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
