673 A MODEST MODEL OF THOUGHT AND ACTION Barbara S. Stengel Peabody College Vanderbilt University Sometime in the past year, Jane Addams set up camp somewhere just below the surface of my consciousness. With remarkable regularity, she pops up when I am confronted with yet another event that illustrates the flaws in and frustrations of political discourse and action in the United States today. I think about her collaborative and collective social work, her commitment to an equity that is mutually educative rather than paternalistic, and her views on the value of communication and constructive conflict. I rehearse her written observations and mine her lived example for clues to guide a creative, constructive, caring, and always mutually beneficial response. I have found myself incorporating her work and words in my teaching in the hopes that her hard-earned wisdom lights fires of educational and political possibility for my students — and wondering why her presence is so immediate to me now. Sometimes she is literally right in front of me, such as when I went for a run in Chicago in June and found myself entering Jane Addams Memorial Park on the waterfront. In truth, I was already thinking about her as I encoun- tered the reality of Chicago: gazing up and up at huge cranes that marked ever new waves of urban (re)development, turning the corner from East Ontario Street to Michigan Avenue’s Miracle Mile, to be surrounded by Coach, Burberry, and Rolex stores on opposing corners, and passing Trump Tower, a beast of a building emblazoned with a name that has come to be associated with the excesses of “more” and “less”: more consumption and less compassion and common sense; more for some who need nothing, and less for some who need much. In a world where it seems the center is not holding and precarity is the descriptor of the hour, Addams emerges as a modest model of thought and action that makes things better rather than worse. That is appealing — so she keeps appearing. The specific social issues that animated Addams’s thought and action face us still: the development that reinscribes the privilege of the rich while circumscrib- ing the prospects of the poor; the lack of affordable housing; the segregation of races, classes, and cultures; the question of education for all, including adults; and the challenges of immigration. My ongoing encounter with Addams is fueled by parallels between the concrete social and economic conditions of her century and those of our own. She has come to me now because the values and communicative circumstances of our age(s) demand careful (and care-filled) attention. When I’m not thinking about Addams, I find that others are. In April, David Brooks published a commentary titled “The Jane Addams Model” on the opinion EDUCATIONAL THEORY Volume 67 Number 6 2017 © 2018 Board of Trustees University of Illinois