CM Magazine: Resiliency and Capacity Building in Inner-city Learning Communities.

________________ CM . . . . Volume X Number 3 . . . . October 3, 2003

cover
Resiliency and Capacity Building in Inner-city Learning Communities.

Dawn Sutherland and Laura Sokol, eds.
Winnipeg, MB: Portage and Main Press, 2003.
212 pp., pbk., $39.00.
ISBN 1-895411-95-5.

Subject Headings:
Education, Urban.
Community and school.

Professional.

Review by Deborah Begoray.

*** /4

excerpt:

Too often, literature on or about the inner city concentrates on the negative aspects of inner city communities and positions education largely as a form of remediation, In contrast, this book builds upon the strengths already present in many inner city contexts and provides a vision of education as a support for community building.

As a former resident of inner city Winnipeg and a former faculty member of the University of Winnipeg, I was very pleased to see this book. To my knowledge, it is currently the only one available on this topic. Evaluating it, however, was challenging because of the range of quality amongst the chapters. Nevertheless, on balance I feel that it is a worthy addition to our understanding of the potential in Canada's core urban neighborhoods (especially for teachers and teacher educators, but also for policy makers).

Resiliency and Capacity Building in Inner-City Learning Communities contains a foreword, an introduction, twelve chapters, an epilogue and brief biographies of the contributors.

The foreward is by Annabelle Mays, Dean of the Faculty of Education, and it describes the inner city neighbourhood that surrounds the University of Winnipeg, the education program and its faculty (few in numbers but clearly devoted to their mission of inner city education) and the book project. The introduction by the book’s editors, Sutherland and Sokal, builds on Mays’ foreward by outlining the topics of the essays.

The twelve essays cover the topics of educational initiatives, two that mostly failed (Chapter 1 on Winnipeg’s Youth Action Project, Chapter 8 Technology) and another which succeeded (Chapter 7 Collaborative Writing); scholarly theoretical papers on inner-city issues (Chapter 2 Needing to Belong, Chapter 4 Early Childhood, Chapter 9 Anti Homophobia Education, Chapter 12 Social and Cultural Capital); practical suggestions (Chapter 3 Science Classrooms, Chapter 5 Grandparents and Parents, Chapter 6 Schools as Catalysts, Chapter 10 Youth Gangs), and a pair of testimonials (Chapter 11 Inner city Activists). There is certainly enough variety in these essays to satisfy most readers and, as a group, they offer an excellent overview not only of inner city issues but also of model essays appropriate for other groups which may want to publish such a collection on other topics. Another strength is the variety of approaches to the topic from the academic paper to personal narratives. The quality of the essays does vary, and the editors might have considered asking the writers of two of the strongest pieces (Chapter 10 McCluskey and McCluskey and Chapter 7 Katz) to offer some assistance to the other writers, especially of the scholarly papers which were sometimes heavy with quotations, models, facts and figures and which lacked examples from the people and events which would have enlivened their work. Chapters 7 and 10 are outstanding and offer the best of scholarly and theoretical arguments with lively examples. Perhaps a slightly heavier editorial hand was needed!

The epilogue by the editors contains further information on the book’s themes and might better have been included in the introduction; nevertheless, the ideas are helpful for readers. The biographies of the contributors are very informative, but again they might better have appeared at the end of each chapter to help give more context for the essay and its argument. I was impressed by the variety of contributors (a principal, a teacher, a student, several professors and others).

All in all, I recommend this compilation of ideas. It is a book whose time has certainly come, and I hope its publication begins a trend.

Recommended with reservations.

Deborah L. Begoray is the Chair, Dept. of Curriculum and Instruction, at the Faculty of Education, the University of Victoria, in Victoria, BC.

To comment on this title or this review, send mail to cm@umanitoba.ca.

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