Framework for Understanding Ruby Payne

Anthony’s Story: The art teacher pointed Anthony out to me, “That’s the bad kid,” she said, nodding toward a slender, brown-eyed second-grade boy. I was the newly minted education director for Baltimore Clayworks in the late 1990s, conducting a ten-day artist-in-residence program at Robert Coleman Elementary School. The art teacher was originally supposed to be the lead teacher on a ceramic mural project that was part of a larger grant. As things turned out she was actually a student teacher and looked to me not only for administrative support but also to help conduct the programming. As we prepared for class the first session, she gave me her assessment of the ten second- and third-grade students we had in the program. Anthony came by his label honestly, from what I could see. Most of the kids seemed excited but focused. Anthony, on the other hand, was a kid in constant motion. He disrupted the workflow at his table, much to the other kids’ frustration, by touching their work and talking incessantly.

“The People Could Fly,” ceramic mural made by students at Robert Coleman Elementary School, Miss Ware and Blaise DePaolo, 1998, based on a Diane and Leo Dillon illustration. (Photo by Angie Dickenson and Kevin Wilson) Click here to enlarge

The plan was to have the kids read a story from “The People Could Fly: Black American Folk Tales” by Virginia Hamilton, discuss the story and make drawings based on it. When it came time to draw, we gave the kids large sheets of paper and lots of markers and pencils. As they drew, the art teacher and I walked around the room and worked with students individually. I noticed Anthony struggling over a tiny drawing in the middle of his paper. Nearly 20 minutes into the drawing session, he was intently erasing this tiny little drawing. I sat down with him and asked him what was wrong. He told me he didn’t know what to draw. I told him to draw anything he wanted, that it didn’t have to have anything to do with the story. I moved on to other kids around the room and kept an eye on the clock.

Ten minutes later, it was time to clean up. I asked the kids to finish what they were doing and began to look over their shoulders again. Anthony’s entire paper was full. There were three intricately drawn hand guns lined up vertically, under them an open coffin with a woman in it, a baby crawling after a baby bottle under the coffin and a police officer wielding a baton. Anthony was drawing the bubble over the police officer’s head. “How do you spell homey?” he asked. I watched him carefully write out “homey don’t play” in the bubble. It took me a moment to understand what I was seeing. As I stared over Anthony’s shoulder a large, feminine hand came into view. It was the art teacher. She was reaching through Anthony and I, grabbing his drawing and crumbling it up -- to our horrified amazement. Just that quickly she pitched it into the waste-paper basket and loudly chastised Anthony, “We don’t do violence here!” I don’t remember what happened next, how I recovered my composure or what exactly I said to her when we were finally alone. What I remember vividly is how determined I was to make it up to Anthony.

The next day, I went in with a portable slab roller, a piece of equipment that looks a lot like a large pasta machine. To a second-grade boy, a big, shiny, blue piece of equipment with the big blue crank looks like a lot of fun. I taught Anthony how to roll out even sheets of clay for tiles, and made him the “boss” of the slab roller. He made all the border tiles that surround the central image of the mural and impressed them with Egyptian hieroglyph stamps. When the other children needed to make slabs, it was Anthony’s job to show them how to use the slab roller. The change in his behavior and demeanor was remarkable. He went from being unfocused and disruptive to helpful, considerate and engaged, in a matter of a few days. He beamed with pride over his clay projects and his newfound identity as a helper. By the end of the week, his peers were making positive comments about him and admiring his artwork.

When I went in the next week to finish the program, he was gone. When I asked about him the art teacher told me he would not be coming back. He spit Jell-O at a classmate in the cafeteria, as punishment they took away the mural program. There was no one in the school’s administration that believed they could help Anthony. The school counselor said she could not work with him because she didn’t believe she could get permission from his parents for mental-health counseling.

“Bad Kids” and Good Behavior

This paper is concerned with outlining positive behavior strategies for the urban K-12 community art classroom. Anthony taught me an invaluable lesson about the “bad kid,” and started me on a journey to understand urban youth and the realities that drive their behavior. In the years since, I have encountered countless “bad kids.” Administrators and teachers have toured my studio/classroom in amazement at the good behavior of the “bad kids.” In seeking to understand urban youth, I have looked closely at poverty, child abuse and neglect. Now in a position to teach others how to be successful community art practitioners, I find myself emphasizing structure and discipline as a first step to the best possible program outcome.

The word discipline has always had negative connotations for me. It conjures up frightening memories of the Felician nuns of my youth, and corporal punishment. In my experience, fear was used to control children’s behavior and insure an orderly school and home environment. What fear also did was traumatize children and stifle learning and creativity. Generations of parents since have rejected corporal punishment; laws now prevent teachers from using it in their classrooms. In today’s best K-12 classrooms, teachers are using a variety of positive-behavior reward strategies to keep kids focused and on task.

In contrast, there are far too many schools in high-poverty areas where these effective behavior strategies have eluded teachers, administrators and parents. In many inner-city public schools, a chaotic classroom environment has become more of a catastrophic barrier to learning than the “spare the rod, spoil the child” paradigm of the 1960s. If artist-educators are to get the best use of their resources and do the highest quality work, they must develop successful behavior strategies for their programs. Youth of all backgrounds need discipline, structure and guidance from the adults in their lives; adolescence is a challenging time regardless of circumstance. In this paper I will articulate the strategies I have used to inspire cooperative behavior in the urban studio/classroom -- strategies I model and teach to my community art students at Morgan State University.

Thinking About Discipline

Over the course of the past 15 years, I have conducted public-art programming with youth primarily from the Baltimore City Public School System. I have had to reshape my thinking in regard to discipline and embrace it as something that can be done positively to foster cooperative behavior based on empowerment rather than intimidation. In an effort to reach all the children in a program and create a healthy environment conducive to learning and creativity, I have developed strategies to inspire cooperative studio/classroom behavior. In 2005, I discovered the Ruby K. Payne book, “Framework for Understanding Poverty.” The purpose of the book is to help educators develop “additive model” strategies for their classrooms, where, “The focus is on solutions, shared responsibilities, new insights, and interdependence” (Payne 163). Payne, a career educator, administrator and author, describes the book as the result of years of experience working in school systems that served people in poverty, the middle-class and wealth. Payne says those economic social structures come with their own respective “cultures.” and that it is the value systems of those cultures that determine behavior norms.

This information put my experience working with urban youth in a whole new context. Although I have always been aware of our class differences, I had not considered that we might also have a different value system and code of acceptable conduct. It caused me to be aware of and reflect upon my middle-class bias. The back cover of Payne’s book reads, ”People in poverty face challenges virtually unknown to those in middle-class or wealth — challenges from both obvious and hidden sources. The reality of being poor brings out a survival mentality, and turns attention away from opportunities taken for granted by everyone else.”

Payne distinguishes between situational poverty and generational poverty. She defines generational poverty as, “being in poverty for two generations or longer. Situational poverty has a shorter timespan and is caused by circumstance (i.e., death, illness, divorce, etc.)” (Payne 3). She describes class as a continuum that you can move along if you have knowledge of the “hidden rules” or social cues of that class. After explaining the mindset of those in poverty in general terms, she builds upon a series of strategies for behavior and discipline that appeal to the needs and strengths of the poverty mindset. In the appendix of the book, Phillip E. DeVol explains the additive model in greater detail and contrasts it to the deficit model, “The deficit model names the problem and blames the individual; the individual must change, whereas society can be left unaltered” (Payne 170). A key feature of the Additive Model is building relationships, says Payne: “When students who have been in poverty (and have successfully made it into middle class) are asked how they made the journey, the answer nine times out of ten has to do with a relationship -- a teacher, counselor, or coach who made a suggestion or took an interest in them as individuals” (Payne 110).

A member of the Visual Art faculty at Morgan State University, I proposed a community art ceramics course for inclusion in the Visual Art course offerings in 2005. The course was adopted by the curriculum committee and added to the course inventory beginning in the 2006-2007 academic year. In the 2008-2009 academic year, it will be included as an option under the Service Learning General Education requirements. The course puts Morgan students in community art programs as teaching interns, with myself as the lead teaching artist. The Morgan students gradually assume more of the responsibility for teaching until they are, by the end of the semester, running the program independently.

That first year we partnered with Young Audiences/Arts For Learning and conducted a ceramic art program at the Academy for College and Career Exploration (ACCE). ACCE, founded in 2004, is an “innovation” high school created by the Mayor’s Office of Employment Development and the Sar Levitan Center of the Johns Hopkins University Institute for Policy Studies. ACCE administrators brought Young Audiences/Arts for Learning in to provide the art component of the ninth-grade curriculum. The Young Audiences’ program, Careers in the Arts, rotates kids through four art disciplines per year: Visual Art, Dance and Drumming, Theater and Ceramics. This partnership enabled me to achieve two important goals: Morgan students gained practical teaching experience with urban youth and, at the same time, we reduced the student-to-teacher ratio in the ACCE classroom. That reduction is critical to creating a focused and productive studio/classroom environment. With more adults on hand to deal with disruptions, the lead teacher is free to carry out the lesson plan with the majority of students who come to class ready to learn.

I have used the Payne book as a textbook for the community art course and engaged my students in critical dialogue about class mindsets, value systems and behaviors. We took the strategies outlined in the chapter on discipline and shaped them to the ACCE classroom. Through trial and error, we discovered what strategies worked for inspiring cooperative behavior in the studio/classroom. Our work at ACCE and our class discussions have given me a deeper appreciation for the value of Payne’s message. Having an awareness of class mindsets provides a new vehicle for more effective communication between the artist/educator and the inner-city school student. If college educators are going to prepare their community-art students to be successful working with kids considered “at risk,” it is essential they are informed about and sensitive to the needs of youth living in poverty and poverty culture. To have proven strategies in place to inspire cooperative studio/classroom behavior creates the environment where high-quality arts programming can take place. Exposure to a high-quality art program may give an inner-city school kid his or her first experience with feelings of mastery. When young people experience mastery of a new skill they become empowered. Youth who begin to see themselves as capable become more capable in other areas of their life. When they are exposed to professional-level art programs, they are given a new possible context in which to see themselves. If we can teach the next generation of inner-city artist-educators classroom management, we hand them a very powerful tool in creating high quality art programs that result in aesthetically sound work.

Many community art programs will not require a rigorous discipline strategy because community-center programs tend to have fewer participants. However, for those who work with large groups in urban schools, consciously developing and refining strategies for inspiring cooperative behavior can be an enlightening journey. The right approach to discipline can mean the difference between a powerful, affirming, transformational experience and a squandering of resources that perpetuate the very problems we are working to solve.

Understanding Poverty

The culture of poverty has some universal characteristics which transcend regional, rural-urban, and even national differences… There are remarkable similarities in family structure, interpersonal relations, time orientations, value systems, spending patterns, and the sense of community in lower-class settlements in London, Glasgow, Paris, Harlem, and Mexico City. --Oscar Lewis, Four Horsemen (Payne 62)

The toll poverty takes on normative youth development cannot be ignored. In 2005, of the 112,785 Baltimore City School children between the ages of 5 and 17, 34,048 lived at or below the poverty line (U.S. Census Bureau 2005). That means at any given time at ACCE one in three of the students, at least, was living at or below the poverty line. Poverty is a poor indicator for academic achievement. So, how does growing up in poverty make a young person different from kids in wealth and the middle class? It is helpful to look at global poverty in contrast to what we experience in Baltimore City.

The consequences of extreme material deprivation are especially harsh for the very young, whose neurological development, physical health, and emotional capacity are permanently compromised by poor nutrition, limited emotional and intellectual stimulation, and inadequate satisfaction of basic human needs, such as safe shelter, clean drinking water, and predictability of social environment. Whether in the inner-city ghettos of the United States, the homelands of South Africa, or the favelas of Brazil, growing numbers of urban youth find themselves at the periphery of city life, facing the familiar problems of poverty: fragile families, inadequate nutrition, limited or no access to education, premature entry into the world of work, and involvement in illegal activities” (Tienda and Wilson 3).

Residential segregation further accentuates the pernicious consequences of poverty by limiting interaction between lower and middle classes, thereby perpetuating the cycle of social exclusion that stymies the life chances of even the most industrious youth (Tienda and Wilson 4).

Some kids in poverty are showing up at school lacking the cognitive strategies (planning, predicting, controlling impulsivity) to function in a school setting. Relationships with caring adults who help kids develop cognitive strategies can have a significant influence on their ability to navigate their way out of poverty. Before you can work with a young person, you must first gain their trust and cooperation. How does one gain the cooperation of kids when “Something about growing up in the inner city offers rewards for not listening to adults.” And when “ Children get more respect from their peers and from some parts of the community for being defiant” (Thomas-EL and Murphey, “Immortality of Influence” 4).

The ACCE classroom was one of the most challenging environments I have been in, as far as behavior is concerned. It was my first experience working with a group of 22 adolescences in a studio/classroom setting. The techniques I used to foster order out of chaos and gain the respect and cooperation of the ACCE kids were a mixture of what experience has taught me and what my Morgan students and I learned by adopting some of the strategies outlined by Ruby Payne. Not all kids who live in poverty have discipline problems. Discipline strategies are needed for only a small percentage of the classroom. The disruptive behavior of only a few students can destroy creative momentum and distract attention away from the work at hand. The kids who are cooperating are often subject to a loss of privileges because of their misbehaving peers. By understanding the unique challenges of poverty, one is far better prepared to respond to issues and conflicts with sensitivity and compassion. Young people respond positively to adults who listen to them and care about them. Our urban youth are coping with anxiety, grief, loss and violence on a scale that is impossible to fully appreciate if you have never experienced it.

Strategies for Inspiring Cooperative Behavior

These are the strategies that have worked for me in the classroom:

• Create a Need
  
  In “I Choose To Stay,” an autobiographical account of his experience in inner-city Philadelphia, Salome Thomas-EL, talks about how he enticed kids to join what would become a national-champion chess club at Vaux Middle School. He recognized the need for high-quality extracurricular activities for his Vaux students. He says he didn’t want to simply advertise the chess program and have just a few kids show up; he wanted to “figure out a strategy to make the kids want to play, even to get them to beg to be on the team” (Thomas-EL and Murphey 132).
  
  How can the community art teacher engage youth or create a need? A dynamic PowerPoint with professional-quality images from the artists’ portfolio and from young people participating in community art projects can inspire youth and give them a big-picture understanding of what they are about to be involved in. Web sites, videos or demonstrations of interesting studio art activities like throwing on a potter’s wheel or blowing glass can be awe-inspiring and stimulate curiosity. Field trips and special events outside of the community can expose kids to a wider range of possibilities.


• Create a Code of Conduct Chart
  
  “Students from poverty need to have a least two sets of behaviors from which to choose — one for the street and one for the school and work settings” (Payne 86). Teach the “hidden rules of middle class” by engaging kids in a dialogue about expectations and appropriate behaviors. Role-play with students the different behavior scenarios for when they are in a more formal social situation such as school or work and for when they are in a casual situation such as hanging out with their friends. Mutually agree upon a code of conduct and create a chart that identifies acceptable “Studio Behavior.” Model the behavior you expect and reinforce the behavior by asking kids to reflect on where they are.


• Convey High Expectations
  
  Youth respond to adults who convey high expectations and an unwavering belief in their intrinsic abilities. Engage youth in a dialogue about goals. State your goals for the program and solicit their goals. Create a set of mutually held goals for the program and diagram the necessary steps you will take together to achieve the goals.


• Build Relationships
  
  Icebreakers and other introduction activities can help kids connect to each other and to the program provider quickly. Always check in with kids to see how they are doing coming into a program. Giving them an opportunity to discuss any emotional baggage they are carrying may help you side-step conflicts once the work session begins.


• The Power of the Positive Message
  
  Take the opportunity to acknowledge success and improvement on the part of the student. Seek to praise and reward positive behavior. Be authentic, don’t praise without merit. Create incentive programs and competitions.


• Predictability of Social Environment
  
  Adult leadership should be consistent. Clearly state the consequences for not adhering to the mutually agreed-upon code of conduct. Follow through with the consequences each time. Teach kids how to treat you by challenging disrespectful behavior in a way that is nonconfrontational and nonjudgmental. “Treat kids with respect and hold them accountable.” (Patricia Cruz, Education Director, Young Audiences/Arts for Learning)


• “Structure and Choices” (Payne 78, adapted for ACCE)
  
  Structure: Conduct well-planned and -orchestrated projects that are straightforward, easily accessible to a wide range of abilities and result in aesthetically sound individual works of student art.
  
  Choice: The student has the choice to cooperate with the planned activity or not. All choices have consequences. Students who cooperate generally create successful work and gain self-confidence and the respect of their peers. Students who act out or otherwise ignore the mutually agreed-upon code of conduct need to be taken aside and given individual attention. Adequate staffing can accommodate kids who need this kind of attention and result in interventions that help the youth come back into the program and participate.


• Appropriate Interventions
  
  When possible create an alternative activity and a space in the studio/classroom for kids who are resisting the planned activity. This gives them an alternative to leaving the classroom that allows them to save face with their peers and feel more in control of their environment. It is the middle ground between re-entering the group activity and leaving the group to seek more individually targeted resources. Kids who feel valued and respected have fewer discipline problems.
  
  Most schools have a safe place for teachers to send their students when they are too disruptive to stay in the classroom. When community art programs offer the same resource, artist/educators can continue the project with the kids who are engaged. At ACCE, Patricia Cruz advocated for her artist-educators to have the PAC (Positive Attitude Center) available to them during the Careers in the Arts program. PAC staff was experienced in connecting kids with resources that would help address the root cause of their disruptive behavior.


• Paying Attention to Language and the Adult Voice
  
  “One of the biggest issues with students from poverty is the fact that many children in poverty must function as their own parents. They parent themselves and others-often younger siblings” (Payne 92). Payne talks about the three voices: the adult voice, the parent voice and the child voice. “Educators tend to speak to students in a parent voice, particularly in discipline situations. To the student who is already functioning as a parent, this is unbearable. Almost immediately, the situation is exacerbated beyond the original incident. The tendency for educators to use the parent voice with students who are poor is based on the assumption that lack of resources must indicate a lack of intelligence. Students and parents in poverty are very offended by this” (Payne 82). She goes on to explain the characteristics of the adult voice (nonjudgmental, attitude of win-win) and recommends that educators not only adopt the adult voice but teach the adult voice to their students, as it is the language of negotiation.


• Strength in Numbers, Intern Teaching Teams
  
  Community artists benefit from having a team of teaching interns in the studio/classroom to lend support and provide individual attention. A lead teacher and three or four interns per group of 20 students is an ideal situation. Stress and burnout are real quality-of-life issues for people who work with urban youth; having appropriate staffing can mean the difference between success and failure.


• Breaking the Cycle of Social Exclusion
  
  College students are positive role models for urban youth. Morgan is an HBCU (Historically Black College or University) and Baltimore City Schools are predominantly African-American. Bringing these two groups together through community art has overwhelmingly confirmed my belief that black children benefit most from positive black role models. Urban youth of color, when exposed to college students and professional people of color, have another possible context in which to see themselves that they do not get with a professional role model of another race. Healthy relationships with role models of all races and backgrounds offer urban youth one of the greatest resources to overcoming the obstacles of poverty.

Intention

At the 2008 Community Arts Convening at the Maryland Institute College of Art, I had the good fortune to be in the Critical Pedagogy work group. We discussed many different types of community but only one type of institution, the academy. However, as I came to know the members of the group and attached faces to papers, I realized that many of us were more concerned with other kinds of institutions. In a smaller work group formed to consider the idea of intention as it relates to community art, there were those of us who did not feel conflicted about “aesthetic canon and diverse community values” and didn’t necessarily feel part of “the academy.” Our small group was much more focused on the history of higher education and the arts and concerns with a socially engaged curriculum, service learning, and the mentoring of students in community settings. We argued over whether the best intention of the community artist and program was aesthetic, academic or social-change centered. We concluded, I believe, that community art is all of those things and more, depending on your point of view.

The concerns of group members who work within the penal system had striking similarities with my concerns about my work within the Baltimore City School System. Both environments require an artist to work within an established social system with little or no understanding of the artists’ role or work. Both environments deal with a high percentage of people who have either been through a significant traumatic event or are the victims of chronic child abuse and neglect. Both institutions deal with high-poverty populations whose antisocial behavior is often a symptom of unresolved emotional states of being. All classes exhibit antisocial and criminal behavior, only those in the middle class and wealth have access to resources that can prevent them from being incarcerated. It is frightening to draw such a direct line between urban education and the penal system but statistics bear out that one feeds the other. A recent editorial in the Baltimore Sun reads,

An estimated 10,500 students in Maryland drop out each year. That’s unacceptable at a time when a high school diploma is a minimal credential for a good job and even a good life. Research shows that adults who don’t have a diploma earn about 27 percent less than those who do, and that dropouts make up about 40 percent of the nation’s prison population and generally have shorter life spans. Dropping out is not a spur-of-the-moment decision, but usually happens after a student has endured years of not being motivated or challenged or not having enough academic and personal supports.

I think about Anthony often and wonder if he is still alive or if he is in jail. I feel as though I watched him in motion as he was slipping through the cracks of an institution that was in no way prepared to catch him. The MICA convening deepened my thinking, knowledge base and understanding of the field of community art. It renewed my sense of urgency and commitment to working for change in urban public schools and help create the networks that will catch kids like Anthony.

This essay is part of the Community Arts Convening & Research Project, 2008, funded by a Nathan Cummings Foundation grant to the Maryland Institute College of Art. The essay was reviewed and selected by the project's Editorial Board: Ron Bechet, Xavier University of Louisiana; Lori Hager, University of Oregon; Marina Gutierrez, Cooper Union; Ken Krafchek, Maryland Institute College of Art; Sonia Mañjon, California College of the Arts; Amalia Mesa-Bains, California State University Monterey Bay; Paul Teruel, Columbia College Chicago; and Stephani Woodson, Arizona State University.

E. Blaise DePaolo is a studio artist, educator and community artist. She lives in Baltimore, Maryland, teaches at Morgan State University and is an exhibiting member of Baltimore Clayworks. DePaolo earned her Bachelor’s degree from the Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington, and her Master’s of Fine Art from the Rochester Institute of Technology School of American Craft. Her work is held in numerous private collections and she has public art projects installed in community centers, schools and organizations throughout Maryland.

Works Cited

Hamilton, Virginia. The People Could Fly American Black Folktales. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1985.

Payne, Ruby K. A Framework for Understanding Poverty. Highlands, Tex.: aha! Process, Inc., 1996.

Thomas-EL, Salome and Cecil Murphey. The Immortality of Influence. New York:  Kensington Publishing Corp., 2006.

Thomas-EL, Salome and Cecil Murphey. I Choose To Stay: A Black Teacher Refuses to Desert the Inner City, New York: Kensington Publishing Corp., 2003.

Tienda, Marta and William Julius Wilson, eds. Youth in Cities A Cross-National Perspective. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2002.

“Catch the Falling Dropouts.” Opinion. The Baltimore Sun. 18 February 2008.

Original CAN/API publication: June 2008