Bidirectional Learning: How a University Interacted With 1,000+ Citizens Through a Free, Mid-Environmental-Crisis Course

• In Event: 58.082 - Roundtable Session 25
  In Roundtable Session: 58.082-20 - Lessons From Flint: Engaging Learners With Environmental Crises

Abstract

Credible information about Flint’s water was in short supply in January, 2016, when a local university launched a course focused on the city’s water crisis. The lecture and discussion series was recorded and posted on the university’s website as a free offering to the people of Flint with an associated one-credit course for the university’s students.

The need for this kind of expert-led conversation and teaching was clear. The Flint water crisis had captured national and international attention because of the tragic nature of damaged lives and the shock that the residents of a U.S. city in the 21st century could be denied a basic human rights: access to a safe water supply. There had been boundless and conflicting information about the cause of this crisis and what actions should be taken by those affected to minimize the damage from toxic chemicals and to protect themselves in the present and the future.

Solving environment-related public health problems requires community engagement and careful listening to the voices of those most affected by those problems. This value informs our scholarship and teaching and is continually reinforced through rich, vital, and productive longstanding partnerships with the Flint community. It is central to our thinking about “community” and the role that an urban-placed university should play in promoting the health and well-being of its community. These ideas are informed by critical race theory (Chaisson, 2004), which looks at identity as a social construct, and Bennett’s ideas about enthorelativsim (1993), which speak about the ability to interpret events from more than one ethnic perspective.

We wanted to create a forum within which students and community members could come together to learn and better understand the breadth of the issues related to the crisis. We developed the format of a two-hour course with the first hour dedicated to brief presentations by panel members, followed by open dialogue with the students and community residents.

Although unique in its scope and size, this model of bi-directional learning among the students, panel experts and community residents is an expansion of a model developed for a Cultural Competence in Health Care course developed in the 1990’s (Selig, S., Tropiano, E., & Greene-Moton, E., 2006). In this course, which addressed racism and discrimination, a community partner joined Selig as a co-instructor, giving students the opportunity to hear firsthand from an instructor who experiences discrimination on a daily basis, thus making the issue “real” for more privileged students.

The Water Crisis Course consisted of eight sessions in early 2016. Among the things that we, as educators, learned from this course:
1. The value of getting community residents and experts together in dialogue
2. How experts can learn from the residents
3. How a crisis like the Water Crisis stimulates people to become more proactive
4. The value of bringing people together in a "neutral environment"
5. The lack of awareness of the fragile nature of our infrastructure
6. The lack of awareness among some of the biases that are pervasive in government

Authors

• Suzanne Selig, University of Michigan - Flint

• Michelle Sahli, University of Michigan - Flint

• E. Yvonne Lewis, University of Michigan - Flint

• Kent Key, University of Michigan - Flint

• Kay Doerr, University of Michigan - Flint