Learning to Listen

How a university project to document Milwaukee neighborhood stories has created a ‘network of hope.’

by

Along the rail corridor that runs through the mostly vanished industries of Milwaukee’s north side lies a sloping garden larger than a city block. Here, Hmong families grow lush stands of sweet corn, rhubarb, and lemongrass, with pole beans twined around teepees of tree branches.

A chain-link fence along the alley on the garden’s west side is covered with a hodgepodge of overlapping wood scraps, fabric, and linoleum. A boarded-up two-story house looms across the alley.

There, on an overcast morning in July 2021, Arijit Sen stopped his class of nine urban planning, architecture, and history students from the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee to admire the makeshift fence covering.

“Architects always think of art as specialized, the definition of beauty,” said Sen, an architect and vernacular architecture historian. “That very definition of beauty is about inequality. But there’s another definition of art—which is, basically, you’re putting in effort and skills in order to change your environment. Somebody took skills, materials, bricolage, to actually tie those things to the chain-link fence.”

The students clustered around Sen, scribbling notes and snapping photos. Sen, a native of Kolkata (formerly Calcutta), India, spoke with an uncanny combination of authority and empathy: “Look at the care they have taken! To overlook it is to overlook human beings’ potential to make a difference to their own world.”

Since 2012, Sen and his students in UW–Milwaukee’s Buildings-Landscapes-Cultures Field School have collaborated with local residents and leaders to offer a five-week summer course that documents the importance of people, places, and histories in some of Milwaukee’s most underserved neighborhoods. This kind of “immersive learning,” as Sen calls it, offers a model for reinventing higher education as a collaborative, community-based effort to imagine a more equitable and sustainable future.

After observing the Hmong garden, the class gathered in the community room of the United Methodist Children’s Services of Wisconsin building that served as the Field School’s 2021 base in the Washington Park neighborhood. Sen talked about how “we were like children” walking through the neighborhood. Indeed, child-like wonder often widened the students’ eyes, whether discovering a garter snake curled through the garden fence or the exposed underbelly of a street where workers were replacing lead water pipes.

“Who talks about this neighborhood with marveling?” Sen asked his students. “It’s always about death and destruction. But we have seen it.”

Washington Park is a neighborhood of detached houses built for mostly German middle- and working-class families in the 1890s and early 1900s. In the second half of the twentieth century, it became a thriving Black community. But in the 1980s and 1990s, the neighborhood bore the full brunt of Milwaukee’s industrial decline and associated disinvestment. The community’s unemployment rate is now more than 15 percent, and almost half of the population lives below the poverty line.  

Today, Washington Park is “not a prison exactly, but it’s like one,” says Sharaka Berry, a former community organizer at United Methodist Children’s Services who collaborated with the Field School. “People stay in their houses. There are cameras. There are gates, for people who can afford it. There are written rules, and there are unwritten rules. These rules were created by the trauma of someone being victimized or killed.”

The community, Berry says, lacks “the infrastructure to live”: affordable housing, jobs, the availability of healthy food, and adequate public transport. But he shares Sen’s desire to help students see the neighborhood’s human achievement and potential.  

“The landscape is an archive written by people whose stories are not told,” Sen often tells his students. The Field School is about “making a catalog of places that matter.”

To make this catalog, Sen immerses students in three research methods: documentation of the physical environment, oral history, and archival research. During the Field School’s 2021 course, a week was devoted to practicing each of these methods, with the final two weeks spent in the classroom combining them into public-facing projects.

Projects range from an online oral history archive to a lean-to in the garden of the Amaranth Bakery in Washington Park, to exhibits and events, podcasts, zines, and “story maps” (web-based, multimedia narratives). In neighboring Sherman Park, where the Field School was previously based, residents have begun using the Field School’s story maps as guides for visitors to the neighborhood.

If the Field School were a stand-alone course, it would be an extraordinary example of community- based education by itself. But it’s scaffolded into a year-round series of evolving courses, community projects, and artistic performances. This set of experiences for students, from incoming first-years to Ph.D. candidates, owes to Sen’s core belief in the power of what he calls “deep listening.”

“When I say listening, I’m also meaning reading, thick description, slowing down,” Sen says in an interview. “I don’t think I can train students to face the future that we’re leaving behind. Where I can make a difference, I feel, is just being able to talk. That’s why I keep saying that if you are to heal the world, you can’t be scared to say anything. You have to have the courage to make mistakes.”

Ph.D. student Bernard Apeku embodies this courage. He describes the oral history interviews he conducted as “his proudest moments.” As a naturally shy person, he didn’t know if he could sustain a conversation for more than an hour with a stranger. But when he met two interviewees in their homes, he was surprised by his capacity to engage them.

One of Apeku’s interviews, which he conducted with his fellow Ph.D. student Yuchen Zhao, evolved into a friendship with Laurie Henderson Thurman, co-owner of the Milwaukee restaurant and north side community hub Coffee Makes You Black.  

“She loved the conversation that we had,” Apeku recalls. “She kept inviting us to come over to her home. She gave us coffee. I was really proud that we were able to collect her story in a way that also created a standing relationship.”

Field School coordinator Chelsea Wait also describes her interviews as a defining experience.

“I’ve listened back to a lot of the oral histories that I conducted and I’m asking people, so naively, ‘What is it like to be in a segregated city on the wrong side of segregation?’ ” she reflects. “I realized that I’m asking people these painful questions when what they clearly want to talk about is how they are caring for their neighborhood, how they exercise their power and strength, even in spite of the city and the nation, and the history of racism.”

This realization led to Wait’s dissertation project, which examines how people care for the built environment of Milwaukee’s Sherman Park neighborhood. “I’ve gotten to know the city so well through the Field School and, more than that, connected to this network of hope,” she says. “We connect to people who know what the problems are, have a plan to fight them, and enlist others.”

Wait cites people who have inspired her, such as David Boucher—the co-owner of Amaranth Bakery—and Sharaka Berry.

Berry, in turn, describes the Field School’s importance to the community. “The most immediate benefit,” he says, “is people in the community being heard with dignity.” In the long term, he wants community organizations “to see the value of incorporating graduate students and academic institutions to analyze the problems that we face.”

Boucher has collaborated with the Field School since 2014, offering his bakery as an exhibit space for the storyboards featuring community members and places that the Field School creates.

“When we had the storyboards up from the first couple years of Arijit’s work,” Boucher recalls, “people were regularly coming in, reading the boards. [They] started to meet people who were on the boards, and they’d actually not have to figure out how to break the ice. There were a couple of police officers who were neighbors that became police academy trainers, so they’d bring their cadets down. All of a sudden, they see the neighborhood as it presently is.”

In these ways and others, the Field School cultivates “civic consciousness”—one of Sen’s course goals—for more than just the students enrolled.

At the end of the Field School, the class always plans a public event to share its work. In 2021, this was a presentation at Amaranth Bakery on a rainy Saturday afternoon. About twenty masked community members, collaborators, and students gathered in chairs lined across the bakery’s hardwood floor. White storyboards featuring the faces of people the students interviewed filled the walls and banks of the room’s high front windows.

Sen’s opening remarks set the tone for the open-hearted afternoon. “Equity, diversity, respect, and inclusion demand from us to expand beyond ourselves,” he told the gathering. “To learn to move beyond feel-good altruism toward a gritty, slow progress toward a cause. That cause is one of fellowship and belonging.”

Sen continued, explaining that the Field School “encourages us to discover that education, research, and scholarship are social contracts. Knowledge is a form of obligation toward the world around us, an external world that offers us erudition.”

In other words, the ultimate sources of knowledge are not professors or textbooks or Google. They are the places we inhabit and the human communities we co-create within these places. Higher education’s function is to provide engaging contexts for students to discover their connections with the world beyond themselves and empower them to enact these connections.

Following Sen’s address, three teams of students shared the multimedia projects they created, including audio excerpts from oral histories and online story map tours of local community gardens and public art. They also reflected movingly on their research process and learning.

Ifedayo Kehinde, an architecture graduate student, said in his presentation: “I have seen the benefits of listening to people, knowing what they go through. Before this class, I wondered, why should you interview people? You might get to know some things that you didn’t expect. Oral history, it grows compassion.”

Sen witnessed this in the ways Kehinde and his team members helped each other work and stay well during the intense all-day course. “This level of caring for each other, it’s so beautiful,” he told me later.  

Sen isn’t alone in using words like “beautiful” and “caring” to describe the relationships his students developed with each other and the community. These words peppered the students’ presentations. They revealed the emotional, interpersonal core of education that research on teaching and learning stresses is so important.

But this kind of education doesn’t have to be extraordinary. Every neighborhood has stories that warrant the kind of inquiry the Field School teaches. When students can be engaged to gather and creatively share them, colleges and their communities can be knitted together.

After the presentations, I spoke with one of the students’ interviewees, Darrell Terrell, who lives in nearby Walnut Hill. A portrait of him  shone on a storyboard behind us. He described the Field School’s work as a “reciprocal” exchange between insiders and outsiders. The student and faculty outsiders, he said, bring a “new pair of eyes, giving me some hope.” The sharing of stories that the Field School facilitates is a form of uplift, Terrell added.

David Boucher reinforced Terrell’s perspective on the importance of community storytelling. “Without it,” he told me, “you don’t have a sense of how to preserve a neighborhood.”

Boucher, who’s more than six feet tall, leaned on the cooler next to his pastry case while he talked. A few students lingered saying goodbye to him. After rounds of thank yous and praise for the bakery’s pastries, they turned toward the door.

“I’ll be back,” said Chelsea Wait as she walked out into the rain-glistened streets of Washington Park.