CSU Chico IR Addendum 1/8/15
A.4.2 Personal Experience Assignment and Sample
EDTE 302 Access and Equity in Education
Personal Experience Investigation (FINAL) 30 points
Assignment
Candidate Work Sample
Assignment
Choose one of the conceptual categories of diversity that we will investigate in class (race, SES,
gender, language, sexual orientation, religion, ability, etc). Design a personal experience where you
can respectfully gain deeper insight about the topic. Ideally, this will involve putting yourself into an
unfamiliar situation where you are a minority/outsider in some way. This could involve attending
events, workshops, a speaker series, religious services, tutoring, volunteering in the community,
volunteering on campus ie. anything that will give you better understanding of a conceptual category
we have addressed in class and your personal experience of being a minority participant. You are
required to attend a minimum of 3 events (or, as many as you like!) to give you a clear sense of this
group/organization and the work that they do. The idea is to get involved enough to have something
significant to say and critically, to monitor and evaluate what you learned in the process. You are to
draw from a minimum of 4-5 class readings in order to help frame your experiences and help you
consider how this will relate to your future classroom. (I will be looking for a deep reading and
incorporation of these readings into your paper, simply referencing them will not be sufficient)
The final assignment includes both a small group presentation to the class and a 10-12 page
(absolute maximum) paper, which will summarize your experiences and directly draw from class
readings, discussions and films. Your paper and presentation should clearly outline the following:
 Summarize the specifics of what you did, what group/organization/event did you attend?
What’s the history of the group? How did you learn about them? How did you make contact?
Who typically is part of the organization/group/event?

What was your personal involvement and how did it evolve/shift over time? What
assumptions or ideas did you bring with you at the beginning? What changed for you in the
course of your involvement? What did you gain from this experience? Did you have any
uncomfortable, or “crisis” moments? What were they and what did you gain from
experiencing them?

How does what you learned relate to your teaching? What new insights did you gain that
could be applied to your own classrooms? Schools? Understanding as a teacher more
broadly?

Bibliographic references should be included at the end of the paper and citations should
follow APA style within the body of the paper.
CSU Chico IR Addendum 1/8/15
Candidate Work Sample
A Place to Call Home:
An Exploration of Youth Homelessness in Chico, CA
Name Removed
California State University, Chico
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A Place to Call Home: An Exploration of
Youth Homelessness in Chico, CA
Growing up, I never understood what my mom did for a living. I knew that she worked
in housing, but “housing”, to a little kid sounds like the most boring, unspecific thing in the
world. I knew her job title involved the word “low-income”. As a kid, that word was just one
that I learned to say to be able to describe to people what she did. It was not until later that I
realized “low-income” referred to the people she served, and that she did serve people,
families; her work was important, and necessary to the survival of many families and
individuals.
Going in to this personal investigation project, I was not planning on investigating
socio-economic status. I had planned to explore gender. Even in my first autobiographical
paper, I planned to write more about gender and my experiences in school as a female. As I
began to write that first paper, I realized that class and economic status were on my mind, and
in my heart something was in need of more exploration and probing. Over the semester,
without intentionally seeking to do so, I immersed myself in what it means to be homeless,
particularly in Chico, but in general how homelessness affects individuals and families in their
day to day lives and schooling experiences.
Without being fully conscious of it, I have been slowly building on personal experiences
and broadening my knowledge about this topic for many years. I first began exploring it at the
end of high school, when I began to take more notice into what my mom actually did for a
living, and what exactly her job entailed. I started to learn more about low-income housing and
public housing development. When I lived in Portland, OR, I worked at an elementary school
that had over 90% of its students on the free or reduced meal program. I began to see the
effects of socio-economic status and housing on my students’ school experiences, on their
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ability to focus, be engaged, and feel safe in the school environment. This work experience
discouraged me; I felt helpless, and hopeless.
Upon returning to Chico for the holidays that year, I gathered clothing donations and
brought them to 6th Street Center for Youth, a place I did not know much about, only that my
mom worked with them on occasion, and that they served young people without homes.
Growing up in Chico as a young person, I felt we needed more safe spaces for youth to go to, to
feel involved and included in a community that socially revolves around college age activities,
and drinking. While I could not connect to the center as a young person who had experienced
homelessness, I felt a connection none-the-less, as a young person in the community. When I
returned home to Chico after graduating college, I found myself struggling to find a job, and
because of this ended up moving back in with my mom. At first it was really nice, but then I
began to feel the dependence and the struggle of not having the option to move out and live on
my own even if I wanted to. I realized though, how privileged I was to have the security and the
support network of my family, so that I was housed, and did have a home, even if I did not have
an income.
I felt this privilege especially clearly when I stopped by 6th Street this last summer, to
drop off more donations. I felt like an outsider, and felt the distance that my own unknowing
and assumptions created between the youth at the center and myself. A month later, I dropped
in again, to speak with the Director of 6th Street, Jennifer Barzey. I had had an idea to combine
forces with her and organize a storytelling event, one that occurs worldwide (founded by the
National Storytelling Network), but that must be produced locally. I went to her to ask if 6th
Street would like to be the beneficiary of the event. In our first meeting, I mentioned to her that
in fact I would love the event to be one of collaboration, and that ideally I wanted to work with
them to organize it, not only to benefit them, but to include them in the entire process. I told
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her my original vision of having storytelling workshops with the youth, in the hope that a few
might wish to perform at the actual event. From this first meeting, a great endeavor was set in
motion.
Jennifer put me in contact with Josh Indar, the facilitator of Writing For Donuts, a
weekly writing workshop at 6th Street that he started about 6 years ago. The three of us,
Jennifer, Josh, and myself, formed a planning committee, and began to envision and construct
the Tellabration! event. The idea was to hold an event to raise awareness for both the
importance of storytelling, and the issue of youth homelessness in our community. Using one
to help the other, storytelling for social justice and social change.
This issue of homelessness, particularly among the youth of Butte County, has been
talked about in the last few years with special fervor among many. The “homeless problem”,
the issue of downtown being “unsafe, unfit for families” (local comment at a community
meeting), and the push for “cleaning up” and policing the downtown city plaza were all hot
topics at council and community action meetings. I worked as a note-taker at a few community
action-planning meetings in 2013, and felt the energy and motivation among many community
members to combat the root causes rather than the surface symptoms (such as the appearance
of downtown). Much of what we discussed was how to provide the necessary services to those
without homes, but also how to educate and increase awareness of the real issues at hand
among the larger public. What we were seeing in the community was a mentality of othering,
creating an us versus “the homeless”, or categorizing individuals without homes into two
types—the “deserving”, or the “undeserving” (Gorski, 2005). This leaves out the systemic issue
of poverty, the structural violence occurring on a national level. Paul Gorski’s critique of Ruby
Payne’s A Framework for Understanding Poverty, explores this phenomenon when he writes, “
Rank explains, ‘Poverty has been conceptualized primarily as a consequence of individual
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failings and deficiencies’… Social surveys have found that Americans view individual reasons
to be more important than structural reasons such as unemployment and discrimination in
determining causes of poverty” (Gorski, 2005, p.133). Gorski asks us, why is it that educators
want to believe and put their faith in Payne’s framework, a framework that focuses on a deficit
perspective, blaming the individual rather than the institution? This same question can be
posed for the Chico community. Why is it so much easier to take the path of least resistance, “to
invest a limited amount of energy in helping fill the spiritual, moral, skill-related, intellectual,
social, and cultural voids that plague the least privileged among us” (Gorski, 2005, p. 133)? We
would rather just donate clothes or cans and call it good, assuming that if the individuals really
want it, they will change their circumstances. What Kozol points out in his book, Rachel and her
Children, “The cause of homelessness is lack of housing” (Kozol, 1988, p. 14). Reading this, I
had to take a moment to think—I tend to think about the causes of homelessness as more
varied and complicated than that, but stripped down and put quite simply, at its basic it is a
lack of housing. What Kozol is getting at is how often we focus on the individual and their
shortcomings, without turning an eye on the institutional practices that create this lack of
access, lack of actual, physical housing that low-income individuals can access and make use of.
I agree with him in his basic argument that we need to look at what kinds of housing are being
taken away and foreclosed on, and the larger institutions that are creating this deficit of
physical housing, but I also believe that it is important to realize the various reasons and
causes of homelessness, for they are also institutional and need to be addressed. Lack of access
to services that give individuals tools and resources to build on, rather than quick fixes (while
still important to alleviate present moment pains and problems), needs to be addressed. But
this work is challenging, and Payne’s quick fix of learning the “hidden rules” of generational
poverty and teaching students the rules of the middle class (Payne, 2005) is much easier than
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thinking systemically about institutional change. Gorski writes, “In today’s anxiety-ridden
milieu, many of us may experience A Framework as a reprieve from the difficult reflective and
transformative work called for by Kozol (1992), hooks, (2000), and others. Their work
challenges us to be part of institutional reform. Payne’s demands shallow awareness and no
commitment to authentic reform” (Gorski, 2005, p. 133).
This reflective, reflexive work that Kozol, Kumashiro, hooks and others speak about
requires time, patience, and the willingness to sit with what Kumashiro calls the “unknowing”,
to allow discomfort, and work through moments of crisis (Kumashiro, 2000, p. 44). He writes
about how Felman argues that it is this very process of working through crisis that “moves a
student to a different intellectual/emotional/political space” (Kumashiro, 2000, p. 44). This
personal investigation project has required me to go deeper than I have in the past, to inspect
my own assumptions and complicity in systems of oppression, and to work towards an
education for change in my society, and in myself (Kumashiro, 2000).
In re-reading Josh Indar’s introduction to the publication of Writing for Donuts, I am
confronted with my own former prejudices and assumptions about the issue of homelessness.
Josh writes:
In the endless debate over what to do with “The Homeless”, we tend to forget that we
are not dealing with some special interest group. We are dealing with individual human
beings who are caught in a cycle of poverty that is not of their own making. We forget
that these are not some invading nomadic outsiders—these are our neighbors, our
colleagues, and in the case of a lot of the writers in this book, our kids. (Indar, 2013, vii)
Prior to this investigation, it was easy for me to conceive of the homeless as a special interest
group, as Josh says. I found myself advocating for change in our community, but from a
standpoint of distance, not one of really seeing the humanity of the people I was advocating
for. When I imagined giving storytelling workshops at 6th Street, I was initially afraid and
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worried that I could not handle the youth’s hardness, that they would see me as too naïve, and
that I was not prepared or qualified to handle the trauma or emotional outbursts and rawness
that might arise in the stories shared.
In the back of my mind, I assumed that all of the youth had always been homeless. I
hadn’t been able to imagine a story for them that was not their current one. This underlying
assumption caused many more inaccurate assumptions—that most homeless youth are not
educated, have trust issues, have low self-esteem, and don’t see a future for themselves. While
this can be true for some young people who are living on the streets or living without homes,
this is not the whole population by far. These assumptions were challenged by the first hand
accounts of my workshop participants, and through the ensuing friendships that occurred
between the youth and myself.
To introduce the Tellabration! event and me and my storytelling workshops to the
youth, Jennifer, Josh and I organized an Open Mic night for the 6th Street youth. We opened the
Center up one night in October, and invited all the youth to come perform and share a song, a
poem, a story, anything they wished to offer the audience. I listened to the many young
performers, many only a year or two younger than me. At the end of the night, I performed a
personal story about my dad, and about growing older and being grateful each year on my
birthday for having made it one more year. I had been working on a different story,
beforehand, trying so hard to put together a smart commentary on housing and helping others,
something that would show the youth that I was aware of the issues, and that I was reflective
and conscious of my own privilege. In the end, I realized all I needed to do was to be real with
them, to share a piece of my life that was authentic and honest. The story I shared was honest
and vulnerable, and they received it well. From this experience together, we began to build a
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relationship, and many of the participants that night ended up participating in my workshop
the next week.
I gave two workshops before the Tellabration! event, and have continued every week
since then, with a break for Thanksgiving. In the workshops, I came face to face with my
assumptions, and was challenged to rethink them. Many of my workshop participants told me
stories of their former lives, their former educations, their choices to leave home, or the
circumstances leading up to them losing their homes. Two in particular are very well read, and
would quote books and authors I had never read before. We became partners in creating an
expressive space for everyone involved in the workshop. The last workshop we had, we
discovered how many of us love drama and theater, and had had positive former experiences
in school with drama teachers and theater games. We played a game together that brought out
everyone’s improvisation and creative skills, and demonstrated the amazingly supportive
atmosphere we had created together, with everyone listening intently to one another and
giving verbal support and hand pats on the back after each person finished.
Rather than feeling intimidated or unqualified, I felt included, supported by the
workshop participants. I found friendship and commonality. Being very close in age, I felt
initially worried that they would think I was a joke, but in the end, I think this in fact allowed
me to connect with them more, and to form stronger relationships.
Josh Indar reflected on his own experience of offering writing workshops at the Center
in his introduction to Writing for Donuts. He talks about his first day in 2008 at 6th Street,
feeling uncertain and confused as to how to get anyone to join in the writing activity. He
realized that he “needed to make a connection—with the youth, with the staff—I had to engage
them in something meaningful” (Indar, 2013). Having the opportunity to work collaboratively
with the staff of 6th Street, and be around the Center consistently each week for Tellabration!
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meetings with Jennifer, and for the storytelling workshops, helped me make that connection,
and helped the youth see that I was not a one time visitor or outsider, but someone who was
dedicated and committed to making a difference there, to working together for change, rather
than offering to give them “change” and move on down the street. As Kumashiro notes, “The
goal here is not merely any difference, since not all changes will be helpful. Rather, the goal is a
change informed by these theories of anti-oppression, a change that works against oppression”
(Kumashiro, 2000, p. 44).
This change does not happen without struggle. As Kumashiro writes, “Anti-oppressive
education involves crisis” (2000, p. 44). I found myself in a few crisis moments throughout the
organizing process for Tellabration!, and in the experience of giving workshops at 6th Street.
First off, I discovered the importance of discourse in advertising and promoting Tellabration!
to local press, and the community at large. We had an interview with the Chico Enterprise
Record, one of the local newspapers in town, and the reporter wanted to interview both Elijah,
one of the youth performers from the Center, and me. I had not met Elijah until that same
meeting with the reporter. I had heard only recently that Elijah had confirmed his desire to
perform his story at the event. As we began to talk, I realized that Elijah was not filtering
anything he said, and I began to worry how the reporter would take what he was saying. I
found myself in the position of mediating Elijah’s honest account of his life and his opinions
about being homeless and living on the streets in Chico, and feeling the need to frame it or add
to it a more systemic perspective. I was sweating in my seat, watching the reporter, a
seemingly nice woman, but also a woman who herself commented a few times about her
experience with the homeless, revealing her own personal assumptions and mentality that
there are homeless who deserve to be helped, and those who need to make better choices,
whose homelessness is their own fault and failure. This experience revealed to me that while it
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is important for the voices of the homeless to be heard and for first hand accounts to be
listened to, harmful discourses and citational practices (Kumashiro, 2000) are often deeply
internalized by those very individuals who are being harmed by them. The same people who
are hurt by these stereotypes and repeated narratives, can also continue this cycle of discourse
by buying into such stereotypes and narratives themselves. In the end, the reporter wrote a
nice article about the event and framed Elijah’s story positively, choosing to focus on the
influence of 6th Street Center on his life and the importance of these types of services, rather
than the internalized narratives of individual failure/success or “if you try harder you’ll make
it” mentality.
Another moment of crisis was during one of the storytelling workshops. A participant
shared a story that involved his history of being molested by his dad, and how much he
appreciated his mom’s house and felt safe there before he had to leave it (for reasons I am still
unsure of). The reason this moment did not create huge discomfort or disruption was that we
had been meeting as a group for many weeks already, and there was a trust established
between us all. I felt a little uneasy and unsure of how to handle the moment, but settled on
acknowledging the individual who shared and thanking him for feeling comfortable enough
with us to share such personal information. I said that I was sorry that he went through that,
but focused on how I was glad to hear that he had found a safe place with his mom in her
house. This moment really brought home to me the importance of establishing a connection
with the people you are working with, and forming a personal connection to create an
atmosphere of safety and trust amongst everyone involved. This lesson would come up again
in my exploration of how to implement teaching about homelessness in the classroom, which I
will return to after.
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The workshops were very successful, so much so that the participants were eager to set
up the next week’s workshop before I left each week. I did not expect them to want me to come
back, and in the beginning felt like perhaps I was imposing on them, that they weren’t really
getting anything out of my workshop. Their attitudes and eagerness after the first few
workshops showed me I was wrong. Going into it, I was aware that it would be a challenge to
get people to commit to performing at the Tellabration!. I had accepted the fact that we would
likely not have any youth performers. The week before the event, Elijah, a youth who had not
been participating in the workshops, but who had previously worked with Josh, came forward
with his interest in performing his life story. Soon after, I had three individuals from my
workshop that wished to perform. In the end, two of them, (a couple, Stefanie and Zack), and
Elijah were able to perform, and their stories were what made the night one to remember for
the rest of my life. It was a night for many to remember and reflect on as a turning point for
their understanding of homelessness in this community.
The event sold out, with people being turned away at the Women’s Club door. The
evening began with a dinner served by youth volunteers from the 6th Street Center. Community
members sat around round tables, talking, discussing what was to come next, introducing
themselves to new people and making connections. The evening then transitioned into its
storytelling concert. With professional storytellers, and the youth performers, audience
members experienced the magic and variety that the oral tradition brings. The three youth
performers were on stage for the first time in their life, and their stories struck a deep chord.
You could have heard a pin drop during Elijah’s true account of how he left a life of theft and
robbery in Los Angeles, made some tough decisions and made his way to Chico where he has
slowly turned his life around with the help of the 6th Street Center. He reminded us that no
matter what we might be upset about, if the food was bad, or “people are hurting because they
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have to stand during the show”, it was all worth it, because “supporting the 6th Street Center is
worth it” (Elijah, Chico Tellabration!).
A community member remarked, “When he first got up there on stage, I thought, ahh
I’m not going to like this guy. But he totally blew me away—his honesty, his ability to be real
with us, and improvise. He really made me think, made me change my mind about him, and
about a lot of things” (Ben R., Chico Tellabration! audience member). Hearing this, I thought of
the quote, “When you tell someone something, it goes to their head. When you tell someone a
story, it goes to their heart”. Chico Tellabration! showed me how storytelling can be the perfect
medium to cut through our illusions of a ‘meritocracy’, and abandon the image of an
“undeserving poor” (Gorski, 2005), instead, replacing this image with the shining eyes of
individuals, making us face our common humanity.
From here, I began an investigation into not only how to teach students that are living
without homes (what we focused on in class), but how to teach all students about the issue of
homelessness. I found some helpful resources, (see Unsheltered Lives in References), but
noticed that the resources out there seem to either focus on effectively teaching students
without homes, or teaching your entire class about homelessness, but, in ways that assume all
your students have homes. I wanted to know how to teach about homelessness to a class of
mixed backgrounds, in a way that all feel comfortable in the learning environment. What I
discovered was the same lesson I learned with my workshops—to teach about these kinds of
issues you must first develop an atmosphere of trust in your classroom, and a personal
connection amongst students, and between yourself and each of the students. The use of
stories and first person narrative accounts can be very effective, but you must lay the
groundwork beforehand, setting the stage and framing the lesson in a way that does not repeat
harmful discourses, but instead “construct(s) disruptive, different knowledges” (Kumashiro,
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2000, p. 43). In this kind of teaching, “Teachers cannot determine ahead of time what students
are to learn” (Kumashiro, 44). The possibility for a true change in self and society is enough to
make this worth it. I think the most effective way to teach this is to create simulations—hands
on, kinesthetic learning for students to put themselves in others’ shoes, literally, physically for
a period of time. It also requires teaching critical thinking, giving students tools to think, tools
to work through different ideas and to handle information coming from primary sources, such
as first person narrative accounts. Kumashiro reminds us, “Educators need to create a space in
their curriculum for students to work through crisis” (2000, p. 44). In using simulations or
storytelling from primary sources in your curriculum, there needs to be a follow up and a time
for reflection and discussion to de-brief the experiences students are having, to work through
conflicting feelings and assumptions that are being challenged. I explored this further and
created a Blendspace presentation of a thematic unit plan to teach about homelessness, while
incorporating the process of reflection and debriefing into the lessons. The presentation (in
Spanish and some English) can be found at:
https://www.blendspace.com/lessons/bfbjKD0FL19-1Q/homelessness-el-fenomeno-de-lacarencia-de-hogar.
This research process, and the overall personal investigation process, allowed me to
become deeply immersed in what Kumashiro would call an “education for change of self and
society” (Kumashiro, 2000). From these I gained a clearer understanding of the experience of
youth homelessness in Chico, particularly of the youth from 6th Street Center. I developed
tools to help me build educational experiences for others in my future classrooms,
implementing the model of education to change the self and society, through allowing
unknowing to exist, working from a place of integrity and honesty, and trusting that the
process itself can bring about essential transformation and change.
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References & Sources
Gorski, P. (2005). Savage unrealities: Uncovering classism in Ruby Payne’s framework.
St. Paul, MN: Self published piece. Found at http://www.EdChange.org.
Indar, Josh. (2013) Writing for donuts: A collection of writing by Butte County’s homeless
youth. Chico, CA: Butte County Office of Education, School Ties.
Kozol, J. (1988) Rachel and her children: Homeless families in America. New York: Three
Rivers Press. p. 1-25.
Kozol, J. (2012). Fire in the ashes: Twenty-five years among the poorest children in
America. New York: Crown Publishers.
Kumashiro, K. (2000). Toward a theory of anti-oppressive education. Review of
Educational Research, (70) 1, pp. 25-53. American Educational
Research Association. http://www.jstor.org/stable/1170593.
Messinger, A. (2010). Unsheltered Lives: Teaching about homeless in grades K-12, an
interdisciplinary activity guide. Burlington, VT: Committee on Temporary Shelter.
http://cotsonline.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/Unsheltered-Lives-2010.pdf.
Opening Doors. Do you have homeless children in your classroom? Arlington Heights, IL:
Adult learning resource center. Resource handout for teachers.
O’Malley, C. Thematic Unit Presentation. Found at:
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https://www.blendspace.com/lessons/bfbjKD0FL19-1Q/homelessness-elfenomeno-de-la-carencia-de-hogar.
Payne, Ruby. (2005). Understanding and working with students and adults from poverty.
Framework for understanding poverty. Baytown, Texas: Aha Process, Inc.