The traditional view of poverty calls us to look at poverty from an economic standpoint, and therefore search for solutions that stem from money. The goal of the economistic view of poverty is to use monetary funds to raise people out of poverty and out of poverty stricken areas so that they can be 'normalized' to a suburban image of the non-poor. This approach to the poverty problem has yet to bring about wide-scale desirable results.
In an attempt to move away from the economistic view of poverty, the Rethinking Urban Poverty Project has begun a new discourse on poverty, which takes a substantive approach. The substantive approach to poverty says that poverty is constituted at a million sites including access to healthcare, transportation, clothing choices, and food. If each one of these issues and thousands more are examined to see how they can be rearranged in order to serve poverty-stricken areas more effectively, we will see a transformation in the actual areas where poverty is a problem. The search for non-traditional resources that can be utilized to help in the many issues affecting poverty, is a main goal of the Rethinking Urban Poverty Project.
The public school systems which serve poverty-stricken areas in the inner-city have also been traditionally examined through an economistic approach to poverty. Issues of funding have dominated conversations of school reform. The goal in mind has always been the molding of inner-city schools to the image of wealthier suburban schools. Taking a substantive approach to poverty calls for a change in the public education system from one based on traditional skill and drill based literacy programs to one based on experiential learning.
Experiential learning means that the students will learn the skills that are needed to prosper within their inner-city community. Parents and community members become non-traditional resources for the classroom, as they are able to share their knowledge and skills that come from a lifetime of living in the inner city. Teachers are able to draw on that knowledge and create interdisciplinary units that are based on meaningful experiences, which will inevitably include literacy experiences. These new meaningful connections between school and home will foster literacy and life-skill learning in inner-city students.
Parents will not only become non-traditional resources for the inner-city classrooms, but also for classrooms at the university level. As pre-service teachers take an experiential approach to learning, they will need to draw on the experiences of parents and community members who are experts on the needs of the inner-city. As other university members examine poverty from a substantive approach, they will need to draw on the knowledge of parents and community members who are acutely aware of what it means to live in the inner city. As parents become valued non-traditional resources at both the university and professional level, the deficiency theory- the traditional devaluing of parents within the school system- will be deconstructed.
In conclusion, a substantive approach to poverty and an experiential approach to learning will become the foundation for major change both within the inner-city school system and the inner-city community.
