Reflections on a Long Day's Work

On an average school day I sit through 4 or 5 meetings or trainings or some other event, everyday. I learn concepts and listen to grievances or struggle with challenges or pose critical questions, and sometimes- often- I simply listen when folks don't have other places to turn. My job is mostly about hand-holding, trying to encourage territorial creatures to lower their boundaries and systematic thinkers to be organic. Legislative policy and school building policy and everyday procedures that would seem to be human in their nature and human in their implementation seem to take on the weight of 1,000 elephants, each one trying to nudge the other from the room. I work to ensure they feel their place at a common conversation, one centered on the health and well-being of students themselves, rather than the social, political, cultural and economic agendas adults have for students.

I understand that a single jangle does not make a sound, so I work to help others understand this, as well. It is a struggle everyday to ensure that everyone feels their place at the table, finds common ground with their opposition, and builds commonality and trust around a common agenda. I try to convene, interpret, translate, and explore people's personal sentiment about their professional endeavors in order to help them find their individual benefit in collective action. Work styles and mandated goals be damned, as they often pose themselves as insurmountable obstacles along the way. Each has to arrive at their own paces.

The other week my dad told me there is a difference between the hungry man running after a rabbit in a field and the one sitting quietly in the bush waiting to pounce. My occupation today is teaching me to sit quietly.

This is my reflection on a long day's work.

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

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?

Well, its been a month of Sundays, but I'm able to respond this morning. Let me start by saying that I think you've asked a valid question that's in the hearts and minds of many youth workers, Maggie, especially when we hear the drumbeat of Youth Voice and the call for youth involvement so frequently.

When I was young the youth workers in my neighborhood often talked to me about youth empowerment, and as I got older I explored the assumptions behind youth empowerment. I came to conclude that there is an ambiguity built into calls for youth empowerment that is inherently disenfranchising, both to the youth and the adults who are involved. "Youth empowerment" fails youth because there is no standard for it. I wrote a definition of it for Freechild's Guide to Social Change Led By and With Youth, stating that, "Youth empowerment is an attitudinal, structural, and cultural process whereby young people gain the ability, authority, and agency to make decisions and implement change in their own lives and the lives of other people, including youth and adults." But there is no consensus about the definition, as several different organizations, researchers and young people have put out their own definitions. Basically, the term means too many different things to too many different people. Many people will challenge that the intention is the same, and that's what I tried to capture with my own definition.

All the same, with that uncertainty comes a lot of room for interpretation. On one end of the spectrum are folks who attribute any amount of power-sharing with young people as youth empowerment. This can look like youth chosing the colors of their bedrooms, students planning homecoming dances and teens "getting" a new basketball court in their neighborhood. All these things have been labelled as youth empowerment. On the other end of the spectrum is the absolutism represented by the youth liberation movement: young people completely able to control their own destinies, with economic, spiritual, educational, politicial, recreational and social "freedom" to do whatever they want, wherever they want, whenever they want. I learned early that these dicotomous understandings aren't necessarily in opposition of each other; instead, they're locations along a spectrum. All that said Maggie, I think your question ultimately asks how you can find the balance, the midway point along that spectrum. The good news is that I don't think you have to chose - the challenging news is that I don't think the question you asked is an honest choice that anyone should have to make. Now I'll answer your questions within a question directly.

Let me say this unequivocally: Adults and youth cannot and should not be equals. There are practical reasons why nature has provided us with differences in our phsyco- and social metrics, with the child/parent/elder relationship intact in my thinking. This is a challenging thing for me to write, and if asked I'll provide some gray spaces and exceptions to the rule. However, for the most part I believe that all children and youth should be granted the permission, ability, resources and opportunities they need to be children and youth. Likewise, I believe that all adults should receive what they need to be adults, as well. In my reading of the literature, those definitions have been changing throughout modern times, from the European colonization of the Americas onwards, and those changes should be acknowledged and embraced for their inevitability and validity. I am a proponent of changing those roles myself. However, as our society stands today youth and adults should not be equals. I do believe there should be equity between youth and adults.

The authority adults have in society is assumed and granted by social custom and political institution. It is a false, yet logical, authority that grants power, access and reign simply because of age, rather than ability, knowledge, strength or widsom. The question of whether adults should ever lose their authority isn't necessarily the right one, because of the political/judicial systems that reinforce our social norms, customs and expectations. Courts hold adults responsible for the interest and well-being of youth, and no adult should be expected to sacrifice their legal compliance to meet the demands of a moral or ethical high ground. If an adult wants to do that it raises the question of appropriate adult allyship and the role of youth/adult partnerships; however, these are questions of gradation rather than absolutism. You don't have to lose your authority Maggie; instead, you have to recognize where the possibilities for power-sharing are possible. My Cycle of Youth Voice is designed for adults who want to do that.

In a new song U2 sings that, "Every generation gets a chance to change the world. Pity the nation that won't listen to your boys and girls - cos the sweetest melody is the one we haven't heard." Maggie, I think you are on your way to listening to this melody. But I want to make sure you're not overwhelmed by the chorus singing in the background. Do what you can for you, and what you can for Jenna, and everything will turn out exactly the way its supposed to. Good luck, and remember I'm here if you want more.

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.

Youth Voice has no limits - it simply exists. I have heard many advocates make the argument that we need more Youth Voice or that youth need to be at the table. On the other side adults complain that youth just don't care and that youth already have all the opportunities they need to be heard. Neither is exactly right, no matter what the situation.

In reality I believe that the efforts of individuals, organizations and communities designed that want to actively engage the "distinct ideas, opinions, attitudes, knowledge, and actions of young people" need to look no further than the ends of their noses. For me this gets to the very crux of the Youth Voice question: How can we meet young people where they are rather than insist they come to where we want them to be?

For as long as there has been a conversation about engaging Youth Voice, civic engagement organizations and community development programs and political parties and national service projects and government agencies have sought nothing more than to bring youth to where they want them to be. Voting booths would be full; trees would be planted and trash retrieved; town halls would be filled with youth, and; committees would have young representatives speaking on them. These familiar actions are complimented by the familiar issues addressed by youth. They'd talk about subjects we're familiar with in ways we're familiar with them, only with that particular enthusiasm adults easily attribute to young people.

I first started working with schools almost 10 years ago I spent a few years talking with teachers about engaging youth voice in the classroom. Almost immediately I ran into a core of teachers who always reported that they already did that. Not knowing any better, I easily dismissed them out-of-hand because I thought they didn't understand what I was trying to explain. Today I think I know what they meant - and it only took me 10 years!

I want to see this notion of Youth Voice better understood, and the only way I can think to demonstrate that is through my writing and training. What can you do?

Responses to "Youth Voice Movement"

Several years ago I was asked to write an article for the National Youth Leadership Council's magazine. I posed the question of whether the Youth Voice movement was reality or just a fiction. A few months ago Tim Ladd, a consultant and media guru, posted a video to YouTube as a reply to my call for responses via Twitter.

I'd love to hear your response, either to Tim or the original article. Thanks!