Once upon a time I taught in School Without Walls Senior High School (SWW), where Men Can Stop Rape (MCSR) has its longest-standing Men of Strength (MOST) Club and where members share in the commitment to create a nonviolent lifestyle. Situated on The George Washington University (GW) campus, the high school and university have a symbiotic relationship – SWW students enroll in GW classes and GW professors teach in SWW’s classrooms at the end of the high school day. Although SWW is a magnet school, drawing students from all over the city who excel at scholastics, it is still in many ways a DC school, especially in terms of its physical condition. Founded in 1971 in an older building, the classrooms have a run-down quality. A few years ago, when I was still an academic and taught a fall GW composition course in a SWW classroom devoted to science during the school day, we used a strange mechanical contraption to cool the room during hot, humid September afternoons. It stood inside the room, with a tube like a dryer vent extending about five feet to the window, where it would suck in fresh air, mix in coolant, and blow the air out. Unfortunately the motor was so loud that students sitting close to it could barely hear; on the other hand, they were the only ones who were comfortably cool since the air conditioner’s impact was limited to a five feet radius.

This December I returned to SWW. Normally in my responsibilities as MCSR’s director of outreach, I don’t spend much time around the young men in our programs, but I had an audio training coming up in late January that I wanted to base on MOST Clubs, so I took time away from my desk to reacquaint myself with our work in DC-area high schools. We pull into the SWW parking lot with the car full of pizza and sodas. Some of the members are hanging around outside and after they help unload it all, we park. As Neil, Kedrick, and I walk past the security person stationed at the desk in the entry way, through groups of lingering students, down the steps leading to the basement and into the room normally devoted to health classes but now a space for the MOST Club meeting, I can see everyone enjoys being here. The security person greets Neil and Kedrick, a lot of the students say hi, and the teachers smile.

The rooms still look about the same as when I was a professor at GW. When we’re settling into the basement room, I hang my coat on the arm of a large weight machine that’s dusty and off to one side. After the young men arrange the desks in a circle, I look around and notice the two windows at ground level so cloudy with grime you can hardly see out them, the glaring fluorescent lights that draw attention to the peeling paint on the brick walls, the stacks of cardboard boxes almost to the ceiling at the back of the room, and the exposed pipes that weave their way from one end of the ceiling to the other. Posters hang from the walls, focusing on different health issues: The Ways Drugs/Alcohol Affect Families, Reasons Why People Do Ecstasy, Reasons Not to Do Ecstasy, and Reasons Why People Drink Alcohol.

Now that I’m more closely connected to the school through the MOST Club, the room and school feel differently. I’m starting to sense that SWW and the Club are special places to be, regardless of the building’s physical condition. The name itself, School Without Walls, implies a boundless education, learning extending into all the corners and crevices of the city, and that is exactly the principle underlying the practice – the “city as a classroom” is the description on SWW’s web site. Men Can Stop Rape describes its work as challenging the boundaries of traditional masculinity, moving beyond the usual trappings of what it means to be a man, or what the organization calls the dominant stories of masculinity, and into counterstories, or stories that don’t fit into the stereotypical masculine mold. And while you might think that you have to go to extremes to come up with examples that run counter to masculine norms, MCSR claims otherwise. In fact, every single male on the planet earth can talk about a time when for one reason or another he finds himself living a counterstory. Maybe sometimes you have to reach back into boyhood, but most likely not. I’m thinking, for example, of the first time I visited my father in the hospital, or the time he rose up early from bed on Valentine’s Day and placed outside each of my sisters’ bedroom doors, and next to my mother’s side of the bed, heart-shaped boxes filled with chocolates. These counterstories become the basis for redefining strength and developing healthier, non-violent lifestyles. So Men of Strength isn’t about kicking somebody’s butt or putting somebody down or committing violence against women and girls. It’s about the strength it takes to express your heart, it’s about the courage to stand up for what you know is right, and it’s about the commitment it takes to create a better world for everyone.

So it seems like there should be a good fit between SWW and the MOST Club – both transgress conventional limitations. In men’s anti-violence speak, both step outside the box. Or at least that’s what I’m thinking as everybody settles in. I’m still not quite sure what to expect, though. Kedrick and I have finished connecting the DVD player we brought with us to the TV on the metal stand with wheels. Neil plans to show “City of God,” a Brazilian movie about a young man who manages to escape the slums and gangs of Rio de Jainero through photography. The guys wander in at different times dressed like you would expect, large tennis shoes, baggy jeans, T-shirts. The racial makeup of the student body is 64.9% African American, 8% Hispanic, 7.4% Asian/Pacific Islanders, .3% Native American, and 19.5% White, but these percentages don’t reflect the members who show up. Of the eleven, ten are African American and one is White. It might be easy to fall into the trap of stereotyping the ten as thugs, rappers, and gang members, except one of them who’s lugging an overweight backpack starts pulling book after book out of it while explaining to Neil how a microwave changes the composition of breast milk – something he’s learned from one of the books. I’m a little confused for a minute because all I hear is “breast milk.” Eventually, though, I figure out that everything he’s said relates to his studies. On the basis of the microwave and breast milk comment, it might be easy to tilt in the other direction – assuming that all SWW MOST Club members thrive in a school and home communities where there are no distractions from scholastic achievement. But the story a Club member tells a few meetings later about someone being shot on New Year’s Day at the Safeway grocery store in his neighborhood while he and his father are there complicates that stereotype. It turns out that there are no easy resting places when it comes to assumptions, which is as it should be.

Neil is a fairly tall, well-built (even though he complains about getting fat) African American man of 39, who has a moustache, long dreads usually tied behind his head, and chiseled cheek bones. He is strikingly attractive and commands attention, so when he says let’s check-in, all the guys at the School Without Walls Men of Strength Club meeting starts to quiet down. Before anyone begins talking though, he realizes that the pizza and drinks are still sitting on the teacher’s desk outside the circle and tells the young men closest to the desk to start passing them around.

Check-ins are basically a go-around where every member takes a minute or two to tell where he's at – how he's feeling, what's going on in his life, how school's going, and so on. They have become a regular part of our work life at MCSR apart from MOST Clubs. Because we didn’t want to become so enmeshed in our job responsibilities that we would lose touch with each other’s personal and emotional lives, we instituted check-ins early on in the history of the organization. Now, they serve to open the weekly staff meetings. Sometimes check-ins are perfunctory, and sometimes they extend into questions and discussion when the topic deserves extended attention. This is also the case during MOST Club meetings.

This is the third year we have had a club at School Without Walls, and so members know what to expect and are comfortable with the check-in. During the last five or six years, we at MCSR have realized the importance of clubs’ sustainability, that we need to have both multi-sessions over a school year, as well as multi-year clubs if we are going to have a lasting impact. Now we have veteran members who welcome new members and set the tone for meetings. They are usually the students who begin the check-in. So once everyone has grabbed a soda and piled their paper plates with as many pizza slices as they can justify, given the depth of appetite, number of pizzas, and number of people who actually came to the meeting, some of the veteran members start the go-around.

At first they talk about the usual topics – trouble with teachers who seem to have it out for them; an upcoming basketball game, the last of the season; how they did on a test or a paper. Neil takes time to respond to each one of them, asking a question, making a comment, inviting other responses, especially to the member who has teacher problems. One student has written what he calls his “Yearly Racism-Conspiracy, Rap Music, and All Around Black Life Report/Debriefing,” and reads aloud a feature focusing on the New England Patriots:

“For the past two years I have said that the Super Bowl’s have been flukes. Why? The evidence is there people! 9-11, terrorism, flags on every lapel, the Patriot Act, the war in Iraq, and the Patriots win the Super Bowl. Each one leads to the next. The Patriots games are just pep rallies for the never-ending game being played in Iraq. The Patriots’ quarterback was even seen at Bush’s State of the Union Address. Open your eyes people! Now the Patriots are 12-1 (I apologize if the record changes by the time you get this). If the Patriots lose the Super Bowl this year, I have just wasted some of your life and I apologize, but until then, prove me wrong NFL, prove me wrong!”