Download Susan Stall* Sociology does an excellent job investigating and

The Sociological Quarterly ISSN 0038-0253
CIVIC SOCIOLOGY
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Susan Stall*
Northeastern Illinois University
In this adaptation of my Presidential Address I celebrate the sociology inspired by the tradition of
progressive social reform. The focus on civic engagement that instigated inquiry into the causes
and reasons for social problems remains an important resource for learning. I describe how my
own journey from social investigator, witness, and activist not only shaped how and what I
studied, but how and what I taught. Three student tales illustrate how service learning combines
insight and action to foster social understanding that inspires practical reform.
Sociology does an excellent job investigating and identifying social issues and introducing theoretical frameworks to explain the interconnections linking issues with their
causes and meanings. The origin of our discipline rooted in the Progressive Era reform
started with questions raised by public interest groups and social change organizations.
W. E. B. Du Bois put it well when he wrote there “could be no . . . rift between theory and
practice, between pure and applied science” (Du Bois 1944). The Hull-House women
used social investigative research and work to promote political, economic, and social
reforms (Fritz 2008). The early Chicago School sociologists studied urban problems so
that their analysis would lead to solutions (Bulmer 1984). I chose sociology inspired by
the hope that by combining knowledge of social change and research skill I might, like
my predecessors, conceive useful improvements to remedy social problems of injustice
and exploitation.
The last two decades have witnessed renewed interest in public sociology (Burawoy
2004) and civic education (Musil 2003). The turn to experiential education at many
institutions of higher education complement and support this renewal. I associate with
the most promising experiential learning tools “within the tradition of critical pedagogy,
a form of pedagogy that emphasizes student involvement, transformative social change,
equality, and social justice” (Huisman 2010:107; see also Giroux 1985; Friere [1970]
1989; Breunig 2005). So when universities propose service learning, I translate this effort
into a form of experiential education that is “both an applied form of sociological
practice and an educational pedagogy” (Hironimus-Wendt and Lovell-Troy 1999:360).
Service learning that uses experiential civic engagement fits well in the tradition of
activist community sociology (Pestello et al. 1996).The “promise” of service learning
centers in this transformational potential.1 If we expect students to achieve the “higher
order goals of service learning (e.g. enhancing civic responsibility, community activism,
enhanced academic learning, etc.),” then we must teach them to use a “sociological
imagination” to comprehend their experience and to use that experience as a resource
for social improvement (Hironimus-Wendt and Lovell-Troy 1999:360–1).
*Direct all correspondence to Susan Stall, Department of Sociology, Northeastern Illinois University, 5500
North St. Louis Avenue, Chicago, IL 60625-4699; e-mail: [email protected]
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I came to sociology as a witness for the efficacy of a social action that comprehends
the meaning of social change as it helps discover what it takes to invent and secure
important social improvements. Service learning ignited my passion for a praxis that
could bind together ideas about public and civic change with efforts to change the gritty
and challenging reality of everyday experience in the less prestigious university settings
where so many sociologists work.
MY SOCIOLOGICAL JOURNEY
I want to begin by sharing a story about discovery—my discovery of the power of
sociology. To understand my commitment to service learning—the topic to which I am
headed—I will set the stage with an abbreviated autobiographical account of my own
sociological journey. These selected stories provide insights into the belief I share with
John Dewey that we acquire our most critical insights as we wrestle with issues in the
world of social experience.
Discovery of the Sociological Imagination
This first story begins in the early 1970s when I was a newly minted, overwhelmed
teacher working in a second grade classroom at Victoria Avenue School in South Gate,
California—a rapidly changing city not far from Watts—site of the 1960s riots. I was
struggling to teach reading to more than 32 students that each year included increasing
numbers of immigrant children from Mexico and Central America. Our overcrowded
school moved to a divided day schedule, and classrooms spilled out into trailers located
on our shrinking playground. South Gate was home to a declining Firestone plant and
an auto parts factory—and I was discovering that many of my students lived in economically challenged circumstances. One of my major wake-up calls came one early
evening in a parent–teacher conference, when I was consulting, in my halting Spanish,
with the mother of Luis about her son’s inattentiveness and furtive behavior in the
classroom.
I was trying rather unsuccessfully to convey to her the importance of Luis returning
regular homework assignments, practicing his reading at home and the like, when his
mother shyly offered the information that Luis and his family were currently, and had
been for several weeks, living in their car. What struck me at that moment with a
blinding force is that I had a lot to learn about my students’ lives—that what Luis and his
family were experiencing was not only their “personal trouble” but was at the same time
a glaring “public issue.”
I devoured courses at the local community college in Chicano and Women’s
Studies, classes not offered in my pre-1970s undergraduate education,and became active
in our teachers’ union—UTLA, the United Teachers of Los Angeles. The Sociology of
Education graduate program at UCLA, where I was reading work such as Bowles and
Gintis’s (1976) findings on the structured inequality of public education and its reproduction of the class system to meet capitalist demands, provided the theoretical scaffolding to inform my challenging work at Victoria Avenue School. This fusion of critical
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theory and informed action underlined for me the importance of the organizing efforts
of one of UTLA’s most active committees—the Inner City Committee. Our committee
was fighting for the comprehensive institution of Bilingual Education Programs and a
Metropolitan Desegregation Plan for the Los Angeles Unified School District to challenge the inequalities between the segregated schools in the San Fernando Valley and
the economically and politically neglected inner city. Mills’s ([1954] 1963) charge
to distinguish “personal troubles” and the “public issues of social structure” in order to
effectively frame public debate and social policy now seriously informed my work as a
classroom teacher, as an activist in my elementary school and in the Los Angeles school
district, and I became a convert to the power of the sociological imagination. But, I still
had a lot to learn about the social bonds and the community building that nurture and
sustain social change.
The Insights of the Sociological Witness
Fast forward to the late 1970s and early ’80s, in Iowa, where I was now a graduate student
in sociology at Iowa State University in Ames. I was working with Dr. Robert Richards,
a crusty, white-bearded journalist turned sociologist, Bob had invited me to work with
him on his newly launched community study of “Parkville.” Confronting a gender
barrier in his research, Bob asked me to interview and observe the most civically engaged
Parkville women, while he focused on Parkville’s male power structure. My initial
response was to ask, “What could a left-leaning urban feminist from Los Angeles possibly learn from a study of small-town rural women?” I reluctantly signed on as Bob’s
research assistant, but with what I believed to be a much more exciting dissertation topic
in the works.
As an activist working on Iowa’s Equal Rights Amendment, I was frustrated by the
slow pace of change that I perceived in Parkville. Why were these women, even the
younger ones, so reluctant to openly confront the gender inequalities that the majority
of them admitted existed? Why were they content to live in a small town where change
happened so slowly? Numerous times, when I voiced my frustration, Bob would urge me
to cool my jets and to take an unbiased observer role—in other words to behave like a
social scientist! After all, “Couldn’t it be remotely possible that there was something that
I might learn from these women?” And over the next two years, the women of Parkville
taught me, “the researcher,” about the importance of solidarity and community ties, and
showed me through the work they did to socially reproduce their small town a richly
expanded view of politics and power. While Bob taught me how to become a sociological
witness and to grasp the subtlety and meaning of the “modest struggles” these women
engaged in as they both responded and adapted to social change (Stall 1991). Yet, I still
had much more to learn about community organizing and the rewards of engaged
scholarship or action research.
Recognizing the Dignity of Resistance
Now travel to Chicago, it is the late 1980s, and I’ve had the privilege to work with public
housing resident activists for over a year culminating in a conference and the formation
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of an advocacy organization: CHARTA—Chicago Housing Authority Residents Taking
Action (Kagan 1991). After meeting hundreds of residents over the 19 public housing
developments, and investigating numerous grassroots initiatives, I decided to focus
on the work of a group of women activists from Wentworth Gardens, a development
near the then-named Comiskey Park Baseball Stadium. Building on the insights
garnered from the Parkville work, I studied the “seemingly little things”—their modest
struggles—to foster community in the face of daunting structural obstacles.
One resident, Mrs. Hallie Amey, was particularly instructive; you might call her my
“public sociology life coach.” My coauthor, Roberta Feldman and I, spent 10 years with
Mrs. Amey and her collaborators at Wentworth Gardens documenting what we later
called, The Dignity of Resistance (Feldman and Stall 2006). This was my first fully realized
Action Research project. I was awakened to the insights of the sociological imagination
and the power of praxis in Los Angeles, witnessed the fabric of community building in
Parkville, and in Wentworth Gardens developed a theory of women-centered organizing
(Stall and Stoecker 1998) by both studying and at times engaging with a most unlikely
group of public housing residents. Their local collective actions in creating a preschool,
laundromat, and a convenience store provided the social confidence and resilience that
these women used to challenge powerful institutional actors such as the Chicago
Housing Authority (CHA), the City of Chicago and the Illinois Sports Authority. And,
I am convinced that the invitation these activists extended to us to both witness and
gather their stories would not have been possible if we had not earned the trust of
the residents through our prior and ongoing efforts to support their struggles, and
when possible, to make public their grassroots challenges and accomplishments
(Stall forthcoming).
TEACHING CIVIC ENGAGEMENT
My current academic home, Northeastern Illinois University in Chicago, has the most
demographically diverse public university student body in the Midwest. Here I teach the
grown-up contemporaries of the Victoria Avenue grade school students I taught 20 years
before in South Gate. How do I inspire these students to love sociology? How can I
stimulate their sociological imaginations? How might I best teach these students to
apply critical thinking about society to shape their own beliefs and actions in the many
“public” arenas they traverse? How can I instill the arts of democracy to ignite their
interest and participation in civic endeavors?
For the past decade I have taught a yearly upper division sociology course about civic
engagement. The development of this course was inspired by my own experiential
journey in becoming an engaged scholar. In this class I use readings, speakers, films, class
discussions, and field trips to help students make sense of 20 hours of service-learning
work each conducts for a community-based nonprofit or social service organization. I
distill the passion of discovery, the disciplined detachment of witness and the critical
judgment of social problems into learning exercises that each student conducts, sometimes alone and sometimes in the company of peers. Students learn to adopt a social
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vocabulary for describing their public life at work, school, church, and neighborhood;
as employees, students, believers, and neighbors. They comprehend familiar customs
and habits using ideas that make them strangers to the routine. Grasping the impacts
of social roles and relationships offers freedom in return. I focus on the power of social
action to help fill the loss and guide their awakened sense of liberty.
Within this course, service learning is not just an option, or one of the course
requirements; rather, it is integral to the class objectives that each student work with
a community-based nonprofit or social service organization on a designated task or
project designed to address one of the organization’s needs. Students are encouraged to
seek a service-learning placement in an organization that deals with an issue that they
are particularly interested in and/or is conveniently located to their homes, work, or to
the university. At their site students works with one or more community members in
order to first identify, then better understand and begin to resolve a particular social
issue or interrelated social issues. The course content is designed to complement and
augment the students’ critical understanding of their work at their service-learning
sites.2 For example, all class assignments, including weekly journal assignments, an
interview with an organizational activist, a critique of a news article on an issue at their
service-learning site, and writing an op-ed piece or letter to the editor on an organizational issue, are designed to developmentally build and increase their sociological understandings of their service-learning experiences and provide insights into their own role
at the site and potential future roles as engaged activists or citizens. For many students
the course offers a first conscious step into “public life.” And, yes, even in 20-plus hours,
they experience both the rewards and lessons of public engagement.
Learning to Engage
I told my story as three phases of learning: imaginative awakening, engaged witness, and
social activist. No accident that I use the same distinctions to frame accounts of three
former students who each found a way to combine social insight and action, making
their experience worth describing to others. The students each took my course,3 but their
accomplishments say nothing here about my competence as their teacher or the efficacy
of the content. I chose them because each offers a complementary and contemporary
example of the kind of social learning I experienced on my own journey becoming a
citizen scholar.4
Cassandra: Discovering the Challenges and Rewards of Public Engagement
In her book, Democracy’s Edge, Frances Moore Lappe (2006) stresses that we each have
a public life; “[i]n every core aspect of contemporary life, we are engaged in complex
public relationships” (p. 34). This is always somewhat of a revelation for many students
who previously have not seen their opportunities for activism in their university classes
or on campus, in their churches, or even in their own children’s or younger siblings’
schools.
Cassandra, decided to accomplish her service-learning work by volunteering for the
first time at her child’s school. Prior to this service-learning experience, Cassandra had
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been only “occasionally involved with the PTA,” but she noticed “that there were only a
few parents involved in a school with hundreds of students.” The social issue Cassandra
hoped to address through her service learning was, in her own words, “the lack of
parental involvement in our [predominantly African American] schools.”
Cassandra’s greatest challenge was her difficulty in getting past the school bureaucracy in order to obtain the clearance required to actually work in her neighborhood school. Cassandra described this obstacle in this way: “[The school] didn’t
respond too rapidly to phone calls and messages. When I went in to speak with them
personally, they were extremely nice and wanted my help, but they still took a long
time getting back to me.” As a result of these delays, Cassandra was unable to begin
her service-learning work until late October—well into the second month of the fall
semester.
Once she was finally cleared to volunteer, Cassandra “made the first step to get more
involved” by helping one teacher out for half an hour each morning with “parking lot
duty,” or traffic control. But before long Cassandra increased her responsibilities and her
direct contact with students, first, by volunteering in the lunch room, and then by
moving into classrooms,helping out where the students needed more “one-on-one
help” and by also assisting in an after-school “Reading Club.” Furthermore, Cassandra
extended her prior involvement with the PTA, now helping with organizing meetings to
attract more parents, and with PTA fund-raisers.
Cassandra’s decision to take this initial step into public life by volunteering at her
neighborhood school was similar to my own experience at Victoria Avenue School when
I decided to become more critically invested in the lives of my second grade Latino
students. But this decision to act does not directly translate into effectiveness. Becoming
effectual in public life means learning the concepts and practices that make us valuable
public actors and believing in our capacity to make our institutions work. It means
paying attention to the consequences of our actions. It means recognizing that acting on
our own interests, as well as those of others, can be legitimate as well as constructive
(Lappe and DuBois 1994:39).
For Cassandra, this involvement in her son’s school taught her that she had something of value to contribute, first with assisting students develop their reading skills, and
then by working directly with the PTA to involve more parents in the school. With this
new awareness of the efficacy of her engagement, Cassandra developed pride in her
accomplishments and she gradually began to believe in her personal power to make a
difference not only in this particular school, but in the larger community.As Cassandra
explained:
The books [assigned in this class] taught me that even though it may seem like a
little selfish working on what appears to be personal issues, you will end up helping
someone else as well. . . . I do feel like I have made a contribution to the children I
work with. . . . [M]y most significant contribution has been in the classrooms
helping those students who need help the most. . . . I have gained a sense of empowerment from being able to help others. . . . I think good schools can help make good
communities and vice versa.
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It was evident, by the end of the semester, that for Cassandra, the rewards of public life
were just beginning. Rather than an occasional visitor to her son’s school, she was now
an engaged and increasingly a better informed parental contributor. Cassandra concluded, “Knowing that I am contributing . . . in some way makes me want to do even
more.” “Working at the school is not over for me. My son is only in the first grade, so I
have a long ways to go.”
Cassandra’s increasing involvement at her son’s school, like my initial foray into the
Los Angeles teacher’s union, only whetted her appetite for increased involvement. Also
significant were Cassandra’s appreciation for the contribution she was making at the
school, her report that she “gained a sense of empowerment,” and her initial theorizing
that “good schools can help make good communities and vice versa.” This statement
reflected her increased understanding of what makes a “good school” and the reciprocal
relationship between good schools and good communities and how her own volunteer
participation and expanding the involvement of other parents and community members
was integral to the production of these outcomes.
Raquel: Developing Relational Self-Interest Ignites Her Public Voice
Before she got started, Raquel was not particularly excited about her service-learning
commitment. A stressed student by day and bartender by night, Raquel elected to work
for Meals on Wheels for reasons of expediency as it was both close to her home and
would accommodate her complicated schedule. But similar to my own reluctance to
study rural women in Parkville, Raquel was also admittedly nervous that she would have
little in common with the elderly population served by Meals on Wheels. In class we
discuss the difficulty in defining one’s own self-interests without interacting with others,
and the near impossibility of achieving one’s self-interests without considering the
interests of others. Becoming effective in public life “means developing relational selfinterest—thinking about how our own interests are linked to those of others” (Lappe
and DuBois 1994:42). Raquel admitted her initial doubts when she said, “I was really
nervous choosing this organization because I thought that I wouldn’t be able to connect
with the seniors on a personal level, the whole relational self-interest deal, but I was
proven wrong. . . .”
Raquel worked each Monday and Friday morning delivering a hot meal and a sack
lunch to ten seniors in the Park City area. Gradually she began to learn more about each
of these ten seniors and her growing importance in their lives. She found that they
“seemed more excited about the person who delivered the food, instead of the actual
food being delivered.” Raquel herself was discovering that through her twice-weekly
food delivery visits there was a mutual social bond forming with these “clients” that
inspired her to want to learn more. Raquel clearly identified hunger caused by poverty
as a central social issue she was addressing through her service learning, but through
our course readings and class discussions she began to see interconnections with a host
of other social issues. And she even wrote an op-ed piece entitled, “The Injustice of
Elderly Poverty.” Raquel explained:
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My volunteer work with Meals on Wheels introduced to me far more issues involved
in the lives of our senior citizens. Besides hunger, issues such as senior independence,
health, nutrition, and even loneliness and opportunities for social interaction greatly
impact the lives of our seniors, as well as increase [their] . . . longevity.
Now, rather than feeling stuck in the restricted role as a food deliverer, Raquel recognized her role in “combating loneliness through social interaction.” She acknowledged
the relational self-interest she had established with these elderly individuals. Raquel
revealed:
I never thought that volunteering two mornings a week, for approximately two to
three hours a day would create such a huge impact on not only my life, but the lives
of the seniors I work for as well. . . . I have become a kind of family to some of my
seniors. That feels really good. . . . Not only am I just a volunteer, but I feel I am
somewhat of an advocate for senior hunger and poverty as well.
Like the Parkville women who taught me the value of rootedness in community settings
and participation in community-based activities as the basis for an expanded view of
power and politics,5 Raquel discovered, and now believes, in her own power to act as “an
advocate for senior hunger and poverty.” The discovery of her “public voice” was developed from her twice weekly interactions and social exchanges and the social bonds she
formed with the ten seniors on her Meal on Wheels route.
Miranda: The Personal Is Political: Action and Theory-Building
This last story presents the clearest example of a student who was able to effectively
combine both her experience in the classroom and in her service learning to critically
reflect, theorize, and then bring these theoretical understandings to better inform and
critique her experience.
Almost from the starting gate, Miranda demonstrated the insights of the sociological
imagination and the power of praxis: the dialectical relationship between theory and
practice. And as my experience with the Wentworth Gardens residents taught me,
Miranda learned how collective experience can provide women with the social confidence and skills they need to challenge powerful opponents. As Miranda put it:
The sociological imagination is the idea that the individual can only come to
know one’s self by becoming aware of public issues . . . the sociological imagination
applies to everyone. If I became more aware of . . . public life I could learn what and
who I am. . . . [E]veryday people have a role in solving public problems.
Because of her interest in issues surrounding violence against women, Miranda signed
on to do her service learning work with IMPACT, a self-defense training program for
women and girls. Miranda described IMPACT as an “empowering” organization:
The goals of this program are to increase self-confidence and awareness as well as
attainment of verbal and physical self-defense skills which are pertinent to possible
real life situations. . . . [T]he focus is on the power of women to realize their own
capacities and values. . . . One motto that reflects IMPACT is, “Ordinary women do
extraordinary things.”
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Within the full 24-hour training (broken into four 6-hour periods) women learn how
to protect themselves against both physical and verbal violence. Although Miranda’s
service-learning project primarily had a research focus—coding and analyzing data
from exit surveys from IMPACT graduates—her initial introduction to the organization
was her assignment to videotape women defending themselves in simulated assault
scenarios at a final IMPACT class.
A few weeks after videotaping the women in the IMPACT class, Miranda was
accosted in the vestibule of her Chicago apartment, and she was able to successfully use
a self-defense technique she had witnessed and videotaped at the IMPACT graduation
to fight back against her assailant, who then fled the scene. This was immediately
empowering for Miranda, but there were even larger positive ramifications.
Miranda shared her successful encounter with our class members. We had recently
discussed the potentially constructive impact of the media and how we might “Make
the media our voice.” One student in the class, Patty, felt that this positive story of a
woman successfully fighting back should be more widely reported, especially since the
stories of local women rape victims of a serial rapist had been dominating the Chicago
news. Patty related, “My mind starting going crazy and I’m telling everyone about this
girl, what she learned and she knew how to fight back. People were saying, ‘What do
you do? How do you fight back?’ ” Patty contacted her sister, who worked for a national
television affiliate. Shortly after the rape attempt, Miranda related her account to a
reporter from NBC news. The story was also reported in our university newspaper.
IMPACT was acknowledged in each news account. The students thus learned the
potential of individual action when combined with social networking to affect a powerful social institution. Patty recalled, “We had this tangible result of making the media
our voice.”
Even after this scenario, Miranda continued to learn a tremendous amount. In our
course we read about and discuss an expanded view of power—one that I’ve learned
from social scientists, but also from the community builders in Parkville and the activists
such as Mrs. Hallie Amey in Wentworth Gardens. By conceptualizing power as our
capacity to do things, a capacity that can only be developed with others, it is possible to
see how as one person’s power grows, it often enhances the power of others. Lappe and
DuBois, describe this as “relational power.” Rather than a zero-sum concept, power can
be both enabling and creative. “Power is the capacity to act publicly and effectively, to
bring about positive change, to build hope” (Lappe and DuBois 1994:47).
Building from her observation of the IMPACT class, her own successful prevention
of a sexual assault, her analyses of the exit evaluations of IMPACT graduates, and her
active participation in our course, Miranda was able to “theorize” about the broader
implications of IMPACT on women’s empowerment: “[S]ociety still depicts women
as being a weaker sex . . . making many women believe that they cannot fight for
themselves. . . . IMPACT works to change this unrealistic image. . . . Media images may
remain that way but women do not have to feel that way.” Yet, for Miranda, it was her
own completion of a 6-hour IMPACT class the last week of the semester that really
brought it all together for her. As she explained, “I finally understood the concept of
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empowerment. Not only did I understand it, but I also felt it! . . . [Taking] a Core Skills
class . . . really helped me to relate to the women. I was able to share my story as well as
hear theirs, at their level.”
Based on both her empowerment experience and new critical understandings,
Miranda could now begin to problem-solve how to more effectively address issues of
violence against women, and she proposed, “[One] way the work of this organization
could be strengthened is by implementing IMPACT’s self-defense training in every
community organization that provides domestic violence and rape counseling
services. . . . I think this goal could be considered an example of ‘widening the circle’
(Loeb 1999, 2010).”6
CONCLUSION: WE START SMALL AS WE LEARN TO THINK BIG ABOUT
THE SOCIETY WE EXPERIENCE
These stories are not remarkable. Many of you, like myself, Cassandra, Raquel, and
Miranda, set out on learning journeys in public settings experiencing and coping with
everyday challenges using the powers of social theory to conceive practical social action
engaging in “civic sociology.” My experience and the experience of these students has
taught me that as we set out to solve social problems, we need to recognize and nurture
small, local, and personal first steps into public life. Social change means that we change
as others change and that the lessons learned come slowly, but can and do accumulate
over time. I have also learned that readings and lectures about the principles and theories
of social justice and social movements matter crucially as a resource for leveraging those
small steps into a sustained and popular effort. Social ideas about change mean little
outside of the context of people’s lives. But introducing these ideas to help fuel small
strategic efforts to change familiar relationships in new and improved ways is how
experiential praxis becomes self reinforcing. Teaching that bridges classroom and community uses experiential learning that enables students to witness and develop organizational and leadership skills—skills that would not have been cultivated prior to doing
service-learning work. As students learn to demonstrate competence as social analysts,
and witness and engage as activists, they become better citizens contributing in practical
and important ways to public improvement.
As sociologists and students of sociology, there is a tendency as we learn, and in our
research, our teaching, and perhaps even in our social activism, to foreground the
dramatic moments in social change efforts—the larger social movement rather than the
more invisible personal and locale-based individual actions and collective modest
struggles which are at the root of all larger social change efforts. These “small, fragmented, and sometimes contradictory efforts by people to change their lives” may be
small, and at times short-lived, but they are significant (Krause 1983:54). They are
modest not because they require self-effacement, but because they derive their strength
and are built on social or community ties—the recognition of our relational selfinterest. Turning our attention to these more invisible personal and locally-based individual and modest collective struggles is necessary in order to understand the more
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elusive process of resistance that is taking place beneath the surface and outside of what
is normally defined as political. These protests of daily life often occur in “free spaces”—
social settings or public types of places in the community that exist between individual
private lives and larger-scale institutions where ordinary people can act with dignity,
independence, and vision (Evans and Boyte 1986). Modest struggles illustrate the
possibilities for significant change from below and offer a challenge to a top-down view
of power and politics that has ignored or trivialized them.
We all are able to participate and engage in these struggles, and we do. Certainly the
way that we elect to teach our classes, engage as students, conduct research, and involve
ourselves in the larger community or world is more important now than ever before!
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This article is adapted from my Presidential Address delivered at the Midwest Sociological Society, Des Moines, IA, in April 2008. My address was dedicated to Dean Wright,
a former MSS President. A public sociologist, Dean Wright was truly dedicated to
applied sociology and to launching students out of the classroom to test their sociological sails in the often troubled waters of reality. It is a tribute to Dean that his memorial
service was attended by formerly homeless individuals he and his students had worked
with over the years and also by service providers—who understood and respected the
work they did “Under the Bridges of Polk County” (Wright 1999). This article has been
greatly informed by lively discussions with the members of my writing group—Martha
E. Thompson and Judith Wittner, and with invaluable input from Charles Hoch and
Georgiann Davis. The Northeastern Illinois sociology students, who, since 1999, have
enrolled and actively participated in my Sociological Practice and Social Action class,
were the inspiration for the initial Presidential Address.
NOTES
1
Hironimus-Wendt and Lovell-Troy (1999) argue that there is evidence for the sociological
support of experiential education. The authors trace Dewey’s philosophy of experience, or
pragmatism, his belief that learning was active, and “occurs through an interaction between the
learner and the environment” and “reflective-thinking activity on the part of the students.” We
learn that Dewey was one of C. Wright Mills early mentors. “Threads of Dewey’s progressive
reforms run through most of Mills’ works regarding education” (Hironimus-Wendt and LovellTroy 1999:365), and are evident in Mills’ assertion that academics should “stand up and be
counted. . . . For it is around them that real publics could develop” (Mills [1954] 1963:371–2).
2
It is also key that the students in this course are exposed to the work of sociological practitioners
and of community organizers (see Bruhn and Rebach 2007; Szakos and Szakos 2007).
3
These three students were selected from the approximately 170 students who have taken this
course since 1999, and who have elected to work in over 115 organizations and agencies. Each of
these students kept a learning journal, and concluded with a final evaluative reflection paper.
In addition, in fall 2003, several students participated in two focus groups to more carefully
analyze what they were learning in the course, and five of these students were also videotaped in
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Susan Stall
their service-learning sites (Moran and Stall 2004). The “data” for these accounts was drawn from
the students’ journal assignment reflections, final reflection papers, and some of their course
assignments. Students’ names have been changed to protect their anonymity.
4
The citizen-scholar is invested in developing “community-based teaching and research programs
that serve our students, the university, the community, and our profession” (Pestello et al.
1996:148; see also Saxton 1993).
5
In fact the Parkville study did include a section on women’s participation in a Meals on Wheels
program. In my dissertation I explained the relational value of these “visits” and how this
“transfer of services” creates social bonds when “not just a meal is shared with an elderly citizen,
but time and conversation.” Moreover, community solidarity is heightened as women mobilized
other individuals and organizations to assist in this program (Stall 1991:90–2, 95).
6
In both editions of his book, Soul of a Citizen: Living with Convictions in Challenging Times (Loeb
1999, 2010), Paul Loeb entitles one of his chapters, “Widening the Circle.” In this chapter he
provides convincing stories of everyday social activists who have discovered what can be gained
by reaching out to others who don’t share their assumptions about particular social issues and
modes of organizing. Miranda is correct in her supposition that implementing IMPACT selfdefense training in community organizations that provide domestic violence and rape counseling
services could be an example of “widening the circle.” This is because some who work in the
women’s antiviolence community do not recognize the distinction between standard self-defense
courses and feminist self-defense comprehensive trainings, like IMPACT. Feminist self-defense
is committed to empowering women and girls, and in fact, works to counter the victim blaming
that is embedded in our society.
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