Reed, a government professor at Georgetown University, talks about how he incorporated student tutoring at DC Reads into the curriculum for his politics of education class for the first time this fall. Talk about the DC Reads program.
They have about 200 students that go out and tutor kids, generally in D.C. public schools. They have an after-school program that they run. They also have a Saturday program, and they’ve been going in as well on some mornings and working as teacher’s aides in classrooms. And there’s a group of coordinators that sort of link up the tutors.
How did you come up with the idea to get your class involved with DC Reads?
The students have wanted — and I’ve wanted them, to — to get a more hands-on look at what happens inside schools and so my goal was to sort of put education politics and policy-making into a real world perspective for students. And I took a summer seminar on community-based learning sponsored by the Center for Social Justice here at Georgetown and sort of thought through some of the issues about how to link up my students to these community-based organizations.
How do students benefit from helping with the program?
It’s sort of one thing for my students, for Georgetown students, to read about limited educational opportunities that kids face either in D.C. or elsewhere. And it’s another thing to really see a kid make his way or her way through that, and to work with kids who are living though those limited educational opportunities.
What feedback have you gotten from students?
I have them keep an online journal…and through those sort of reflections you see the gap between sort of academic concerns and real world concerns play out, and I think it actually changes some of their viewpoints — maybe in ways they didn’t necessarily expect.
