Credentials

Kids Around Town: Valuing Multiple Perspectives

Children in Eisenhower School's third grade in Upper St. Clair, Pennsylvania, have no difficulty explaining community groups' different perspectives on recreation in their town. They can argue persuasively for picnic shelters and park benches that the United Senior Citizens Group wants; they can present the concerns of the high school students who want to play miniature golf and go swimming (with room to sit by the pool and talk to each other); they can represent the parents of the children at Westminster Nursery School who want play areas for young children, and they can even explain their own preference for an arcade and a swimming pool with a water slide. They have ideas about how the community's ideal recreational center should look and how it should be paid for.

These children have been exploring a local public policy issue as part of Kids Around Town, an interdisciplinary civics project developed by the League of Women Voters of Pennsylvania Citizen Education Fund. Through this project, children use a local issue as a springboard to research, analysis, problem-solving, and civic action.

Kids Around Town (KAT) is an inquiry-based, hands-on approach to learning about local government. One of the major goals of KAT is to have children think about issues from different perspectives and to explore or devise possible solutions to problems they encounter. Children are encouraged not to be limited by choosing a solution before they have explored all the possibilities. They are also urged to understand how different groups in the community may be affected by policy decisions.

The KAT model provides a flexible structure for teachers to guide children through a study of a local issue. Children are introduced to the idea of local government; they choose an issue of interest to them; they research that issue and analyze what they have found; they decide on a possible course of action and carry it out. Different classes have studied issues as far ranging as land use and zoning, bicycle safety, citywide curfews, and juveniles and the law. Often the children and teachers find that the KAT model's components are overlapping. For example, in many cases being introduced to local government can also be the beginning of choosing an issue of interest.

In an introductory interview with their township manager, the third-grade children from Eisenhower Elementary School in Upper St. Clair learned that their community was considering building a centralized recreation center at a site not too far from their school. The children began making suggestions about what they would like to have as part of the center. Under the careful guidance of their teachers, the children soon realized that if the community recreation center was to serve the entire community, it would need to reflect the desires not only of Eisenhower's third graders, but also of many other individuals in town.

Framing the question is one of the most important parts of actually studying an issue. Often the very way that the question is formulated guides (or limits) the possible ideas that can grow from it. The children in Upper St. Clair could have framed their question in many different ways from "Should Upper St. Clair build a centralized recreation center?" to "Should Upper St. Clair include a swimming pool in its plans for a centralized recreation center?" The first question is so broad that the third-grade children would have been studying something very different from their original questions to the township manager. They would have needed to study about zoning laws, taxation, other recreational facilities in the area, etc. Although this could have been done, it would have taken a great deal of the class time for a year, and it wouldn't have answered the questions that the children were really interested in. On the other hand, the swimming pool question would probably have been too narrow. It would have limited the children to examining the positive and negative aspects of including the swimming pool, but it would not have given them the creative freedom they needed to come up with alternative suggestions. After long discussions, the teachers and children decided that their real interest was in what facilities would be included in the recreational center. Their research question was "If Upper St. Clair is to have a centralized recreation center, what does the community want to be included there for their use?"

With this as the guiding question, the four classes of third-graders began their research. They brain stormed possible activities that they thought community members might like to have at a recreation center. The teachers helped the children realize that during brainstorming no one stops to say that something wouldn't work or that something is "dumb." Brainstorming is a time to get as many ideas as possible. The children came up with twenty-eight different possibilities for the center including an arcade, tennis courts, a water slide, rooms for dance classes, sledding hills, an indoor climbing center, miniature golf, baseball fields, and a roller blading area.

To explore further possibilities, they visited a nearby community's recreational center and talked with the manager about which facilities seemed to be the most popular, which ones caused the most problems, which ones cost the most, and which ones were seldom used. They added these ideas to the list that they had begun and developed a survey for the community. Realizing that they might not have thought of everything that was possible, they also left space on their survey for respondents to add ideas of their own.

The children prepared an introduction explaining their research, and with the help of community volunteers they surveyed a large sample of Upper St. Clair residents. Knowing that different groups might have different interests, they were careful to include a wide representation in their sample. They attended meetings of the United Senior Citizens of Upper St. Clair, the Women's Club, the Athletic Association, and the Community Education Foundation. They also surveyed the parents of children at a nursery school, and they went to each of the other four schools in the district collecting data. At the end of the three weeks spent interviewing, the students had gathered surveys from more than 600 individuals!

Analysis of the research forms an essential part of any Kids Around Town project. In some KAT projects, students have had the opportunity to examine information they have received for potential bias. For example, in one school where the children studied land development, they received conflicting information from a developer and from an environmentalist. Analyzing the information gave them the chance to think about why individuals might have different perspectives on an issue.

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