Monday, June 29, 2009
Learning About Learning
You spend 10, 13, 17 years in school or more and you'd think everyone would learn exactly what they need to know in order to learn anything they needed to for the rest of their lives. Instead we're left feeling like John Lennon's "Working Class Hero" or the Dead Prez's "They Schools": resentment or cynicism about compulsory schooling fogs the minds of some, while numbed out superficiality claims many of the rest. Left somewhere else along the way are the few who learned to learn, for better or worse. Unfortunately they're the exception to the rule.
Learning about learning isn't about the mechanical functioning of cognizance - but that's part of it. It isn't about multiple intelligences or social relationships or even student engagement - but they're all part of it. Learning about learning is a multifacited experience including self-evaluation, planning, learning through doing, reflection, and critical self-examination.
Integrating this process into our programming for young people and our schools can only call out the higher purpose of education. Our future demands nothing less.
-- This is Adam Fletcher's blog originally posted at http://www.YoungerWorld.org. For more see http://www.bicyclingfish.com
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Monday, June 29, 2009
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Sunday, June 28, 2009
Why "Youth Empowerment" Fails Us (for Maggie)
A while back I wrote a post called Youth Involvement as a Kludge where I described how youth involvement programs can actually become bigger problems than they are solutions. My friend Maggie responded with the following question:
I don't know how to become an equal [with youth] without losing my authority; how to give youth their power, without giving too much- is it even possible?
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Adam Fletcher
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Sunday, June 28, 2009
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Labels: adult allies, adultism, parenting, society, Theory, youth empowerment, Youth involvement
Thursday, June 25, 2009
Youth Voice Has No Limits
- The tech-saavy girl at school builds a website about how students can run schools.That punk kid pulls out a marker and tags a locker on his way down the hall.
- Two fifth grades classes at the local elementary band together to replant the native vegetation down by the lake.
- A 16-year-old testifies in front of the state legislature against raising the driving age.
- Three teens protest the site of the new gravel plant in their rural community; within an hour 15 youth and adults join them.
- Brandy and Levon call the police when they witness a shooting.
- Miguel and Alejandro start a new hip hop band to speak out against youth unemployment.
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Adam Fletcher
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Thursday, June 25, 2009
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Labels: Research, society, Theory, Training, Youth Voice
Saturday, June 20, 2009
Responses to "Youth Voice Movement"
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Adam Fletcher
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Saturday, June 20, 2009
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