He sauntered in behind the rest of the group. His ponytail and partially shaved head stood in stark contrast to the short cropped hair of the other guys in the group. As he searched for a seat, I asked his name. “Paul,” he said semi-defiantly. The assistant principal, standing nearby, replied, “I don't think so, Lonnie.” So, I thought to myself, this is the rebel that I'd heard about, ready in a heartbeat to catch the world off balance.
I had just arrived at Shaw Middle School in W. Roxbury, Massachusetts, to take a group of 7th graders on a community service mission at Boston Aid for the Blind. At the center, we introduced ourselves, and the staff demonstrated various devices the blind use to perform daily tasks. An elderly man related how he had become blind because of medication his doctor had prescribed. Students learned how to guide a blind person, and they asked the questions they had prepared: “How do you pour boiling water into a cup?” “How do you choose your clothes?” “What's it like not to see the person you're speaking with?” Students experienced varying degrees of sightlessness themselves by wearing Lone Ranger/Ninja Turtle-style blinders and glasses smeared in Vaseline™. As they walked around the circle of clients and visitors using canes, they tried to identify various objects without the use of their eyes.
Lonnie had acted restless until this point, unsure of whether to be bored or not. But then the woman next to him started to tell her story. “Do people ever bother you?” he asked. “Sometimes they cut ahead of me in line. Makes me want to crack 'em with my cane,” she responded matter-of-factly. She spoke of the pain she felt when she developed blindness: “I felt sorry for myself, but then I realized that other people have it worse. I'm still alive, and I can still think. That's what it's all about.”
Doris, an elderly woman wearing dark glasses, got up and made her way to the piano. She played like the female incarnation of Ray Charles. The students joined her and the other clients in singing “A-men” and “When the Saints Come Marching In.” Then it was time to go.
As we said goodbye, Lonnie burst out, “Can I get a job here?” The staff person paused, unsure about funding. “Well, could I volunteer?” he asked, more determined than ever. “I want to teach wood carving and carpentry.”
I told Lonnie I'd give him the phone number of a person to contact. As we started to leave, Doris and the others belted out several verses of “Goodnight Sweetheart.”
On the way out, Lonnie lagged behind again. As I went back to find him, Doris stepped carefully toward us with a broad grin. “Where is that young man?” she demanded from behind her Ray-Bans®. “I want to shake his hand.” When she gave him a hug, Lonnie almost seemed in shock, but only for a moment.
The Leadership Initiative
Lonnie participated in a pilot program launched last spring at the Thompson Island Outward Bound Education Center in Boston. The idea was to supplement the traditional program of ropes and rocks with a community service component. Three groups of students from diverse racial backgrounds participated in the Middle School Leadership Initiative. Each group of 30 to 40 students had been selected from three inner-city middle schools: Timilty, Edward, and Shaw. Because of the constraints of preparation time and limited staff for supervision, only 10 to 15 students from each group took part in the service aspect of the program. Seed money for the project came from a grant from Reader's Digest, and the participating schools supplemented this funding with allocations set aside for counseling and improved retention of students.
The program represents one of the latest moves by Thompson Island to address the multitude of issues that plague urban public schools. Since Kurt Hahn founded it 50 years ago in Europe, Outward Bound has developed programs on an international scale. The organization has become synonymous with the development of individual potential and teamwork through adventure-based education. Traditionally, Outward Bound has followed an expedition model: students learn together through hands-on experience for an extended period of time at sea or in the wilderness (Arnold 1992).
With its greater involvement in the urban scene over the last decade, Thompson Island, like other Outward Bound programs, has moved from this concept of a one-shot expedition course to more long-term sequential programs in partnership with schools (Proudman 1991). The format has undergone a metamorphosis from an intensive course in a pristine natural setting to a series of encounters throughout a student's school career. In confronting the realities of the urban setting, this adaptation has helped inner-city schools to modify the content and design of existing curriculums by offering an ongoing supplemental program.
An Alternative Vision
Thompson Island advances an alternative vision for change within the “mainstream” of contemporary education. As Albert Shanker of the American Federation of Teachers has noted, the standard definition of school deprives students from “real world” contact with the skills and ideas that would allow them to expand their exploration of life's possibilities (Shanker 1988). The Boston program, like other Outward Bound schools, strives to reengage students through social and physical challenges in tangible situations relevant to their own lives.
In the process, Thompson Island also addresses another neglected concept central to education: the development of self-esteem. As Peter Willauer, president of the Thompson Island Outward Bound Education Center, has said, “Our city youth want to feel needed; they want to feel important” (Arnold 1992, quoting Willauer). The program shares the perspective of Buckminster Fuller that the ultimate purpose of education is to feel comfortable in the universe.
Ropes and Rocks
- introduce leadership through a hands-on activity,
- define the concept of leadership,
- identify leaders familiar to students,
- analyze what these leaders did to exhibit leadership,
- examine how they came to be leaders,
- determine how students can become leaders,
- follow up with another hands-on activity in which students, working in teams, observe a series of clues to track a fake bomb in the building,
- debrief the experiences.
This introductory session establishes the principles of leadership while students are still at school. For the next session, they travel by boat to Thompson Island to participate in activities involving varying degrees of physical demands. The island, located in Boston Harbor, provides a natural setting for Outward Bound's base of operations. During their first visit, students engage in group activities designed to build trust in others, self-confidence, and individual initiative. For example, the group has to figure out how to pass each member through a web of rope without touching the ground. They also tackle selected portions of the low elements of the ropes course. The experience of walking the length of a balance beam suspended a few feet off the ground and other similar activities helps to crystalize the individual initiative and team effort necessary for the challenges of the next session.
During the next visit, students take to the air. By negotiating a series of high-wire acts, they experience the risks of leadership and stretch the limits of their courage. Staff members supervise every step to ensure that each student is properly clipped into a belay rope to prevent them from falling. Students climb a rope ladder, walk a cable 50 feet above the ground, and ride a harness down a zipline from a platform to the ground. In the “flying squirrel” exercise, each participant hooks into a harness so that the rest of the group can haul him toward the roof of the gym by means of a rope-and-pulley system. On the way down, the person takes a shot at a basketball hoop from mid-air. Michael Jordan never had it so good! Throughout these exercises, students learn to support one another and to stay involved in helping others even if they themselves are not the individual undertaking the event at that moment.
In the final phase of the Leadership Initiative, students rock-climb at a nearby quarry. Their efforts on the face of a rock are the culmination of all they have learned in the earlier exercises, as they experience leadership in action.
Community Service
The second stage of the Middle School Leadership Initiative reinforces the earlier phase—but with a twist. During community service projects, students apply the skills they have gained on the island to real-life situations in their communities. Like any other lessons taught in school, exercises to build self-esteem and personal initiative won't take hold without practice. Community service provides a chance for students to take action close to home.
- working together,
- facing fear and an element of risk,
- employing good problem solving,
- developing courage,
- developing personal initiative,
- building trust,
- exercising compassion.
What follows are accounts of projects undertaken by students from two other Boston schools that participated in the Middle School Initiative.
Over the last year, the neighborhood around the Highland Park section of Roxbury has witnessed more than its share of gang violence, drive-by shootings, and stabbings. Timilty Middle School stands solidly in this neighborhood. Some student council members who attended the first segment of the Leadership Initiative at Thompson Island, along with several other students, volunteered their time and energy one Sunday in May to offer an alternative to violence. To fulfill the public service aspect of the Outward Bound course, they joined forces with a local after-school program at a nearby church, known as the Island School. The Timilty group assisted the Island School in sponsoring Unity Day, an outdoor festival of games and local talent in celebration of the spirit of community cooperation.
Students arrived hours early in order to set up for the activities. Unity Day became a true Outward Bound experience when the weather turned to an Arctic blast just as the festivities were about to begin! In spite of frostbite conditions, volunteers stayed the entire afternoon, supervising pony rides, volleyball games, football and basketball, and the prize table. Local rap performers, dancers, lip-synchers, and musicians demonstrated their talents on a nearby stage. A DJ named “We Be Cool” (“We Be Freezin'” would have been more appropriate at the time!) coordinated the acts while strutting his own crowd-pleasing antics. Through their perseverance and initiative, Timilty students became true activists in the campaign against neighborhood violence.
Across the city, at Edward Middle School in Charlestown, students offered firsthand advice about middle school to a group of elementary school students due to enter middle school in the fall. The gathering was a rewarding follow up to group counseling sessions the younger students had attended about the transition to middle school. At first, some of the middle schoolers were shy about speaking before a group, but a few showed particular skill in leading the discussion, and almost all of them came forward to share experiences and take questions. In fact, the younger students asked so many questions that no time was left to tackle a planned cooperative art project.
One of the most notable moments was when the older students overcame their own fear about the presentation. They took the risk of stepping outside of themselves to assist others in overcoming their fear of the future. Because of these efforts, I suspect those elementary students had an easier go of it when they took that first walk to Edward Middle School last fall. Because of the project's success, administrators at Edward hope to institute an ongoing peer leadership program.
From Self to Selflessness
Through the community service aspect of the Middle School Leadership Initiative, students learn in a tangible way that leadership transcends many environments and that it will be a valuable ability throughout their lives. The respect and concern for one another that participants gain through the physical challenges later blossom into concern for the people and environment around them. Having scaled the cliff face, they reach back down to help others in their own climb.
Later, through service in their city neighborhoods, students develop the values of citizenship, individual responsibility, and engagement (Burkhardt 1991). The key is that students recognize that they matter (Levin 1992). Leadership isn't reserved for some remote figure on TV—it is within them. Thompson Island's Middle School Leadership Initiative dramatically demonstrates to students that they themselves hold the power to make valid decisions to create change. As they step out of preoccupation with themselves, students experience the selfless rewards that concern for others and being needed bring (Burkhardt 1991).
We educators often focus on the so-called “hard” skills of math and reading, while students such as Lonnie are contending with the far harder issues of daily life in the city: sex, drugs, AIDS, violence, and abandonment. We expect young people to make some of life's most treacherous decisions, but rarely allow them to gain experience in how to use good judgment. Lonnie and other students are all too often expected to sit like mute passengers on a mysterious voyage. The Thompson Island program guides them to chart and sail the course, to see that they have something to offer to others. The relevance of that lesson is undeniable— whether students are walking the high-wire in the woods or the tightrope of life.
