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A women’s studies class is creating a community service program to assist single mothers and dispel stereotypes about them. The students are attempting to incorporate in-school and in-home tutoring, a “mommy and me” swim program at the YMCA, and workshops on nutrition, how to create a baby-sitting cooperative, word processing, and nurturing childhood emotional and intellectual development.
Taught by Deborah Byrd, associate professor of English, Single Motherhood in the Contemporary U.S.: Myths and Realities brings classroom and hands-on learning together. Students are getting a comprehensive look at the struggles faced by single mothers in Easton, available resources, and the mothers’ opinions of their situations.
Byrd says the course started to evolve several years ago when she worked on a grant proposal to increase Lafayette’s community involvement.
“I met a lot of people in the community and realized how much interest there was among faculty and students – we have a lot of students who volunteer in the community – in running a program out of Easton Area High School (EAHS), which would be supported by guidance counselors, doctors, nurses, and social workers with the goal of [helping] young women who are committed to finishing high school, being good parents, and receiving a post-secondary education,” she explains. “These pregnant and parenting teens were interested in having Lafayette students get involved to help support and build their programs.”
Last spring, a group of single mothers completed surveys on beneficial programming such as education, parenting support, and life skills. This fall, six students taking the course and 20 student volunteers are developing and implementing the program.
“We wanted to give our students, who already have a good understanding of the issues of poverty, privilege, and various forms of oppression, the opportunity to apply what they have learned by working in the community,” Byrd says. “This course gives them a chance to try to make a constructive change in society and to learn that it takes time and effort. You have to be involved in collective action.”
While the outreach program initially included only teenage mothers at EAHS, single mothers receiving services through Third Street Alliance for Women and Children were quickly included.
“One of the wonderful things about the course is that the class is getting the chance to create a community program from scratch,” Byrd says. “But we’re running into a number of difficulties, such as transportation issues with the teen moms not having access to cars or being too young to drive, limitations on the time we’re able to use the high school, and liability issues in that we’re prevented from transporting members of the community.”
Byrd notes that for each hurdle the class encounters, there is a lesson to be learned.
“It has been a very good experience in community activism,” she explains. “My students are learning a lot about liability issues, the welfare system, and Section 8 Housing. Even when you have a group of people who are interested in being supportive and people who want to support them, it can take a lot of time to facilitate a relationship.”
“The first day we met with the high school girls, the first question from one of the girls, who was obviously skeptical of these middle-class girls wanting to help them, was if any of us had kids,” recalls Rachel Gallagher’07 (Allentown, Pa.), who has an individualized major in equality and justice. “You could see that she thought I didn’t understand what she was going through.”
Gallagher and her peers went to Third Street Alliance to find the experience they did not have. They decided to start a mentoring relationship between older single mothers at Third Street Alliance and the EAHS teens.
“It’s important for women experiencing the same issues to influence one another,” Gallagher says. “We want the teen parents to face reality, come to terms with how serious the issues are, and become proactive about the problems and issues they’re going to face. It’s important for the Third Street Alliance moms to work with the teens because the teens are still focusing on their educations, and because they’re in that environment, they are still instilled with the sense of hope that a lot of the Third Street Alliance moms have lost. There’s a lot of learning going on that excludes us, but that’s okay, and we’re doing our part to bring that together. It’s important that we embrace the idea that we can’t fix things without that learning and bonding that’s going on among the single moms.”
Gallagher is quick to point out that Lafayette students are reaping great benefits from the program as well.
“This course has probably been the single most important, fundamentally changing, impacting class I’ve had during my academic life at Lafayette,” she says. “It combines real-life experiences, community connections, and academia more than any other course I’ve had.”
“What I like is that we’re connecting the academic statistics and the narrative experiences that we’re learning about through books and research to the real-life experiences of women in America,” she continues. “This course is allowing us to try and begin to see how difficult it is to alleviate some of the problems we’re discovering, such as liability and transportation. It’s showing us just how difficult and complex it is to solve these problems, which is why we need more attention on them in the first place.”
For neuroscience major Anja McCartney’06 (Nassau, Bahamas), her favorite part of the class is getting to know the teenage mothers one-on-one.
“We’ve been learning a lot from them,” she says. “I am the product of a teenage mom, so I didn’t have very many stereotypes, but I admire their courage for keeping their children, taking care of them, and continuing with high school. They have to grow up in such a short time period to be good mothers, while many of them still need mothering.”
The students agree that the challenges of having to work through various bureaucratic institutions to create a community outreach program have been frustrating. The program’s importance to the community inspires the class to overcome obstacles.
“In college, you don’t get to interact with the outside community often,” says McCartney. “Sometimes you even forget there’s an existing world outside Lafayette; you can go around on a daily basis and not be impacted by what’s going on outside Lafayette’s walls. But making these connections reminds us of what’s really important at the end of the day.”
The course goes beyond basic community service, adds Gallagher.
“It’s not just learning about why community service and giving back is good and important,” she says. “It’s important that a program comes full circle to get the dialogue, ideas, and criticisms from both ends.”
Byrd and her students hope to keep the issues surrounding single motherhood in the spotlight beyond the end of the semester.
“One of the goals of the course is to work toward a more long-term, systematic change,” she says. “One of the projects in the course is to have a student give a brown bag talk at Lafayette to dispel some of the common myths about welfare and people on welfare. I’m also in the process of arranging a meeting with President [Dan] Weiss to talk about some of the obstacles we’ve faced to encourage him to get Lafayette more involved in the community.”
Students are fundraising through the course’s grant-writing component to ensure the outreach program will remain in place after they graduate. Also, one class member is in charge of recruiting student volunteers to steer the program in the spring when the course is not offered.
“The single most important thing to me about this course is that it does not die,” Gallagher says. “It’s important that we get the work out to students so they keep taking this course. One of the great things about this class is when we started to talk about what we came to do, everyone had something different they could bring to the table. This is an issue that doesn’t have to have boundaries drawn by any discipline.”