Inner-city youth help educate one young teacher

When they first drove into Chicago’s south side, says Kelly Anderson, some students became nervous. Windswept streets, overflowing garbage cans, windows with steel bars. Looking out the windows of their van, many were seeing genuine poverty for the first time.

But it didn’t take long for them to settle in, join the community, and begin working. During the day, Anderson assisted at the Cesar E. Chavez Elementary School. Afternoons, she volunteered at the Robert Taylor Boys and Girls Club of Chicago, which is located on the grounds of the Robert Taylor Homes, the second-poorest urban community in the nation.

It was the spring of 1999, the inaugural year of The University of Iowa’s Chicago Experience program. Developed by Rahima Wade, an associate professor of curriculum and instruction in the College of Education, the program offered elementary education majors the opportunity to spend a week in Chicago—over spring break—work in inner-city schools, volunteer with children’s agencies, complete their community service-learning requirement, fulfill a portion of their classroom practicum, and earn one semester hour of education credit.

"I was so gung-ho about it," says Anderson, a 1999 College of Education graduate. "The inner-city life and what these children have to go through really intrigued me. I wanted to see how these kids overcome obstacles and find out what makes some kids strive to succeed, even in difficult environments."

At the time, Anderson was a special education major from a mid-sized college town in West Virginia, planning to return home after graduation to teach children with physical handicaps. But she’d felt glimmers of a different calling: four years earlier, working as a camp counselor outside Buffalo, N.Y., Anderson had connected with a group of at-risk children from the city. Now, the Chicago Experience gave her an opportunity to find out if this might be her niche. She discovered within a day that it was.

"At Chavez school, I implemented behavioral modification programs for the kids," Anderson recalls. "I did everything from recess duty to work in the autism classroom. At the Boys and Girls Club, I ran self-esteem classes and other enrichment programs for adolescents. The point was to keep them off the streets, basically, so we did everything: dancing, basketball, drama, games, computers."

It was an exhausting week that packed in far more than a semester’s worth of learning. But Anderson was elated. She knew she’d found her calling and immediately accepted when she was offered a full-time, three-week summer position working with the Robert Taylor Homes.

This is exactly the effect Wade had been hoping to have when she conceived the program after meeting the coordinator of the Urban Life Center, a nonprofit agency that arranges experiential learning opportunities in Chicago. The center worked with Wade to provide lodging, orientation, and manage placements in the schools and neighborhood centers.

"Students who participate in the Chicago Experience learn firsthand about inner-city life, diverse children, and the challenges of teaching in a large city public school system," Wade says. "While many sign up out of curiosity and the excitement of spending a week in a big city with their peers, some return with an interest in teaching in the inner-city. Even those students who realize that inner city teaching is not for them benefit in terms of learning about cities and diversity and bringing that knowledge to their future teaching in suburban or rural areas."

There appears to be no downside to the Chicago Experience: it is a boon both for the inner-city schools it serves and for the University. This is why it quickly became an annual program offered by the College of Education. But perhaps no one has benefited from Wade’s innovation more than students like Anderson.

After graduation, she moved to Kansas City, Kan., where she began working on a master’s degree and teaching in an autism and behavioral disorders program in a Kansas City, Mo., school. In spring 2001, Anderson completed an M.A. degree and now supervises an emotional mental health program for at-risk children.

"This is the sort of work where you have to get up and remember each morning where these kids are coming from," Anderson says. "Last year, four of the 11 children I taught had felony charges against them. What they need is a positive experience at school, and I try to give that to them. I know that this is what I want to do for the rest of my life."