Street Level Learning: Transforming Understandings of Poverty through Semi-Structured Pedagogies

Journal of Poverty ISSN: 1087-5549 (Print) 1540-7608 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/wpov20 Street Level Learning: Transforming Understandings of Poverty through SemiStructured Pedagogies Brandi Lawless To cite this article: Brandi Lawless (2019): Street Level Learning: Transforming Understandings of Poverty through Semi-Structured Pedagogies, Journal of Poverty, DOI: 10.1080/10875549.2019.1616034 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/10875549.2019.1616034 Published online: 10 May 2019. Submit your article to this journal Article views: 23 View Crossmark data Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=wpov20 JOURNAL OF POVERTY https://doi.org/10.1080/10875549.2019.1616034 Street Level Learning: Transforming Understandings of Poverty through Semi-Structured Pedagogies Brandi Lawless Department of Communication Studies, University of San Francisco, San Francisco, California, USA ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY This research explores the pedagogical possibilities of semistructured immersion experiences for service-learning students through an assessment of “Street Retreats” used by one poverty advocacy organization. Qualitative focus groups with 76 participants who participated in a 4-hour Street Retreat. After the semi-structured immersion, students’ awareness of privilege, perceptions of people in poverty, and stereotype projections began to shift toward a state of critical consciousness. The reinforcement of “us v. them” discourses are also explored. Received 13 Oct 2018 Accepted 30 Apr 2019 Revised 08 Apr 2019 KEYWORDS Street retreat; communityengaged learning; engaged pedagogy The majority of those who “come to help” in an impoverished community do so without much thought about how to engage the structures that create and maintain poverty. Without deeper engagement, charity can simply perpetuate poverty with Band-Aid approaches; volunteering can merely create an outlet for guilt. This study explores pedagogical possibilities through analysis of a collaborative assessment research project with a poverty advocacy organization. This analysis evidences forms of immersion that can create the desire among volunteers to become advocates, allies, and peers in marginalized communities. Service learning and corporate volunteerism are frequently structured as top-down, self-gratifying experiences (Cruz & Giles, 2000; Henry & Breyfogle, 2006). This kind of service does more to maintain the status quo than to change the policies/practices leaving the structures of poverty unquestioned and unchanged (Pompa, 2002). Moreover, research shows that service learning is more effective when enhanced with experiential pedagogies that engage reflection and personal connections (Fenwick, 2000; Howard, 1998; Mitchell, 2013; Parker-Gwin & Mabry, 1998). As long as volunteers can go home feeling good about the work they did they can avoid asking questions about how poverty, racism, and injustice preserve the status quo. Thus, volunteer experiences may unintentionally reinforce larger ideologies that keep people in poverty, maintain harmful stereotypes, CONTACT Brandi Lawless bjlawless@usfca.edu Francisco, 2130 Fulton St., San Francisco, CA 94112 © 2019 Taylor & Francis Department of Communication Studies, University of San 2 B. LAWLESS and perpetuate the status quo (Brunell, Tumblin, & Buelow, 2014; Eby, 1998). Community-engaged learning creates the opportunity to challenge stereotypes and foster better understandings of difference (Boyle-Baise, 2002). This study attempts to uncover such strategies for engaging intellectual curiosity in students in a way that promotes community engagement and develops critical consciousness. The goal of this project is to understand how to change people’s perception of poverty through immersive experiences. If we are able to understand transformative learning, we can more effectively change the attitudes of volunteers and students who work with low-income communities. Thus, it is important to ask: How do structured immersion experiences change participants’ understanding of marginalized communities, if at all? Pedagogical possibilities and community engagement Current neoliberal trends in education drive classroom approaches that are marked by measurement, objectives, and assessment. Educators doing community-engaged work are left wondering how to measure compassion, empathy, and critical consciousness. Many scholars and educators have articulated a need for more experiential learning opportunities – those that expand epistemologies through informal every day and lived experiences, rather than formal instruction (Fenwick, 2000). Experiential learning models seek to bridge students’ ability to grasp ideas and transform them through interaction. Service-learning has been one approach to community engagement work that focuses on experiential learning through in-person volunteer experiences and increased exposure to diverse communities (Gallego, 2001). Howard (1998) defines service learning as “a pedagogical model that intentionally integrates academic learning and relevant community service” (p. 22). Indeed, service learning can produce evidence for lecture-based course concepts and develop a sense of reflective practice for both educators and students (Pribbenow, 2005). Thus, the experiential learning that takes place in service-learning classrooms has the potential to engage a variety of learning styles and helps to achieve learning outcomes, especially when bolstered with reflection activities (Parker-Gwin & Mabry, 1998). In many cases, service learning is no doubt a successful tool for student learning. However, Butin (2006) argues that service-learning courses are created with an “ideal” student in mind: white students with a relative amount of privilege and the time to spare for “helping” their community. He argues that student demographics are shifting and relying on an archetype will become a challenge for educators. Educators and students alike continue to struggle with how to engage diverse communities, challenge stereotypes, and build relationships (Himley, 2004). Moreover, a focus on student learning without an emphasis on addressing underlying systemic issues in a community leads JOURNAL OF POVERTY 3 scholars like Cruz and Giles (2000) to ask, “Where’s the community in service-learning research?” (p. 28). The need for community-driven service learning experiences has been well documented (Butin, 2015; Swaminathan, 2007; Ward & Wolf-Wendel, 2000). Those scholars wanting to understand how service learning can challenge systemic problems closely link volunteerism to critical pedagogy (Deans, 1999; King, 2004; Lakes, 1998). Following Freire (1970), critical pedagogy is a community-based approach to knowledge production and activism that understands society as multiple/complex relationships between the oppressed and the oppressor. Moreover, critical pedagogy promotes a breakdown of the subject/object dichotomy in educational settings by creating an egalitarian approach to education that presumes educators can learn as much from students as students learn from educators. Critical pedagogies have the potential to engage multiple contexts that inform the day-to-day experiences of marginalized community members and help students to understand their place in a system that perpetuates privilege and inequity. As Gruenewald (2003) explains, “Place-based pedagogies are needed so that the education of citizens might have some direct bearing on the well-being of the social and ecological places people actually inhabit” (p. 4). Still, some of this work continues to center the experiences and voices of volunteers as indicative of civic engagement and social responsibility (Lakes, 1998). Butin (2015) explains that instructors and students doing “critical service learning” must wake up from the dream that they have achieved work that has a real impact on the communities they serve if they have not articulated a collaborative relationship that moves beyond traditional semester timelines, segregates academic/practitioner roles, and emphasizes grade-based evaluation. Community-Based Research (CBR) has also emerged as a prominent pedagogical approach to critical student engagement with/in marginalized communities (Israel, Schulz, Parker, & Becker, 1998; Strand, 2000). Strand (2000) explains that CBR can create a form of “connected knowledge,” characterized by empathy and interpersonal relationships. Such strategies begin to consider the value of a humanization process in education settings where marginalized communities are approached, engaged, and mobilized. While CBR in the curriculum, highlights the identified needs of community members in service-learning experiences, the focus remains on researching the other (even if it is articulated as research with the other), rather than developing an understanding of community members’ cultural experiences as linked to larger systems of inequality. Community-based pedagogical strategies should turn inward in the sense that students sense of self should be interrupted and reconstituted, given their encounters with and relationship to the Other (Bruce, 2013). Given the critiques of current educational strategies used to engage difference, we must articulate new modes of learning that draw from the 4 B. LAWLESS successful strategies of experiential learning, critical service learning, and community-based research, and also move beyond these pedagogies in ways that develop a critical consciousness of marginalized communities, challenge students’ sense of self in relation to others, counter systemic efforts to dehumanize individuals living in poverty, and focus on relationship building, rather than term papers. Case study and method This analysis draws from data collected at Faithful Fools Street Ministry – an arts, education, advocacy, and direct service community, living and working in the Tenderloin District of San Francisco. The Fools’ mission is to participate in shattering myths about those living in poverty, especially homeless individuals. The Faithful Fools have been doing community-based education for over 15 years. Programming at the Fools aims to build community, discover the common humanity across diverse groups of people, and promote personal healing. One of the many programs sponsored by the Faithful Fools is the Institute for Street Level Learning. The role of the Institute is to provide interdisciplinary, inter-institutional learning programs directly addressing homelessness and poverty. One program, Street Retreats, offers immersion experiences of varying lengths/intensity (4 hours, 8 hours, and 7 days/nights). These programs directly engage individuals with perceptions/assumptions about poverty and often move people to engage as advocates. These programs generally serve students (middle school, high school, graduate and undergraduate) and volunteer orientation programs for community organizations, churches, and corporations. All service-learning students who work with the Fools for a semester-long class must begin their relationship with the Fools by embarking on a Street Retreat. Students who do not complete this requirement will not move on to project-based learning with the organization. As such, approximately 30 service-learning students (in addition to other volunteers, community members, schools, and organizations) embark on the Street Retreat each semester. When an individual embarks on a Street Retreat, they are first asked to meet as a group where discussions about expectations regarding the Tenderloin (commonly known as the poorest neighborhood in San Francisco) and community-building activities take place. Participants are told they will spend the next 4+ hours walking through the Tenderloin and observing what they see. Participants are given little direction or explanation about what the Street Retreat entails, except for the street names that create a “border” for the Tenderloin neighborhood and the names of two food kitchens that they can visit for meals at lunchtime. In addition, participants are given a card with the address and contact information for the Faithful JOURNAL OF POVERTY 5 Fools (in case someone is lost) and a mantra: “What holds me separate? What keeps me separated? As I walk the streets, what still connects me?” Participants are encouraged to revisit this mantra as a way to stimulate reflection during their time on the streets of the Tenderloin. Participants are encouraged to make eye contact and engage with people they encounter in their journey, to ask questions about where to find things, and to reflect on the borders of the space known as “the Tenderloin.” After approximately 4 hours walking through/observing the community, participants meet back at the Faithful Fools Court (the building owned by the Fools), and continue written and shared reflection activities. More than 5,000 people (i.e. students, community volunteers, city officials, tech workers, journalists, and international travelers) have participated in Street Retreats. Data collection Participants A total of 76 participants of the 4-hour Street Retreats were interviewed. The 4-hour retreat was chosen to assess because it is the most common and frequent program offered at the nonprofit organization. Immediately following the Street Retreat, purposeful sampling was utilized to recruit college and university students who have participated in at least one Street Retreat. Several students were enrolled in a service-learning course, while others came to participate in one-week winter exchange programs. Students were enrolled in West Coast or Midwest colleges and universities. Students were not asked to explicitly state their race; however, a variety of racial and ethnic backgrounds were represented in this study, as well as participants who identified across the gender spectrum. Students were asked by the nonprofit director to participate after a briefing from the researcher. Participation in focus groups was voluntary. Five Street Retreat participants chose not to participate. Procedures Data was collected through qualitative focus group interviews. Interviews with the researcher took place at the Faithful Fools Court – the meeting place for the organization, and a familiar place for all participants. Interviews lasted between 60 and 90 minutes and pertained to the overarching experience of completing the Street Retreat. Only the researcher and participants were present. Participants were asked questions such as: What were your overall feelings about the educational program you were a part of today? What did you expect the Street Retreat to be before you did it? Would you voluntarily spend time in the Tenderloin after this experience? This study was approved by the IRB at [institution blinded for review]. The researcher has a Ph.D. and is trained in qualitative research methods. All interviews 6 B. LAWLESS were audio recorded for accuracy and transcribed. This process resulted in 144 pages of single-spaced transcriptions. Data analysis Following Lawless and Chen (2018), a critical thematic analysis was used to group codes into categories based on a critical analysis of recurrence, repetition, and forcefulness of students’ responses in relation to larger social ideologies. In the first stage of open coding, the author coded the interviews independently noting “impressions, thoughts, and initial analysis” (Hsieh & Shannon, 2005, p. 1279). Keywords such as “awareness,” “perception,” “experience,” “we” and “them” were used in closed-coding. Finally, categories were aggregated into overarching themes related to best practices regarding immersive education experiences (Lindlof & Taylor, 2002). Specifically, three overarching themes emerged: (1) Fundamental Transformations in Thinking; (2) Value of Semi-Structured Immersion Experiences; and (3) Maintenance of an “Us vs. Them” Discourse. Findings Data analysis revealed a variety of ways in which Street Retreats offered a unique way of learning that they could not get in the traditional classroom. Most responses forcefully suggested that the Street Retreat was fundamental in creating a new type of exposure to difference that moved beyond “helping” or “serving” the homeless population of San Francisco. However, data also revealed that Street Retreats are imperfect in building critical consciousness around issues of poverty and difference. Fundamental transformations in thinking Intensive immersion paired with opportunities for reflective observation creates the potential for fundamental transformation in thinking. The transformations that students described occurred on a variety of levels: Realization of personal privileges, shifts in biases and stereotype projection, shifts in levels of dis/comfort, and shifts in awareness/consciousness. Realization of personal privileges Like critical service learning proponents advocate, service-learning can help students to understand themselves in connection to marginalized community members that have been affected by inequitable policies and taken-forgranted ideologies that “blame the victim” for their poverty and suffering. After the Street Retreat, students were able to articulate their privileges in juxtaposition to the people they encountered. They marked clear shifts in JOURNAL OF POVERTY 7 their personal thinking around race, gender, poverty, and systemic inequality. For example, one student explained: The city is very diverse throughout but I now see that in that one area there’s a huge population of African American males and females and I felt like I was almost the only white person on the street and that was eye opening for me. Wow, I hate to say it, but it was like a concentration camp. There were borders and then once I crossed those borders I started to realize these things. I realized my white privilege realized I do have a home and I can go to my bank and maybe get some money out and I have these things that are the norm for me, whereas these people don’t have these norms. This student’s use of the powerful metaphor “concentration camp” was used to mark the realization of active displacement, othering, and suffering that homeless individuals experienced on a day-to-day basis. The student was also able to link race to systemic marginalization, ultimately highlighting her own racial privilege. The frequency at which white students were able to identify how their racial privilege worked for them, given their apparent “difference” on the streets of the Tenderloin was also apparent. As one student stated, “I was asked right away, ‘Why are you here?’” Another participant similarly experienced insider/outsider discourse when being asked to serve food in a soup kitchen while waiting in line to eat at the organization. She explained, “A worker came out and said, ‘You, we need you to help us out. We are short on volunteers.” A third student described, “When I walked up to the Soup Kitchen, the guard asked, ‘Are you here to volunteer? The line is over here. You’re in the wrong line!’ I said, ‘No, I am here to eat.’ The guard said, ‘Why? You look like you’re here to help out.’” Together, these examples demonstrate the overt marking of privilege by members of the community as moments in which they began to reflect on their class, race, and gender privilege. Shifts in biases/stereotype projection Most students admitted that the Tenderloin was a place they were told to stay away from on a day-to-day basis. Some, in fact, admitted they were afraid to work with the Faithful Fools in any capacity. For some, there was a fear of safety; for others, there was a fear of the unknown. Many students explained that these perceptions were socially constructed by their families, peer groups, and media reports, rather than through direct experiences with the area itself or its inhabitants. One student explained: There are so many of my peers from my hometown who have these biases. I tell them I spent the day in the Tenderloin and they’re like ‘WHY?! WHY WOULD YOU DO THAT?’ So, I feel like Street Retreats are important because they can help break down those barriers. Maybe you’ll keep those biases but at least you’ll be more understanding of them. 8 B. LAWLESS In general, most students purported to have negative stereotypes about the Tenderloin before participating in the Street Retreat. In some cases, students actively tried to resist such stereotypes, but were met with forceful opposition by their parents. One student stated, “My mom said I would need to find another place to volunteer. I told her, it’s my life. Screw you, Mom!” For others, shifts in stereotype projection were centered on who resides in the Tenderloin community. As one student’s melancholy response indicated, poverty is not a monolithic experience for middle-aged men with mental disabilities and/or drug addictions: “I didn’t realize there were children here. I didn’t realize there were elders here.” For these students, the transformative learning experience that occurred on the Street Retreat pushed back against the agents in their lives that promoted stereotypical views of poverty, homelessness, and the Tenderloin. For many students, the Street Retreat was a first experience in the Tenderloin and/or with homeless people. This experience developed a schema for which future understandings of and experiences with marginalized communities are informed. Shifts in levels of dis/comfort Because students’ understandings of difference began to shift over the course of the Street Retreat, students’ comfort communicating with residents of the Tenderloin community increased. Whereas most students agreed that they would not have willingly entered the Tenderloin prior to the Street Retreat, they also claimed they would most likely do so after having this experience. One student explained, “As the retreat was going on I felt comfortable walking around.” Another noted: It’s kind of like if you’re scared to go down a roller coaster but the second it starts and you go down it and it’s over you think ‘I’ve done it!’ So, you can go again as many times as you want. You’ve done it, why not keep going? I’ve experienced it and I feel really comfortable here. However, the extent to which students felt comfortable being in and engaging with the Tenderloin community varied. A few students noted they would only come back and feel comfortable during the day. Others explained that it would take a few visits to see a significant change in comfortability, but that they were willing to go through such a process. Out of the 76 students interviewed, only one said that she would not feel comfortable in the Tenderloin due to catcalling and incidents of sexual harassment. Given that their service-learning experience is just beginning with the Street Retreat, these students have the opportunity to continue to immerse themselves in the community and shift in their levels of comfort. While comfort levels decidedly shifted for most students, the reasoning behind the desire to further engage was not necessarily tied to the vibrant community. Instead, one male enthusiastically noted a desire to return to JOURNAL OF POVERTY 9 “check out shows and try out the best food” without giving much thought to gentrification in the area and rapid displacement of homeless or temporarily housed residents. Statements like these acknowledge that while Street Retreats have a profound impact on student awareness and consciousness, such immersive experiences must be supplemented with discussion, lecture, reflection, and other modes of teaching (Kolb, 1984). Although Street Retreats end with individual and group-based reflection, critical consciousness cannot happen in one day. Shifts in awareness and consciousness Street Retreats are successful in starting a process of critical consciousness or awareness of systemic inequalities, their impact on marginalized people, and individual’s ability to affect systemic change. In Shor’s (1993) extrapolation of Freirian pedagogy, he describes three stages of critical consciousness – pointing out that it must be developed overtime. The first stage, intransitive thought, marks a dominated consciousness in which individuals see themselves as lacking agency and are thus, disempowered and dominated. Stage two, semi-transitive thought, is marked by a feeling of partial empowerment. Individuals in this stage believe that their actions can be influential, “but they relate to problems one at a time in isolation, rather than seeing the whole system underlying any single issue” (p. 32). Stage three of consciousness growth, critical transitivity, merges critical thought and critical action. Individuals in this stage have achieved some level of consciousness and see themselves as central to processes of change. At this stage, individuals begin to see themselves as implicated in the dominance of larger social structures and contexts. Students who participate in Street Retreats enter at various stages of consciousness. Some, see themselves as separate from other’s marginalization and others see themselves as connected, albeit for many this connection is as change agent, helper/savior, or volunteer, rather than learner or community member. Nevertheless, the Street Retreat meets students where they are and works to move them through the various stages of critical consciousness. In realizing various privileges and challenging socially constructed perceptions they carried into the experience, students are better equipped to question the systems that create the circumstances that keep people in poverty. One student poignantly mentioned: If a picture is worth a thousand words, then an experience, especially like a weeklong experience, is worth a thousand pictures. It evokes all the feelings and it impacts you way more. I will never see the world in the same way. These findings relate back to the Fools’ mission to encourage individuals to “see a common humanity” in those they encounter on the streets of the Tenderloin or any marginalized community. The challenge for the Fools is to 10 B. LAWLESS encourage this mission through development of critical consciousness, rather than blind ideologies that leave students thinking, “Now I see that homeless people are just like me!” Value of semi-structured immersion experiences The Institute for Street Level Learning creates an experience for students that is unlike the orientation to traditional service-learning opportunities. As described above, participants of the Street Retreat receive very little direction in terms of what they are “supposed to” experience. Students also had unclear expectations going into the Street Retreat. For example, one man claimed, “When I pictured the Street Retreat, I thought it was booths set up for giving away things!” The Fools do not do much to ameliorate such misconceptions prior to the event itself. In other words, Street Retreats are intentionally semistructured immersive experience, which allow for deep observation and reflection. Students offered specific commentary about this semi-structured nature with both positive and negative regards. For example: I think the laissez-faire kind of style where you’re just supposed to go on your own is intimidating, BUT I think it should be required for learning about new cultures because it makes you want to push yourself. Having that approach where you don’t know what’s going to happen and you just throw yourself into it and figure it out is important because that’s what [people living in the Tenderloin] need to do. I thought the street retreat was more of emphasizing the experience itself since and was not necessarily goal oriented except for the fact that we had to get back there at a certain time…it was more open-ended so it’s focusing on where the retreat is going to take you, where you’re going to take yourself, what you’re going to learn…I think that’s what was needed. Together, these examples articulate a sense of curiosity amongst participants that is fostered through the lack of apparent structure guiding the educational experience. Students were also able to connect concrete experiences to reflective observation, arguing that the semi-structured nature of the Streets Retreat creates the mental space to do so. When asked about the intentional ambiguity offered to students, Sam Dennison explained that the Street Retreat must involve “trusting students to know that they can be their own guide.” Some students found this imbued trust and came out with a greater sense of empowerment. When asked what advice they would give to other students who participated in the Street Retreat, one student said, “Go on your own and don’t ask too many questions. It won’t be the same if you can’t make yourself a little vulnerable.” It is this semi-structured experience that allows for students to “slow down and observe” and concentrate on JOURNAL OF POVERTY 11 one of the few pieces of information they are given – the mantra. As one student explained, I had enough time and freedom to just sit on one corner and watch what was going on around me. I kept thinking, “What holds us separate? What keeps us separated? As we walk the streets, what still connects us?” So, when I’m walking the streets sometimes I imagined the invisible lines between me and a stranger that I don’t really know. Students frequently remarked on the slow pace that is set up when there are limited directions for spending several hours in a four-block radius. The following remarks exemplify how this created space for deeper reflections and new connections: It’s kind of natural when you’re going somewhere to be in a hurry and walk really fast. So, what I really try to do is slow my pace, don’t look down, acknowledge my surroundings. If someone tries to interact with you…it’s kind of second nature for me personally just to be like, ‘maybe it’ll be a catcall’ and to be like ‘oh just forget them.’ But sometimes people are just trying to engage you because people just really want a genuine human interaction. So, use the time to be aware of what’s going on around you. Whereas this student articulated the creation of mental space through semi-structured immersion, others struggled with the ambiguity. None of the students argued for a completely structured and guided experience. However, some asked for more direction. For example: “I don’t know because I get why they did it and I’m not saying tell us what to do. But maybe just give a little more direction.” Faithful Fools leadership has articulated a strong desire to maintain the semi-structured nature of the retreats, seeing in these comments a fear of the unknown, but benefits from being asked to “simply be.” As is evident in the comment above, even those most uncomfortable with a lack of structure were able to recognize the value in observing without a prescribed lens through which one should view the world. Ultimately, this created deeper and more meaningful reflection and communication for those who participate in Street Retreats. Maintaining an “Us vs. Them” discourse As evidenced above, Street Retreats are successful in working toward a critical consciousness and developing modes of deep reflection. However, as this assessment demonstrates, short semi-structured experiences do not make enough progress toward “building a common sense of humanity” in the sense that students fully understand how their liberation and sense of self are wrapped up with the liberation of those they encounter on the Street Retreat. Students are unable to break down the “us versus them” ideology 12 B. LAWLESS that constrains community engagement work. Unfortunately, not a single student used the terms “we” and “us” to describe the group of people that includes students and those who they encountered on the streets. “Seeing that on the street these people can still be so happy and so joyful…” Such binaries are common in poverty alleviation work and statusbased hierarchies are often unintentionally reproduced (Lawless, 2016). These discourses were evident in statements such as, “At the end of the day, I don’t know how these people are living” and “I have a very open mind and it helped me to deter negative connotations about these people.” Leadership is aware of this ongoing discourse and has attempted to dismantle this discursive divide with increased attention to the mission and mantra, emphasizing to students that we must discover on the streets our common humanity. While students can articulate such a mission successfully, this analysis demonstrates that they continue to maintain distance from marginalized communities even when recognizing a common humanity. In the end, a single experince does not create an epiphany. Some of the students who participated in a Street Retreat will create long-term relationships with the Faithful Fools and develop their understanding of community engagement over a sustained period of time. For others, the progress made in 4–6 hours is remarkable in and of itself. Still, such a finding demonstrates the value for relationship building within service-learning experiences. Discussion Implications The Institute for Street Level Learning at the Faithful Fools Street Ministry offers programming that serves as a model for service-learning orientations that moves beyond experiential, community-based projects. In assessing this programming, it becomes apparent that scholarship on community-engaged learning must address action-oriented community needs, as well as the importance of relationship building. Efforts to increase the importance of relationship building must begin between academics and community partners. Building alliances (i.e. mutually beneficial relationships) creates better communication involved in identity negotiation, and makes difficult dialogues more comfortable long-term. Moreover, community-engaged learning should move toward including semi-structured and immersive experiences. The ambiguity demonstrated in the Street Retreats can serve as a model for how to let students “be their own guide” – a move that inevitably challenges students to move beyond a sense of “coming to help.” When mental space is made for community engagement, students can begin to think about themselves as part of a larger community with which their liberties and justice are bound up. JOURNAL OF POVERTY 13 This research also implies best practices for nonprofit curriculum development. The findings that semi-structured approaches to engagement increase students’ potential to engage individuals where they are bolsters the idea that community engagement happens outside of predetermined course projects, timelines, and learning outcomes. This data provides a critique for traditional academics and shifts the power relationship from a top-down hierarchy from ivory tower to nonprofit organization. Ultimately, nonprofit partners and academic instructors are in a place where they can demand more from students with regards to engagement and vulnerability. This study is limited in its scope and lack of longitudinal investigation. Because the Street Retreat is the orientation to service learning at the Faithful Fools, it would be helpful to better understand the long-term impact that the immersive experience has on the students’ coursework, co-education with the Fools, and impressions of the community in which they work throughout the semester. Future studies can look at such experiential learning over time, tracking student responses immediately after the retreat and again at the end of the semester. Moreover, studying the impact of the 7-day Street Retreat would offer more of an understanding of the effects of immersion on learning. Limitations This study is limited in its scope and methodology. First, in choosing to focus on the 4-hour Street Retreats, rather than the week-long immersions, findings regarding semi-structured immersion are limited. A fuller examination of the various lengths of Street Retreats may reveal deeper understandings of how perceptions change over time (or not), and the correlation between depth of participant commitment to the educational experience and changes in perception. Such an approach may weed out participants who were either “required” to complete a retreat or did so because the experience seemed novel. Moreover, the qualitative approach to this study limits its sample size and generalizability. Future studies could compliment this study with a quantitative approach that interrogates changes in attitude among participants. Conclusion The goal of this project was to understand how to change people’s perception of poverty through immersive experiences and better understand how structured immersion experiences change participants’ understanding of marginalized communities, it at all. Two overarching findings were revealed through this study: (1) The semi-structured nature of Street Retreats builds capacity 14 B. LAWLESS for deep reflection and understanding in ways that traditionally structured service-learning cannot accomplish; and (2) Street Retreats offer students an opportunity to begin a process of relationship development that works toward critical consciousness and dehumanization. As a result, students who participate in the Street Retreat build a greater sense of empathy with community members, which has a deeper impact on participants’ commitment to advocacy and social justice. As advocates for the Tenderloin, Faithful Fools Street Ministry engages people from all walks of life, from those with little or no resources to those with great economic resources. They use the Institute of Street Level Learning to create community and bring people to a consciousness that poverty does not just happen to those not willing to “work hard” and that we all have a responsibility to address systemic issues that create and maintain poverty. For the past four years, the Faithful Fools has been challenging undergraduate and graduate students to use their resources and education to advocate for social justice. Their model for experiential learning has the potential to engage both traditional classroom students and those who engage in learning from non-academic spaces. Following their model, nonprofit organizations have a unique opportunity to engage multiple stakeholders in meaningful advocacy work that does not focus on “feel good” volunteerism, but rather, community engagement, relationship building, and social justice. Disclosure statement No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author. References Boyle-Baise, M. (2002). Multicultural service learning: Educating teachers in diverse communities. New York, NY: Teachers College Press. Bruce, J. (2013). Service learning as a pedagogy of interruption. International Journal of Development Education and Global Learning, 5(1), 33–47. doi:10.18546/ IJDEGL.05.1.03 Brunell, A. B., Tumblin, L., & Buelow, M. T. (2014). Narcissism and the motivation to engage in volunteerism. Current Psychology, 33(3), 365–376. doi:10.1007/s12144-014-9216-7 Butin, D. (2015). Dreaming of justice: Critical service-learning and the need to wake up. 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