuss in this course that will guide the students into a global “conflict resolution” conversation:

·       De facto vs. de jure segregation: Trayvon Martin, Little Rock 9 and Little Rock Central past and present: Little Rock Central 50 Years Later (HBO Documentaries)

·      Genocide: Blinded Activism vs. Efficient Diplomacy: Rwanda, Darfur and how to prevent future genocides

·      Globalized Values & Morals: Tradition vs. Progress: Changing Roles of Women & the “Emergence” of Gay Marriage & the American & Russian Responses: Wadja (Haifaa Al Mansour)

·      I-Toys & Globalization: Pros & Cons of Globalization & Multinational Factories: What dictates morals: supply or demand?

·      Power & the Psychology of Oppression: Oppressed and Oppressors (2014-2015): Pedagogy of the Oppressed (Paulo Freire)

·       Race, Social Class & Ethnicity: Child of the Dark: The Diary of Carolina Maria de Jesus (Brazil) & Black in Latin America Haiti & the Dominican Republic: An Island Divided (PBS; Dr. Henry Lewis Gates Jr.)

·      Terrorism & Counter Terrorism: The Ethics and the Economy of War & Zinn’s Cycle of Stupidity: Hiroshima, Nagasaki, 9-11, War on Terror & Drones: Howard Zinn’s The Bomb, Unmanned: America's Drone War (Brave New Films) & The Untold History of the United States (Oliver Stone, Showtime)

·      Welfare Reform & the War on Poverty: Nickel and Dimed: On Getting By in America (Barbara Ehrenreich)

Every year the course will conclude (April Vacation or June) with a service learning trip, so students can put into practice a new form of activism that uses education to re-imagine and reshape our world.  The trip will involve working with the local community and where possible to build or renovate homes or a community center with the local Habitat for Humanity. The course also calls for local (within Boston) service learning, before and after the international or national service learning trip.  

The course also focus on teaching students how to fundraise, so all students regardless of socio-economic status can attend (students going to New Orleans will only pay $200 to $300 as off pocket expenses).

April 2014 New Orleans

April 2015 Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic