1. The American ideal – implicitly if not explicitly – asserts that poverty is the result of personal failings (lack of work ethic, addictions, immorality). However, the greater contributor to poverty, in particular generational poverty (cyclical), is inequality in social systems (education, criminal justice) and inequality in networks (mentors, stable support systems).
2. Universally for humans, geography (our environment and stimuli) shapes perspective (what we see), and perspective shapes how we process experience (how we interpret and respond). Confirmation bias (seeing what we want to see in order to support our view of the world) often leads to faulty attribution of motives and behaviors (making judgment based on what we see, not the objective situation of the other).
3. Categorically speaking, there are different types of poverty (different geographies), which tend to shape and shift perspective differently, thereby producing different interpretations and responses. For example, an immigrant living in poverty may very well be hopeful because they see temporary hardship as a ticket to a better life in a new country. You could apply a similar model to a poor graduate student. Alternatively, a person coming from generational poverty, in which a family has been living in poverty for many years, may not be anywhere near as hopeful as their lived experience has demonstrated few ways out.
Further Research
- Beegle, Donna, See Poverty, Be the Difference (2007).
- Beegle, Donna, An Action Approach to Educating Students Who Live in the Crisis of Poverty (2012).
- Gans, H. The War Against the Poor (1995).
- Invisible Nation, PBS Documentary, in production
- http://www.combarriers.com/Home
Great post. Although I couldn't attend the conference I wish I would have but your post got me thinking about this idea of the meritocracy. According to the idea of meritocracy a person can go as far as their own merit takes them. When thinking about inequities in many areas of life especially poverty and education, there are countless talented people that go unheard or unnoticed, especially when coming from backgrounds of poverty. This work is important and I am glad we were able to host it at CCD.
ReplyDeleteThe interesting question to me is how to contextualize the dialogue in our culture surrounding meritocracy. I think there is much about meritocracy that pretty much all of us can appreciate - hard work should lead to positive outcomes, societal judgments should be based on individual contributions as opposed to personal circumstances, et cetera. The point, I think, that is often lost but that needs to be made is that the work we do at a community college is all about meritocracy. For, we cannot honestly be talking about individual effort producing individual outcome unless we have created a level playing field. I think the last point in this definition of meritocracy is often left out of our political and cultural discussions. So how do we go about widening the perspective of our cultural dialogues? How do we get more people conversant with the ideas and frameworks presented by people such as Dr. Beegle?
ReplyDeleteTroy, I like your point about widening the cultural discussion of meritocracy to encompass merit achieved from a level playing field. This conference and its facilitator Dr. Donna Beegle, remind me of the work by Dr.Ruby K Payne who coauthored 'Bridges Out of Poverty'. What I most remember from a 'Bridges' workshop I attended was the focus on understanding poverty via the "hidden rules among classes" and her proposed "mental models" for understanding different socioeconomic perspectives (upper, middle, lower). Though the author received criticism for her work in mainstream academia for lack of empirical research and promoting classism, I do feel the strategies and models were useful ones for getting folks, who are not always so inclined, to begin addressing the deeply reified cultural and political belief that those in poverty have some inherent personal fallibility (the American ideal). The 'Bridges' workshops emphasize that people in poverty have extensive social networks and deep interconnected relationships that they draw upon to get by in an environment of limited resources. Ultimately, a strengths based perspective for those experiencing poverty. While this is not by any means a new idea, I think her work was beneficial in helping to create a dialogue about poverty in many community sectors like education, healthcare and business. Moreover, the thrust of the 'Bridges' workshops is to encourage communities to develop strategic planning initiatives and foster community collaboration to address long-term poverty from many different angles, human service, business, healthcare, etc.
ReplyDelete