Paying the Rent
The Currency of Research, Teaching, and Service

"I read some place that service is the rent you pay for living. I think that’s true," says Professor Frank Johnston, Gr’62. "I think we have an obligation to define the right kind of service we can perform."

The mild mannered scholar doesn’t say why he thinks we have this obligation, but one suspects it’s related to the underlying dispositions that led him to anthropology, the science that studies human beings, in the first place. Johnston is a physical anthropologist; he studies the biological aspects of anthropological questions, which means he sorts through the intricate connections among human behavior, society, culture, and biology. His research specialization is the growth and development of children, especially the effects of the social and cultural environment on nutrition and health. Mostly he studies children in less developed countries and, more recently, among socially disadvantaged populations in the U.S.

"I like kids," he responds when asked what’s behind his research interests. He also loves travel because it allows the anthropologist in him to see firsthand a wider "spectrum of human variation." His research has taken him to Mexico, Cuba, Peru, Ecuador, New Guinea, and South Africa, but a major part of his research energy has been expended in Guatemala.

For 30 years he has taken part in a number of Guatemalan studies. In one major project, which dates back to the early 50s, Johnston compares children from very poor communities who aren’t growing normally with children from more affluent sectors of the society. "It’s a matter of looking at children who are growing well and children who are not, and then going back and trying to reconstruct the environments of these kids to try to predict what factors in those environments are going to be associated with good growth or poor growth."

The social and cultural circumstances of a community have a profound impact on child development, he says, and growth can illuminate aspects of those conditions. In many developed parts of the world, for instance, children’s growth rate is accelerating and people are getting bigger. Data from the 50-year-old longitudinal study Johnston has worked on show that Guatemalan children are not getting taller or bigger, suggesting that the social and cultural environment that supports their growth has changed little.

Johnston continued going to Guatemala during the years of bitter civil strife. He stayed out of the highlands where much of the military conflict took place, although there was a shootout once between government soldiers and guerrillas across the street from a school where he was working in Guatemala City. "You just keep your head down," he says. "You just try not to—I hate to say, you don’t make waves—but you try not to be associated with people who are working for either side [of the conflict]."

The reason he’s reluctant to invoke the wave metaphor is that Johnston does want to make waves—or at least he wants to understand the social and cultural equilibrium that sustains malnutrition in very poor societies. That way, he’ll know where and how to toss the pebbles that might disturb things. Research, he believes, should provide the basis for policy recommendations and social programs that could send ripples of change through undernourished communities. "I’ve always felt very strongly that research needs to be put to use, which is one of the reasons I did what I did for so long in Guatemala and other countries."

Johnston’s rent-paying imperative extends to teaching as well as research. About ten years ago, Ira Harkavy, C’70, Gr’79, now director of Penn’s Center for Community Partnerships, invited him to lunch to talk about new University initiatives for revitalizing the surrounding community. The strategy was to use Penn’s intellectual resources to serve the needs of West Philadelphia as well as the University’s academic mission. Scholars call it academically based service learning. The following spring, and each spring since, Johnston taught Anthropology 310 (formerly 210): Nutrition, Health, and Community Schools.

The course is now one of about 100 service-learning classes, most of them offered through SAS. The courses introduce students to hands-on, real-world problem solving, linking research and community service to teaching. "I’ve always been interested in teaching undergraduates," says Johnston, who has taught at universities for 40 years, 35 of them at Penn. "After you’ve taught as long as I have, it begins to make you wonder what the hell it is you’re doing. I really feel [teaching service-learning courses] has rejuvenated me as a teacher by giving me a different approach to teaching."

Anthropology 310 is an integral part of the Turner Nutritional Awareness Program (TNAP), an ongoing and comprehensive project that aims to improve the nutritional health of students at John P. Turner Middle School and the community it serves. Project initiatives include nutritional education, monitoring, and screening; health-promotion activities; and peer education. TNAP has been supported by grants from the Ford Foundation, the W. H. Kellogg Foundation, the Nassau Fund, private donors, and the University of Pennsylvania.

The program was started when staff at Turner became concerned about the prevalence of obesity at the school and in the neighborhood. "What you find in a third world country," Johnston comments, "is malnutrition on a epidemiological basis. The problem is just lack of food. When you look at developed countries like the U.S., the whole pattern changes. Obesity becomes a disease of the poor. It has to do with the type of food that’s eaten, and it probably has a lot to do with calorie expenditure"—lack of exercise.

Undergraduates who register for Nutrition, Health, and Community Schools learn about the course’s subject matter in a traditional classroom setting, but they also take part in TNAP projects. Some teach basic principles of food, nutrition, and health to Turner students, which requires preparation of weekly age- and culture-appropriate lesson plans in consultation with Turner staff. Other Penn students take part in research and data collection projects, working together with Turner students to assess community needs, survey nutritional status and attitudes, and determine the dietary intake of the student body. The data and research findings help shape future TNAP initiatives.

In this nontraditional approach to undergraduate education, explains Johnston, "the problem—in this case poor nutrition in West Philadelphia—becomes the vehicle for teaching. So the theories that students are learning about anthropology and about nutrition and about the social and cultural aspects of health derive from their actual experience at Turner. At the same time, they’re providing a service to the school and the community. The final piece of this is they’re also learning to do research because everything has to be phrased in terms of a research project."

Senior Holly McClain has taken four courses with Johnston, including 310, where she was part of the teaching team. She also signed up for Anthropology 318, Anthropological Perspectives on Monitoring and Evaluating Social Programs. Course assignments involved undergraduates in the evaluation of the Kellogg Program to Link Intellectual Resources and Community Needs, of which TNAP is a part. In Johnston’s courses, McClain learned how to design, implement, and evaluate social programs—involving the community at every step. "It was a beginning–to–end experience," she says. "This knowledge will stick with me forever because I had to actually do it." McClain is a double major in anthropology and biology, and intends to study public health in graduate school.

"Anthro 310 is the best class I’ve ever taken," enthuses Anna Schwartz, a pre-med senior majoring in anthropology. Another former Turner teacher, she has continued to work in West Philadelphia as a Netter Fellow with the Urban Nutrition Initiative, a broader project that subsumes and reaches beyond TNAP. "Before I took 310, I barely considered the community around me. Now it is a vital part of my life here, and working at the schools is the best part of my day."

Johnston has defined for himself the "right kind of service," using his expertise as currency to pay the rent for the parcel of space and span of time his life takes up. "My expertise allows me to contribute," he observes. "As an academic, it’s through teaching; as an anthropologist and researcher, it’s through working with the growth of children."

More than generosity, his is a scholar’s practical humility. "The expertise is only to effect change," he says, focusing on the outcome, "not to serve as ‘the expert.’"