Announcing Shelter – a new book by one of our GW Alumni

by Scott Seider

Scott Seider is an assistant professor of education at Boston University. He completed his doctorate in education at Harvard University where he worked under Professor Howard Gardner on the GoodWork Project. His research focuses on the ethical development of teenagers and emerging adults — the ethical “E” of the GoodWork Project. In ‘Shelter,’ he considers the impact upon college students of volunteering at an entirely student-run homeless shelter.

Every winter night the Harvard Square Homeless Shelter brings together society’s most privileged and marginalized groups under one roof: Harvard students and the homeless. What makes the Harvard Square Shelter unique is that it is operated entirely by Harvard College students. It is the only student-run homeless shelter in the United States.

Shelter demonstrates how the juxtaposition of privilege and poverty inside the Harvard Square Shelter proves transformative for the homeless men and women taking shelter there, the Harvard students volunteering there, and the wider society into which both groups emerge each morning. In so doing, Shelter makes the case for the replication of this student-run model in major cities across the United States.

Inspiring and energizing, Shelter offers a unique window into the lives of America’s poorest and most privileged citizens as well as a testament to the powerful effects that can result when members of these opposing groups come together.

Shelter can be purchased on Amazon.com.

My Summer Job

by Lucy Curran

I have so loved working on the Good Work Project this summer. The Good Work Team is a wonderful and inspiring group of people, and it has truly been a pleasure to work with them. In addition, it was difficult for me to immerse myself in the ideas of Good Work and not come away with a fresh perspective on my own life. As I typed up discussion questions for the Toolkit, I mulled over the questions myself. How would I have acted if faced with this or that dilemma in my academic work? As I drafted reflective activities, I imagined how the core idea of each activity might illuminate the places in my own work that needed improvement. Was my own current academic work excellent? I found myself wondering. Was it ethical? Engaging?

The answer that emerged struck me with particular force with regard to the third quality of Good Work: engagement. This is not to say that I do not also struggle to make my work excellent at school, or that I never face ethical dilemmas in my work. It is simply that excellence and ethics tend to be more at the forefront of my mind when I think of what I strive for in my school work. When I asked myself if my own work was engaging to me, my answer was sometimes. I find that I often disregard the importance of finding work that is personally meaningful. I have a tendency to discount work that is fun and exciting for me because it somehow seems less serious and important! An academic mentor who knows this tendency of mine well once encouraged me to pursue work that “made my heart sing,” and I think this gets to the core of what engagement means. When I find work that truly engages me, it makes me feel energized and impatient to begin. For me, the arts have this effect: there is nothing more exciting than having a fresh canvas before me and a paintbrush in my hand; and there is nothing more exhilarating than performing a dramatic scene onstage with a group of committed actors.

It is also becoming easier for me to sense when work is not engaging to me. Robert Louis Stevenson once wrote: “If your morals make you dreary, depend on it: they are wrong.” I think the same could be said of work. Work that makes me dreary is not engaging, and is not work that I should be pursuing. Of course, it is easier said than done, I have found. It is easy to convince myself that soul-deadening work is too important, or too serious to give up. And yet, I have at times paid the price for blindly pursuing work that makes me dreary. It is not helpful to me or to anybody for me to slog—feeling martyrish—through a sea of work that I dislike.

I have come to understand that when I find work that truly engages me, I cannot wait to get out of bed in the morning. Instead of waking up with a sense of dread and hitting the snooze button, I am excited to start the day. This does not have to be true every day; but it ought to be the trend. In his recent commencement speech at Stanford, Steve Jobs said he tries to look the mirror every day and ask himself: “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?” He said that “whenever the answer has been ‘no’ for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.” This is his way of keeping himself honest. As I look ahead to my final year of college and further still to the great wide unknown of life after college, my goal is to keep myself honest. I want to find out what makes my heart sing, and then I want to pursue this work whole-heartedly.

I feel so honored to have had a chance to help out a little bit with Good Work this summer, and I know that I will be drawing upon tools from the Toolkit in the coming months as I figure out my plans for the next few years. Working with the Good Work Team has been a true pleasure, and the work has been—among many other things—very engaging!

Early Warning Signs of Ethical Disaster

by Shelly London

It seems that every major disaster is followed by almost pro forma revelations of danger signs that should have alerted us to the danger but were ignored. We heard those revelations in the aftermath of 9/11 and we’re hearing them now as the BP oil spill takes its place as the worst environmental disaster in American history.

My research into ethics education gives me the uncomfortable feeling that we might be in danger of a collapse in ethical values, not as dramatic perhaps but in its own way as detrimental to America as a terrorist attack or environmental disaster.

Ethical danger signs usually come from adult business and poltical leaders, whose egregious ethical shortcuts often warrant headlines. But I’m more concerned about ethical danger signs among young people, like the one raised for me by an experience shared by a college ethics professor.

This professor told a class of college freshmen about a long-running scandal on the Long Island Railroad, a commuter line connecting New York City with the Long Island suburbs.

Extensive investigative journalism by the New York Times in 2008 revealed that for years almost every employee retiring from the railroad applied for and received occupational disability payments as well as his or her regular pension and retirement benefits. Those results could only indicate that wholesale fraud was taking place, especially since the railroad had won national awards for improving worker safety.

With the full knowledge of management, retiring employees were essentially gaming a complicated system that made unjustified occupational disability benefits a virtual part of their retirement package. Not only were perfectly healthy retirees drawing disability payments from their former employer, they were also using their disabled classification to claim taxpayer-paid benefits. They qualified for free passes at state parks and free access to publicly owned golf courses, which they used with great frequency despite their “disabled” status.

The professor expected outrage from the class at this epidemic of fraud and ethical failure. But the class reacted quite differently. They concluded that if any problem existed, it lay with “the system” that allowed such institutionalized theft of undeserved benefits. As they saw it, the individual retirees had no ethical responsibility at all. They were just dipping into the trough with everybody else.

These college freshmen found no problem with that and saw no failure in ethical values. In fact, more than one student expressed the hope that he or she could take advantage of a LIRR style “perk” someday.

Talk about a warning sign! The attitude of these young adults indicated they had reached college age without absorbing the concept of individual ethics and collective responsibility to society. Unfortunately, that attitude is not an aberration. I’ll spare you statistics, and I’ll stipulate that not all kids would react the same way.

Still, those students reflect the danger that the most hovered-over generation in history has been raised in an ethical wilderness — in an environment that emphasizes individual entitlement over individual responsibility.

We owe it to our children and to the future of our society to at least give young people the intellectual ammunition to evaluate life’s choices in terms of ethical values. The warning signs are there. We ignore them at our peril.

Five Start Green Hotels

by Howard Gardner

This spring I was fortunate enough to undertake a round-the-world trip, visiting St Petersburg, Helsinki, Beijing, and Singapore. In each city I was the guest of a local host who booked me a room—and sometimes a suite—at a well regarded hotel. I was treated well and enjoyed myself. But at the same time, I was struck and disturbed by the huge waste in each place. To begin with, the rooms were way too large, sometimes ridiculously so. Such large rooms have to be heated or cooled down, and hotels tend to overcompensate in the least responsible direction. Guests are told that towels and sheets will be reused, but this rule is often not followed. And of course, there are all kinds of disposable goods—soaps, vanity sets, etc.—in every room and these are often changed as a matter of course, even when they are only partially used.

The waste of food is particularly painful. The hotels all feature lavish breakfasts, buffet style. There are dozens of different dishes, which are regularly replenished. In one of the hotels, there were buffet lunches and dinners as well, with yet more dishes to choose from. I don’t want even to think about the amount of food that is thrown away each day—this when so many (indeed, at least one billion persons) go hungry each evening.

These luxury hotels are competing on amenities. I’d like to see them compete on the basis of environmental concerns, wise use of space, and a limited menu with portions on the small side. Why doesn’t the widely admired Four Seasons’ hotel chain start a set of hotels, called Four Seasons Green? And why don’t the competitors come up with their own suite of offerings—Hilton Healthy, Sonesta Sustainability, etc? Of course these hotels ought to be immaculate and have good service, but with the amount of money gained by the aforementioned savings, they could probably charge less than their lavish competitors. At the same time, those of us who can afford to stay—or to be put up at—lavish hotels would be sending the message, that we value the viability of the planet more than we value our own creature comforts.

In this regard, a useful concept is ‘the nudge.’ Currently at such hotels, the default assumption is that people want fresh everything and endless food. Why not set up the hotels in reverse? That is, unless you explicitly ask for new towels and new linens, you won’t get them. Unless you explicitly ask for an outsized, overly heated (or over cooled) room, you won’t get it. And why not throw in or feature a green restaurant, so only those who ask for it get overstuffed meals?

To be sure, there are economy hotels, some of which do attempt to be green. A different headline results when Four Star hotels, serving the rich and the celebrated, adopt these recommendations. Often, inadvertently, even those who favor green policies don’t exemplify them in their own practices. I am not just talking about Al Gore travelling in a private plane. In a conference on climate change that I attended a few years ago, the very same individuals who espoused limits on carbon in the atmosphere travelled in limousines from one hotel to another. Only when those with real choices live and act green all the time, will we have taken important steps toward putting our planetary energy and climate needs in order.

Thoughts about the Summer Institute

by Wendy Fischman

We have just wrapped up our Project Zero annual Summer Institute—when hundreds of educators from all over the world come to Cambridge to learn about Project Zero research and practice methods. It is always an energizing experience for us researchers—it is a reminder for many of us that we are fortunate to do work that is engaging and stimulating, and attendees always make us feel as though it is important and helpful to their own work‚ which is rewarding for us to hear.

Lynn and I taught the GoodWork Toolkit course twice, and we had two very different, very interesting groups. In the first group we had twenty participants, and in the second course, we had nine. Though sometimes, as a presenter, it is energizing to have a large group of participants, the smaller group can be more intimate and sometimes easier to get to know on a more personal level. We followed the same agenda (of course staying flexible to participants’ needs), which is similar to the one posted on this site…. (link pasted below).

In this course and in other presentations and seminars, we have used the narrative of Meg hundreds of times. Meg is an Asian-American actress who is unsure about accepting a role in play that she feels degrades stereotypes of her own race. Interestingly, last week we heard a comment we had never heard before (if you have not yet read this narrative, see the link below). In each of the two different sessions during last week’s institute, a participant suggested that Meg might be in the wrong profession. If her goal is to undermine racial stereotypes, perhaps she should think about becoming an academic, a writer, or a journalist—not an actress. How can she take a role that compromises this goal? Our participants argued that being an actress is not going to satisfy her goal—and that should not be her mission as an actress. What do you think? Do you agree with these two institute participants?

The other tidbit that we learned from this year’s course related to the Value Sort Activity. A participant suggested that it would be interesting to have her peers sort the values in terms of how they think she would sort them. She was interested in how her peers interpret her own values and what is most important in her work. I thought this would be fascinating.

Lastly, one other important note: in addition to being able to sort your values on this site, we now have new and improved Value Sort cards available (for purchase), as well as two new resources: a narrative volume (with some new narratives) and a guidebook (with suggested structure for educators who want to use the GoodWork materials and need some guidance). We are very excited about these revised resources, and look forward to hearing your thoughts about them.