By Hannah

We met up at Blake’s house, a two-story in a residential neighborhood of Bowling Green. It was a Thursday evening unlike any other… Well, it wasn’t all that crazy.
Days before, Blake, Andrew, and I had met up for a few minutes to work out details of our collaborative supper. We talked about who would bring what piece of the meal, and what was going to make this project go smooth and swift. I think our main goal was to get everything planned out so that later in the week our dinner would be a calm and welcome environment for discussion and understanding. Not a bad goal, I think. Ultimately, we learned each other’s faces and exchanged numbers, communicating something about a willingness to reach out when it came time to see each other once again.
Because of this positive, face-to-face pre-interaction, I think our dinner went better than it could have gone without the interaction. It created a connection between some members of the group so that we had a comfy start before we would all eventually be corralled into sharing heavier thoughts and opinions amongst the group – a daunting task, yet, the main point of the supper.
Thursday came, and I travelled with Camille, a bright, freshman girl whom I had met at the beginning of the school year in my dorm. She agreed to accompany me because she thought the dinner would be an interesting experience. On the drive over to Blake’s, we talked about our aspirations for the future, which was founded in the academic and social obstacles of the now. Camille had just decided to drop her pre-medicine track and go for an engineering major. She is still interested in service industries, such as healthcare, but is switching gears for a bit. So, Camille and I had our heads wrapped around education and careers before we even stepped foot into the beautiful home in which we were destined to spend a couple hours conversing around a kitchen table.
We arrived a bit early and were greeted by Blake and his mother, Stacy – a nurse practitioner with three young adult children. Throughout the meal, she was not shy about sharing her observations and did a great job contextualizing our conversation in a more “grown-up” way. Overall, she was the pragmatist, and helped guide the rest of the group’s theorizing back down to earth.
We each contributed to the meal: Blake with mac n’ cheese and apple pie, Camille with baked beans, Andrew with the most exciting food, fried chicken, and I with chocolate cake, which Andrew had heartily requested. It was a fine meal for college students who were used to neither creating meals nor eating foods outside of their dorm rooms and dining halls.
As we ate, we talked about the neighborhood we were in, and what it was like years before, as Blake and Stacy’s family had been situated there for 12 years. This spurred us into talking more deeply about each of our own neighborhoods and their demographic makeups. Later on, we discussed the concept of a neighbor, and how each of us interacted differently with the people living in our communities. This brought up the question, “Do we owe our neighbors anything? And if so, do we owe them more or less than the people who are not our neighbors?” We defined and redefined the term neighbor to exclude and then include people who were beyond a certain proximity of us and outside the communities with which we associated. Andrew brought up the point that we might feel a stronger bond with the people closest to us, but that we should not prioritize them any higher than the people who are living across the globe from us. We all had a slightly different opinion on how much we should be involved with the lives of those around us. It was nice to hear the extremes and the middle grounds all represented on this particular issue. Hearing these diverse perspectives made me see how much experiences can shift your stance on socially and politically charged issues.
Once we began thinking globally, I think all of our brains started awakening to the many possibilities of ways the discussion could continue because we all became at least somewhat more vocal.
Technological advances and growing communities were the next topics we discussed. With healthcare being central to and Stacy’s profession and Camille’s probable future, we spent a considerable amount of time thinking on the ways technology had been detrimental and beneficial to the many communities, including the overall global community.
Blake is a film major who seemed to be very involved with film/theatre projects taking place at Western Kentucky University. In the few hours I knew him, he seemed to me passionate about people and their inner workings. At least, he tended to talk about how individual’s problems fit into the wicked problems we were discussing.
Andrew is a math major. He plans to teach mathematics at the collegiate level. As you would expect, he liked thinking about the logistics of solutions and how they might not “add up” to solving all parts of the problem.
The largest portion of our discussion had to do with the educational industry and where it was headed. As college students and a mother who had two in college and one who would probably end up there soon, we had given thought to this topic and felt our opinions had weight because of our experience. It was also interesting that Camille and I had discussed education earlier in the evening. That probably helped us communicate our opinions more clearly over supper. Andrew enlightened us with statistics on the educational crisis in The United States, and he and I were able to compare our understanding of the academia in other countries.
We also talked a bit about the different cultures we were a part of or simply knew about because of second-hand experiences. A few of us had in common that we had gotten close with some exchange students (Blake’s family even hosting one) and all of us had some exposure to young adults like ourselves who were very obviously of another ethnic background. What everyone shared on this topic was fun to hear.
By the time we were cleaning up the table, we were quite comfortable with one another and had transitioned into telling funny memories of our grade-school teachers. I think we all left feeling jovial.
Although we didn’t solve any wicked problems, I think we all learned about a perspective on a topic that we had never heard proposed before. Our conversation was very relaxed, and so it was an easy space to share. At the very least, we grew in our empathy for people and in our knowledge of problematic circumstances. We each came out of the supper better equipped to contribute to humanity, and I think that is where this type of deliberation does the most good. This type of deliberation surely did not help much of anything about our world, but it did help us grow as individuals striving to be citizens and community members every day.
In class we read a lecture by a professor at UC Berkeley named Robert Hass. At the end of his lecture, “Green Fire, the Still Point, and an Oak Grove: Some Reflections on the Humanities and the Environment,” he included this quotation:

This is the world our students are inheriting. They are going to need a sense of urgency and patience and a sense of complexity and everything they can learn about the processes of the natural world, if we are going to protect what our science tells us is at the core of life, the richness and diversity of the gene pool. The task may be beyond us. Wildlife biologists these days often have meetings with titles like, “Which Species Can We Save” or “Which Species Are We Willing To Save.” But we have to act as if we can accomplish it. We have to act as if the soul gets to choose.

This quotation correctly appropriates an urgency to the significant, or wicked, problems that society has not been able to successfully address. Hass is focused here on a scientifically pronounced issue we are faced with, but that does not mean his observations cannot translate into how we are tackling other wicked problems. A central theme of my Kentucky kitchen table and the citizen and self class is that we are responsible for change needed to better society. During the meal, we had discussed what citizenship meant to each of us, and came up with the idea that it may be different for everyone, but is grounded in a sense of community welfare. Hass is similarly saying that we are the determining factor of the state of our world. But just our empathies will not spontaneously act outside of us; we must both allow them to work through us and believe that “the soul gets to choose” for what and whom we become impassioned. That change in us – our developing understanding of other people – will be what changes the communities in which we live.

By Andrew

This past Thursday, I rang the doorbell of a stranger while holding a bucket of fried chicken. Before you stop reading, this isn’t as awkward as it sounds. It was the beginning of my Kentucky Kitchen Table, an interesting experience with some equally interesting people. I, along with Hannah and Camille, participated in a dinner hosted by Blake and his mother Stacy at their home in Bowling Green, Kentucky.

Sitting around the dining room table with my fried chicken and heaping helpings of mac-n-cheese, baked beans, corn, and chocolate cake, we began our dinner with some timid introductions. Blake is a film major at WKU with a great interest in film production, and his mother Stacy is a nurse practitioner. They have lived in the Bowling Green area for around 12 years, and Blake has a brother who also attends WKU. Hannah is a social psychology major with an interest in performing research, and her friend Camille recently transitioned to an engineering major. After some brief talk about where we are from, including the coincidental realization that Camille and I grew up in fairly close towns, we started our conversation with a big question: What does citizenship mean to you?

I decided to get the ball rolling by describing my friendly neighbor ideal of citizenship within a community, where each member of the community is active in helping improve the community and helping each other. I added that this also means letting others live their lives in peace, unless their actions are harmful to the community. Everybody else seemed to have a similar definition, and Stacy emphasized that what we believe is harmful to the community is subjective. We then discussed how this is often the cause of debate within a community, as debates are often about problems that don’t have clear cut solutions, which we call wicked problems in our class.

From here, we transitioned to a conversation about how well we knew our neighbors/members of our community. While all of us knew some of our neighbors, we all agreed that we didn’t know all of them, including some of the next door neighbors. However, for some of us this wasn’t always the case. For example, Stacy said that during her childhood on the family farm, she knew everyone from the surrounding farms very well, and either Hannah or Camille commented that they knew all of the kids their age that lived close by. Blake commented that now he didn’t see kids outside as much anymore, and that nobody seemed to be around the neighborhood, especially on weekends. We thought that perhaps this isolation among people was due to an increase in technology.

While speaking about other people in our community, we switched topics and talked about people we knew who had very different backgrounds from ourselves. I had a hard time thinking of somebody as I realized that I don’t surround myself with very diverse people. Hannah talked about an exchange student she knew from South America. She described how one of the most peculiar things about him was how intense his work ethic was for school work. He and those that he traveled with all seemed to have this strong desire to work really hard on their school work, showing how different education is portrayed in different cultures. Blake also mentioned a German exchange student from high school who somewhat lacked a sense of humor. Stacy then remembered a man from the Middle East who is still here in Bowling Green. He is a friend of Blake’s brother, and he was taking classes to become a translator at WKU, but when his country fell into war, he couldn’t continue to receive money from his parents. So now he lives with the Baptist Campus Ministry, while trying to learn to drive so he can get a job. However, even under such circumstances, he was very respectful, and at a meal at Stacy’s house, he would even stand up when an adult male walked in the room and introduce himself. We find this odd in our culture, but to him it is just a sign of respect.

After some more food, we continued our conversation with a question of my own. I wanted to know what everyone’s thoughts are on the increasing price of a college education. I pointed out how it has changed the way that colleges operate, as they act more like businesses than they used to, causing things like grade inflation.  I also mentioned how much harder it is to get a sustainable job without getting a college education. I continued to point out a couple characteristics of the problem, and then Stacy asked us if we knew the root cause of the issue. We didn’t have an answer, and we agreed that this is due to the wicked nature of the problem.

From there we changed topics to a conversation about obligation to those in our communities. The first aspect of the question was whether we have any obligation. Stemming off of the citizen conversation earlier in the meal, we all seemed to agree that we have some sort of obligation to help those within our communities live their lives peacefully. Then Blake asked if we felt the same obligation to somebody who wasn’t in your actual neighborhood or town, but halfway around the world. I felt that there was an obligation, depending on how close your relationship is to the person or community you are helping.  However, I also brought up that some people help those far away from them while ignoring those closest to them in need. Stacy asked us if we thought that was common, and we all seemed to agree that while everybody doesn’t do it, it can be easier to send money or aid to a distant place rather than spend your time helping locally. Hannah said she thought that in a capitalist culture like ours, that we would be greedier about our money, but Blake and Camille pointed out that often people would rather lose some money if they can be lazier.

To finish up the meal, we then talked about how often we sat down at meals like that with our families. Stacy told us how she was required to sit and eat dinner with her family at the same time every day, and how she tried to continue that with her family. She pointed out that with the scheduling of activities, it became hard to find a time that worked, and that practice slowly faded away. I talked about how I regretfully didn’t often eat with everyone in my family. While we all in the same area during meals, often the television was on, and the focus wasn’t on conversation. Blake mentioned how he wishes his family sat down and ate together more often, even though he didn’t like it when they still did it. He said that as he got older he started to appreciate that time together, and that sometimes he just wants that time back with his family.

After this, we decided that we needed to go, and we cleaned up and headed out. Thinking back on the meal, I find that I really enjoyed it. While I am not too socially anxious, I often don’t like to put myself in situations where I don’t know anybody, since I hate awkward conversation. However, I found that some prompted questions in addition to food helped get rid of those awkward silences, and created a meaningful conversation that helped me get to know everyone a little bit better. The idea behind the Kentucky Kitchen Table reminds me of Nussbaum’s article, “Socratic Pedagogy: The Importance of Argument.” While this wasn’t a Socratic town hall debate, the concept behind such a debate is reflected in the way we conversed at our meal. The ability to listen to respectfully hear the point of others in a constructive way and speak for yourself to obtain a constructive result (which happened to just be a thoughtful conversation) is central to our democracy, especially in local government. Meals like this are a great way to teach this core aspect of democracy, and I was amazed after leaving the meal at how natural it felt. Perhaps such meals need to happen more often in our communities. A central point of our class is how do we get along with each other, and such conversations are may be the key. The nature of the situation gets rid of that tension between people, and brings out a peaceful conversation that feels like it can resolve any conflict.