Dream Bigger: Radically Democratic Education

There is a lot of conversation among democratic education practitioners about how democratic should a school be. The dilemma for me is that a lot of these conversations reflect ideas about participatory democracy in schools that no fewer than 80 years old (thanks A.S. Neill).  In this time of technological revolution we need a real educational transformation that will usher in radical democracy throughout our society! Here are some examples:

1. Create Democratic School Cultures. This means no more student councils. All students in all grades in all schools need to experience democracy as a practical, tangible activity within their daily educational experience, without the tokenistic gesture of representation and the passive activity of voting being at the middle of their day. Instead, concrete experiences of dialogue, peer-driven conflict resolution and interactive learning conducted within a democratic culture and education can serve as the decision-making aparati apparently provided by student councils. 
2. No More Tokenism. There should be no single seats for high school students on building-, district-, or state-level committees. Instead, all school committees at all levels should be operated in a way that deliberately engages students as equal partners, including using meeting techniques that are engaging, and having equitable positions on those committees, including numbers and representative power. 
3. Student/Adult Courts Rule. When educators learn to use school rules as interactive educative tools for determining social interactions schools can engage students and adults collectively in determining appropriate outcomes for infractions.
4. Student-Driven Learning. Self-guided educational practices are already the norm in some "alternative" schools; let's make this practice normative throughout all levels of schools. There is a possibility in the relationships between all students and teachers to actually have all K-12 students design their own individual academic programs, and to utilize those experiences as educational and democratic processes. Rather than seeing this as a situation where adults are "handing over the keys to the car" to a 16-year-old, let's use student-driven learning in a constructivist fashion from kindergarten forward.
5. Constructivist Democratic Learning. Engaging students takes a deliberate process that should begin in their youngest years and extend through high school. It should build on students' previous knowledge and be imbued by their cultural norms. In kindergarten learners can facilitate peer-to-peer conflict resolution, personal decision-making anddemocratic group learning experiences; by forth, fifth and sixth grades students can conduct original research on their schools, complete regular self- and teacher-evaluations, and participate in building-wide decision-making activities; by high school young people should have established clear and equitable relationships with adults throughout schools in order to participate in full student/adult partnerships.
   
6. Reciprocal Accountability. The era of adults measuring student achievement without some form of mutual measurement is over. When ratemyteachers.com started mocking the power of students in the early 2000s teachers across the nation flipped out, finding their names and classrooms rated by anonymous users calling themselves students. Educators still haven't identified a way en masse to use tools like this as teaching opportunities, but there has been some headway. And while assessments of student behavior have often been focused on negative perspectives, schools are finding ways to acknowledge positive student behavior and learning through student-led conferencing. So there is progress towards reciprocity- but educators must continue to move forward with students as partners.
7. Full-Court Press. All student expression, positive, negative and otherwise, must be allowed space and opportunity within schools, and used towards teaching and learning. By embracing diverse and divergent student voice, educators can embrace the potential of learning led by students and learn new ways to relate to, teach, and encourage themselves and everyone in our communities.
   
8. Equity and Equality. A common assumption among educators is that all student involvement should be actualized as complete equality. However, equity is often the just, fair and righteous route to take. Equity is about fairness in schools, equality of access in learning, recognizing inequalities throughout education and taking steps to address them. It is about changing school culture and structure to ensure equally accessible to all students.
9. Make Meaning from Living. Curriculum should be based in every students' experiences of living their daily lives as well as preparing them for tomorrow so that schools meet the purpose of enriching the present as well as enlightening the future. This validates the ideas, experiences, wisdom and knowledge young people have, ultimately positioning their voices as central throughout learning, which in turn reinforces the depth and meaning of democracy. This will secure learning for life, and a commitment to democracy that is unparalelled.
10. Public Or Nothing At All. Democracy is inherently about inclusion. Private schools and charter schools are antithetical to the democratic levers of public control over public schools, as they generally operate with privately elected boards of directors or fully autonomous presidents. Admittedly, public schools generally behave as if they're out of the purview of the masses; however, forceful, peaceful and powerful advocacy by students and parents will ultimately lead to stronger controls. 
    

Oversharing

According to the ever-definitive Urban Dictionary, oversharing is "providing more personal information than is absolutely necessary." Named word of the year in 2008, its a phenomenom of modern times, brought to us by texting, twittering, blogging, Facebook and other social networking mediums. In popular culture so far, we've seen oversharing expose inner-most thoughts about relationships, ruin perfectly normal days at the office, and otherwise run amok throughout society. But what effect does oversharing have on Youth Voice?

Back in 2004 the ever-insightful Anastacia Goodstein at YPulse suggested young people might be oversharing on their blogs. She says, "Personally I think if teens want to use blogs as full blown diaries where they are sharing everything about their lives (especially incriminating info), they should probably do it under a pseudonym." In this sense, oversharing may be a sort of trojan horse that takes Youth Voice and encourages otherwise well-meaning adults to advocate for anonymity among young people struggling to make their voices, ideas, experiences and wisdom relevant to the world. Perhaps a different angle on this would be to promote actively educating young people about the opportunities and challenges of writing online, as Goodstein herself knows well. This would empower young people to maintain their identity, as any good journalist strives to, while reporting on the issues that matter to them most- which in many cases seem to be their own lives.

Still others have warned about the dangers of oversharing on the futures of young people, as they seek to be taken seriously in job interviews, college applications and other scenarios. Some see oversharing as a blight upon the lands, while others laud oversharing as a way to break the ice in otherwise awkward social situations.

This has been an overview of oversharing. Let me think about this, and I'll revist the actual impacts of oversharing on youth voice soon.

"That Kid" Revisited

Graffiting, stealing, trespassing, gross vandalism, fighting... I was also the kid who'd sit in the back of the classroom and through pencils into the ceiling tiles just to see if I could get others to do it, too. Friday nights were mine to break out of the house and sneak up 24th Street to graffiti innocent walls, and Saturdays were for the garage down the alley, where there was a cache of lumber that I cajoled friends into helping me, um, "liberate." We built a fort, and later re-purposed the wood for my bedroom in the basement. One of my favorite pasttimes was sneaking across lawns around the neighborhood without getting caught by the pit bulls or dealers or old men who lived in those houses, while teachers at school dreaded my lack of self-application. That seemed like their favorite line: "If you'd only apply yourself..."

Like I wrote last time, I did apply myself; only as a thorn in the side of adults around me. I was 15 when I tried to join the environmental club at my high school. The science teacher who ran it quickly let me know I couldn't join because my grades were too low. I knew that was bunkus, mostly because I lived in a neighborhood that was filled with environmental contamination and a bad, bad track record of only getting worse, not better. So I decided to create my own environmental club. I wrote a manifesto and borrowed the photocopier at the local church to make the copies that I handed out to every single adult in the school. In my vision, the North Environmental Action Team would be an after school activity for students from the neighborhood to fight their own problems. My high school was a magnet school where the majority of white students were bused in from another part of the city; students from my neighborhood were mostly low-income whites and African Americans. Well, the North Environmental Action Team, or NEAT, never found an adult sponsor in the school. It wasn't for lack of trying: I talked to every adult there. But that didn't deter us. Instead, there were several guerrilla activist projects we did, including clearing the dumpsters of recyclables and giving the principal Earth Day greeting cards made of cardboard with 500+ student signatures on them. And maybe a little eco-centric graffiti here and there.

The reason I wanted to "revisit" my notion of "that kid" is that I'm afraid I made out myself to be something other than I was. In simple reality I was just another young person who was trying to make it through difficult circumstances. In my prattling off a list of friends, I neglected to mention all the adults who made a difference in my life when I was young. There was Idu Maduli and Laura Partridge-Nedds, both of whom I worked with in a drama program called "You're The Star," and who gave me the motivation I needed to work with young people for the rest of my life. There were ministers, too, like Helen and Steve and Jamie. My parents' friends kept me in line, especially Tracy's mom, Betty, and when I was young, Kal's mom, who called me "Trouble" from the age I was 12. All these adults, and so many more, helped me through my younger years. My dad's friend Chuck took me to my first play and helped me audition for my first theater performance. 

All this is to say that I can't paint a decisive picture of my own youth in own blog entry. This was a little more info to say that just like all of us, the sum of the whole is greater than its individual parts. Its important to remember this when we think of engaging youth, especially that kid.

Confessions of "That" Kid

I was that kid: a little more excited, a little more motivated and a  little more interested than the other young people around me. Sure, I grew up in a rough neighborhood, but there were those among us who stood out. I was the kid who other parents pointed to- literally- and asked their kids  why they weren't more like me.

When I was really young I sat with my parents while they talked with their friends. I helped my mom clean the house, listened carefully when my dad lectured me, and used my newspaper route money to help pay family bills. I  volunteered for the neighborhood elementary school's PTA when I was in  junior high, and was the school's Santa Claus for 3 years. I joined the church leadership council when I was 14. I made up a guerilla environmental justice activism group for my friends when I was 15. I helped stock in the  food bank my family was assisted by, sat with my dad to watch Habitat for  Humanity sites while they were being built, and started a neighborhood youth council when I was 17. I was that kid.

I hung around with a few different handfuls of friends throughout school who were subjected to my ambitions. Tracy and Marlin and Joe and I were  friends from 5th grade into high school. They were my neighborhood friends who played video games and basketball with me, joining the scout troop my dad started and riding scooters with me around North Omaha. There was Kelly and Tara and Lesley and other girlfriends in junior high, and in high school I had really good friends who didn't live right in my neighborhood. Bethany and Erin and Mary and Brian and Jason set templates for the friends that I have wanted throughout all the rest of my life. I was tight with my friends in scouts, too, especially when Jimmy, Nick, Scott, Jaimie and I were able to get together outside that program. All of these people were subjected to my peculiar brand of obosteriousness, overzealousness and enthusiasm, and lucky for me they tolerated it for as long as they did. They were the mirrors that I saw myself through and wanted to be more like. But I can say now, through the lenses of time and space and distance that none of them were identical to me. They each shown brightly in their own ways, and while I don't know where almost any of them are today, I believe they must be doing well, or at least okay, because of those ways they shown brightly.

Looking back at it, it is youth like my teenage friends who I believe are the "outlyers" of youth involvement. They tended to fall into that realm of "middle achievers" in youth voice, those who neither glowed or were fully thwarted; instead, they were just *there* in many cases. Now, to remind you I am talking about youth voice specifically; a lot of my friends were academically gifted, athletically skilled or socially wonderful. Some had the gift of gab while others aced tests and won trophies. I didn't hang out with a lot of ruffians, and my friends were a lot of things I simply wasn't in a lot of respects. But thinking about their expressions of engagement, their infusions of ability and energy related to sharing their unique ideas, opinions, actions and wisdom, I can't recall a lot of "umph." None of them were that kid- that was my job. 

We need to reach those young people. In workshops I'll often share a piece of informal observation tool Greg Williamson and I once created. Its a pie chart split into 25, 50 and 25 percent slices. One 25 percent slice represents children and youth like I was: no matter what the situation, what the resistance or supports, we were always going to be heard. Generally this 25 percent's voices are impossible to thwart or suppress. The other 25 percent slice represents the most oppressed, the young people whose voices are most squelched because of poverty or abuse or other dire situations. Tonight I'm thinking about that other slice, that 50 percent right in the middle who show up because their mom told them they had to go, or whose girlfriend picked them up and made them go, or were simply there because they didn't have anything better to do at that moment. Those are the young people who are caught in the middle between extremities. They generally aren't involved in honors clubs or recitivism programs; instead, they are young people who don't stand out in crowds, who don't stand up in meetings and who don't connect with their communities in meaningful ways as they grow up. 

Let's stop focusing on that kid and reach those kids: these who are moving away from small towns, who don't vote, and who have broken the cycles of social capital that once tied together our communities. Those who perform vanishing acts when volunteers are sought out and those who sit quietly at the back of the room when their opinions are sought. And let me be clear here: its not their fault they aren't engaged. Rather, its the failure of our communities as a whole, and particularly those adults in their lives who are responsible for providing substantive, sustainable and real opportunities for them to be heard. That's the only way we can move this movement forward- as a whole. 

Hearing Young Children's Voices

In Washington, DC this week I had an excellent conversation with a woman named Ashley Keenan who works with the Parent Support Network of Rhode Island. Her work focuses on engaging children's voices and creating opportunities for them to become meaningfully involved in Systems of Care, specifically for kids under 8. 

What spectacular work! Listening to her stories I was inspired, causing me to remember the excitement I felt when my daughter was very, very young (she is 5 now). I love the prospect of engaging really young children and changing the roles adults have always assigned them. Especially because we have an increasing amoung of research focused on this that clearly illustrates the benefits of age-appropriate decision-making on children's growth and evolution. Its so exciting! As I became I parent and have experienced the awesomeness of my daughter's growth over these last years I have come to believe there is no age more relevant for fostering lifelong commitment to Youth Voice. These people, infants, toddles, pre-schoolers and kindergarteners, will become the parents, teachers, youth workers, childcare providers, police, politicians, social workers, policy-makers, secretaries, ambassadors, and every single other position in our society. It seems weird but necessary to say that every single person in our world has been a child. How that childhood is experienced and expressed varies according to cultural, economical, ethnic, educational, and other backgrounds that inform young people as they grow up. But regardless of our backgrounds, all of us need to have opportunities to use our voices when we're this young. All of us.

I see it in the actions of the mom sitting in front of me on the airplane as she plays with her baby boy. He's a happy, giggling guy and she's asking him questions, acknowledging his language as valid even though nobody beyond him and her understand it. I hear it from my daughter when she comes home from school so happy because her teacher asked her to pick which book the class got to read aloud today. This voice might be a simple question about which clothes or food, but repeated throughout the day in a variety of forms these questions become a force for significant learning within a young person's life. I see these choices and hear these voices in dozens of small acts everyday that I'm with young people, the youngest of people, and I am honestly excited everytime, and it gives me hope. 

Those are the actions, the gestures, the interactions and opportunities we need to educate people about. While some of them come naturally, intrinsically, to moms and dads and grandparents and loving, kind, caring adults throughout the lives of children, many of these skills and abilities are learned and need to be nurtured throughout adulthood. We need to work to ensure all young people have safe and supportive and empowering lives while they're young. We need to make sure the adults who surround them have capable as well. Only then can we actually engage very young children, and then we'll be able to develop and sustain a lifetime continuum of youth engagement.

Building Youth Empowerment

Today I'm thinking about how to express my so-far obtuse "Architecture of Youth Empowerment." I've tried before; however, rereading and listening anew to the experiences of people around me has helped me create a new visualization to express the relevance of our varying ideas about youth voice, engagement, involvement and empowerment.

I want you to stand outside a huge building with me. This building represents youth empowerment. For those of you familiar with my work, you'll know that I've long rejected youth empowerment as a motivating ideology for this work. However, I do believe that empowerment is the ultimate goal of voice, involvement and engagement. Its the keen purpose why all this work is so relevant and meaningful, from whichever angle it takes. Take a look across the building in front of you and decide what it looks like to you- maybe its a temple at Bangalore, or a Tlingit longhouse, or a state capitol- whatever it is, make sure its grand and wonderful, and that you can see one whole side. You can't see the whole thing- we can never fully know this magically evolutionary work we're engaged in- but definitely look at one whole side.

The foundation of youth empowerment is youth voice. Youth voice is the active, distinct, and concentrated ways young people represent themselves throughout society. The way adults respond to youth voice is essential for the radically democratic social change I envision for our society; however, and luckily, youth voice is not contingent on adults' response. I believe its our ethical obligation as a democratically-minded society to ensure the active, effective and sustained engagement of youth voice throughout society, and that is why I believe it is the foundation of youth empowerment. The root prefix of empowerment- em- means with. With power. The concept of youth empowerment inherently insists that adults experience power with young people, and that begins with youth voice. Voice is the base expression of any person that can happen in any form.

Distinctly different from this foundation are the walls that hold up the building. These walls represent youth involvement. Different from voice, involvement is the structural supports we create in order to move towards youth empowerment. For a long time well-meaning adults believed that in order to successfully empower young people they had to just listen to them- then trying to do that in the absence of strong walls. The youth involvement walls that hold up our youth empowerment building are made of four primary elements: Reflection, Knowledge-building, Skill-sharing, and Action. These are the main ways young people become involved.

The strong foundation and the powerful walls are capped by the roof of youth engagement. Engagement is a feeling that we have when we're deeply connected with people, an idea, work or potentially any other thing in our lives. Some people mistake engagement with engrossment; but they're different. When you're engrossed in something you can't remove your concentration from it: a video game, crocheting, a new album, sports, and good novels can do this for me. Similarly, engagement is not the same as involvement. Instead, engagement is a peronal emotional reaction we develop in response to excitement, entanglement, entwinement and enculturation. Its a feeling. No building can withstand the tests of time without a strong roof, and youth empowerment requires that roof to be engagement.

The interaction of these three elements- voice, involvement and engagement- combine to form a healthy, effective and sustainable experience for all young people to become more powerful with us. I believe this is how we build youth engagement.

Steps to a New Youth Voice Movement

I've spent the last two days at a TA Partnership meeting on youth involvement in Systems of Care. For those of you who don't know, Systems of Care is a coordination framework for ensuring that the individuals and organizations involved in providing care for young people who are in foster care, who have been homeless, or other circumstances where our communities are responsible for an individual young person's well-being. The question this group of practitioners is considering is how to effectively and sustainably involve young people in their own care. I am very humbled by the amount of knowledge, depth and perspective the folks here possess, and it drives home a point for me.

About 5 years ago my friend and ally, Andrea Felix, wrote a paper about the Youth Voice Movement for Youth Service America. She suggested that organizations committed to Youth Voice be connected to each other, and working with organizations Andrea facilitated a series of forums in cities across the U.S. In response I wrote an article for the National Youth Leadership Council addressing the reality that the Youth Voice Movement had always existed - it just exists in ways a lot of people aren't capable of seeing.

After spending 9 years looking for new ways of seeing Youth Voice, I am still discovering new ways Youth Voice is happening, being taught, encouraged, engaged, infused, parlayed, leveraged and otherwise heard. I have been part of dozens of rallies, observed and interacted with hundreds of programs, studied a lot of literature and research and spent thousands of hours in conversations dialoging with youth and adults about Youth Voice. And I'm still learning more.

Sitting in a room full of fulltime Youth Voice practitioners I am reminded that we must move past our organizational and field boundaries. I have personally been exposed to Youth Voice initiatives in the following professional fields:

• K-12 public schools
  
• Youth service, including community service and service learning
  
• Community organizing
  
• Public health
  
• Research and evaluation
  
• Media
  
• Mental health
  
• Higher education, including community colleges, colleges and universities
  
• Experiential education, including high adventure and ropes courses
  
• Governance, including city, state and provincial, federal and national
  
• Technology
  
• Arts, including dance, music, theatre and performance
  

And the list grows on. This list looks similar to the list of Issues on The Freechild Project website, but its different because of its meaning: rather than being the things youth are addressing with Youth Voice, these are the actual professional fields where Youth Voice is taking hold as an element.

These are the roots of the Youth Voice Movement today. These are the places, spaces and people who we need to engage in developing, strengthening, and fostering Youth Voice in communities across the nation and around the world.

International Youth Involvement Role Models

Fun fact about the US and youth involvement! Since the United States is not a signatories to the Convention on the Rights of the Child there is no legal precedent for youth involvement here!

Article 12 of the CDC states:

1. Parties shall assure to the child who is capable of forming his or her own views the right to express those views freely in all matters affecting the child, the views of the child being given due weight in accordance with the age and maturity of the child.
2. For this purpose, the child shall in particular be provided the opportunity to be heard in any judicial and administrative proceedings affecting the child, either directly, or through a representative or an appropriate body, in a manner consistent with the procedural rules of national law.
   

In response to that call for action more than 100 nations around the world have instituted a variety of measures to ensure youth involvement. These include the establishment of youth secretatiates, youth ombudspeople, youth liasions, youth councils, and many, many other systemic efforts to promote youth voice. Powerful! There are legitimate concerns about Article 12, and those shouldn't be dismissed; however, it does success in providing a starting point for the conversation, which is wholly missing in U.S. policy today.

So the U.S. is struggling to find its own way to ensure youth involvement. The lobbyists in D.C. are working on behalf of dozens of organizations to challenge the Obama administration to involve youth, and there are plenty of efforts to systematize youth involvement that are in effect right now. However, it seems we're doing this devoid of U.N. examples, without role models, nothing. All the coordination in Europe, all the expertise in Canada and all the collaboration in Micronesian countries seem to do nothing to overtly inform the attempts in the U.S. Instead, anything that comes from any of this advocacy is going to happen because of an authentic rush from the ground up. 

That adds to the excitement in a sense- although it continues to remind me of the disappointing isolationism this country has sunk into over the last 8 years. We need to rise above our sometimes shallow perspectives and see the paths that have been made by other countries, and from there move forward. We need to pay attention to our international youth involvement role models.

Note: This morning I'm involved in a meeting with the Government of Alberta Youth Secretariat, and then this afternoon I'm flying to Washington, D.C. for the inaugaration and a conference on youth involvement in systems of care. I love connecting the dots, and will share more later.

Addendum: Not Post-Youth

I want to add something to my earlier post on "So-Called Youth Issues": we're not in an era of some type of "post-youth" analysis. While I want young people to focus on issues that are beyond their demographic, I do not want adults to think that for one minute we should respond in kind by ending our work with young people. Instead, I think that this awareness of young people working outside issues that affect them directly calls us to respond by increasing advocacy with child and youth activists. We must call for more youth involvement, deeper youth engagement and more sustainable youth action. There must be more opportunities for youth activism, more projects for youth researchers, more classes for youth to teach, and lobbying for programs that focus on children and youth - its just that this advocacy shouldn't be stopped or relegated to youth alone.

These are times when adult allyship is more important than ever before. Ours is an increasingly adultcetric society that is completely comfortable with youth segregation; by identifying that, examining it, educating it and challenging it we can end the stigma that surrounds young people. We aren't post-youth - we're actually pre-integration. Let's call it what it is and work accordingly.

So-Called "Youth Issues"

The myth of so-called "youth issues" is pervasive throughout our communities, as young people are routinely segregated from adults throughout society, including mainstream decision-making, problem-solving and policy choices. There has been a frequent temptation to pigeonhole children and youth by focusing on schools, children's healthcare, youth homelessness, child labor, afterschool programs, social work, nutrition, and other issues addressing children and youth specifically.

Luckily, young people won't have any part of this. Children and youth activists aren't be fooled anymore by adults' frequent insistence that they need to focus on what we think they should. Instead, they are addressing hundreds of inconvenient truths facing our world today in immeasureable ways. And historians like Phillip House have shown us that there is a precident of youth activists doing this throughout American history.

Today I found some hope from Barack Obama's transition team. In recent conversations the national youth lobbying community succeeded in demonstrating the wide range of issues that are important to young people. While the transition team member in the video reduced their concerns to "having a seat at the table," having this step forward is further than anyone has got before. That along is cause for celebration.

• Oh, and thanks to Dana Welsh and Jonah Wittkamper for informing this post.
  

Youth Voice and the Urgency of Now

This morning I was looking through one of my AmeriCorps scrapbooks - I served three terms - and thought about the ways I understood youth involvement 10 years ago. Those were different times for me, when I was tied deeply into my own experience and hadn't critically examined a lot of the assumptions I had. My head was full of weighty considerations and even some painful memories, as a lot of my attempts to make my voice heard as a youth were squelched, suppressed and negated. However, I was also filled with an optomism, a hope that youth involvement could stretch far beyond just showing up and earning the accolades that adults had laid out for me. At 23 I saw youth involvement as a door opening for young people to sit with adults and work as partners and really be members of their communities - I just couldn't put a finger on what that looked like. 

Here I am 10 years on, and this morning I read an article by Bono in the New York Times. He's bragging about his time with Frank Sinatra, and says once Sinatra told him that, "Being modern is not about the future, its about the present." That is what I love about modernity, is that its so present, and I think that is the challenge of youth involvement: instead of focusing on some fuzzy unrelatable past or some foggy hopeful future, youth demand that we focus on now. As an adult I have often found fault with that thinking, lambasting the sentiment behind it for not being sustainable or considerate or whatever... but there's a deeper lesson within it that I think we've got to give credence. The urgent necessity of now is that we not look away, look ahead, look behind, but rather that we look forward and around, seeing and hearing and breathing and believing that presence of the present.

Thoreau once wrote that, “You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find your eternity in each moment. Fools stand on their island opportunities and look toward another land. There is no other land, there is no other life but this.” Let's find the eternity of youth by considering their moment, which is inherently fleeting. Rather than entrench our hope in some future we bestow on them, let's embrace the duality, complexity and depth of urgency of today and now, which is the only time we are guarenteed to share with our young allies.

This consideration for modernity calls us to raise the stakes and outcomes we are seeking from youth involvement. Rather than attempting to educate young people that they're working for some remote and intangible future, we suddenly becomed forced to acknowledge their agenda. 

This is backed by scientific literature [*note: I can't find any good free online literature about this; email me for a short bibliography] about the brain and comprehension that shows there are major differences between how children understand time and how adults understand time. One of those differences, and there are many, is that young children aren't able to conceptualize the abstract basis of "the future." What does that mean for a 4-year-old picking up trash with her mom for a service project? As young people reach their middle teens they have a more complete understanding of the past and an emerging interest in the future; however, their ability to plan and consider the future is still remote and disjointed from their present. 

I think that differentiation has radical implications for youth involvement. It doesn't mean that we stop thinking about the future, or challenging young people to consider the future; however, I believe it does mean that consider more than the future. Rather, we should seek to help children and youth understand how their actions, ideas, knowledge and wisdom affect the present, this moment, right now. If we can't answer that question ourselves then perhaps we need to think about the same. 

That's how we can get to the point: There is an urgency to Youth Voice, and an urgency to the present. Let's meet the challenge that's implicit in that.

Roles of Youth in Society

The roles of youth in society vary according to our perceptions of young people. They aren't consistent throughout society and there are exceptions that must be identified. However, this gives us an opportunity to generalize and learn. Here are a few different positions I have figured out.

Youth as Less-Than-Adult. In this role young people are taught to wait for parents, teachers, bells, calls, alarms, college, adulthood, something... they are always waiting for something in the future, something distant, something beyond right now. This is where the mantra, "Youth are the leaders of tomorrow," comes from. These youth are viewed as transitional, in motion and not respected for who they are currently.

Youth as Greater-than-Youth. When thought of as this way, youth are called precocious, and seen as being out-of-step with their peers. Adults have the tendency to bring this young person "into the fold," molding them into "Junior Adults" and foisting tons of responsibility onto their shoulders. Alternatively, these youth are viewed as overly ambitious and treated with contempt, as adults around them.

Youth as Child. This young person is infantalized, meaning they are treated like babies. They suffer the major repression of their rights either through unconscious or conscious adults. The are portrayed as insignificant, incapable and particularly inadequate. This treatment can lead to youth being treated as "trained puppies" who respond to stimulus, like Pavlov and his dog with a bell. Conversely, it can also lead youth to "act out" against their treatment and behave "childishly."

Youth as Monster. Alternatively viewed as a predator or profit, these young people are usually and eventually the subjects of mass media articles that demonize them. In this scenario they are routinely portrayed as violent, criminal, angry and generally relentless.

Youth as the Future. As a society, we used to routinely invest in youth. They were regarded as the future, we did spend significant amounts of money on schools and community programs, and we did regard their future as ours. This "future trust" led to the strengthening of community bonds with grandmas standing on porches scolding young people, which in turn may have led to the treatment of "youth as child."

These are typologies that are meant to illustrate differences between different treatments of young people throughout society. They are not absolutes, they aren't set in concrete or any of that. Instead, they're simply meant to be opportunities to examine our own treatment of young people, and to provide lenses to look at the behavior of others. 

Adam's note: I started writing this post in March 2008, and picked it up again this morning. I think that almost a year of mulling it over has given me some clarity about what I was thinking - exciting. 

Youth Voice at Home Pt II

On xmas day I posted about youth voice at home, and the notion that engaging young people has to extend throughout our communities, including the places where young people spend more time than anywhere else. My friend Jenn is a rock star goddess mother and writer and youth worker who has been doing this work for a month of Sundays. She replied to that post on Facebook, where I "re-broadcast" these blog entries. Here's some of what she said, and my responses.

"My 3 1/2 yells that she wants to play hide and seek and I don't want to. I'm doing this. And then I might want to read. What is the voice she is applying and what is the voice that I might be denying by not always engaging with her 24/7? Where do I draw the line between realizing her person and presence as an equal in this family and where do I learn to make my needs known and admired, too?"

There are many, many significant differences between youth voice at home and youth voice in community orgs and schools, and you just lit up the boards some of them. One is the notion of purpose: youth voice should be infused in community orgs to encourage engagement in the community, and youth voice should be infused in classrooms to encourage students engage in the curriculum. 

However, at home, youth voice should be acknowledged at home to reach both of those goals, and much, much more. Those other goals can't be ignored, despite how much some would do that. Those other goals are determined by tradition, culture, religion, socio-economic class, education, heritage, and a lot more. They may include creating emotional ties, showing support, fostering love, enshrining respect, and encouraging kindness. Because of that difference parents have to take a different tact than youth workers or teachers. Our means must reflect our ends, and honestly I don't believe young people can reach any of those goals by parents simply acquiescing to every whim of a 3 1/2 year-old. There's an essential tension in many peoples' understanding of youth voice, where we believe that engaging youth voice equates to giving young people free reign over a given situation. I think it is important to acknowledge that engaging youth voice means finding a common ground between different perspectives. Perhaps that is where you can engage your daughter's voice (which I know you do already, but for the sake of saying it...): When your daughter makes her needs known to you, make your needs known to her by modeling appropriate tones of voice and ways of asking. Show the difference between simply giving in and teaching her how to wait for when its time to share space.

"I'm and adult and she's a child. Our minds don't think alike and they just won't for years. Where will the youth voice portion of this confusion and frustration come in? ...We have lived on the earth longer and can see some distances better somehow."

I don't think that engaging youth voice equates to eliminating the responsibilities of parenting. I don't think we, as parents, are required to give up, give in, or otherwise refrain from fulfilling the obligations, duties and responsibilities we have as parents. However, I do think that as conscious, considerate and deliberate allies to young people in schools and communities, as well as in our homes, we have a moral and ethical obligation to challenge ourselves when our children are young, and as they grow older, to create spaces and opportunities for our children to share their voices, collaborate, connect and otherwise connect their voices to the livelihood and well-being to the other voices within their families, including parents and siblings.

As a young parent I believe I have a huge opportunity to examine and live this notion of engaging youth voice at home, and I hope I don't let my daughter down in the process. She gives me hope for the future we are going to share together. How about you?

Engagement or Involvement?

I have been talking with teachers and youth workers for the last 10 years about youth involvement. We've talked about classrooms, after-school programs, boards of directors, city councils, research projects, university classes... all kinds of different places. Somewhere along the way I was introduced to the notion of engagement as opposed to involvement. I was challenged to differentiate between the two, and after reading the research and literature I came away with a pretty clear picture. Here are my definitions:

• Youth engagement is a personal response to surrounding stimulus. 
  
• Youth involvement is any attempt to promote engagement through systemic efforts.
  

So you can see that in my book one leads to the next. For instance, we might strive to write a classroom lesson plan that engages students in water quality issues by appealing to the effect of water on their health, the health of their families, and their community's economic livelihood. In order to engage them, though, we involve youth in writing the curriculum, facilitating activities and evaluating the class afterwards. In a youth program that might take the form of wanting to engage youth in caring about the elders in their neighborhood. We do that by involving them in an oral history project.

I think clarifying these terms helps identify how different elements of this conversation play into the picture. For instance, we can see that youth engagement, as the more nebulous term, captures the more cultural elements of this conversation, including:

• Youth voice
  
• Youth/adult partnerships
  
• Adultism
  
• Adultcentrism
  
• Ephibiophobia
  

In turn, youth involvement becomes the more concrete, structural effort. For instance:

• Youth activism
  
• Youth as researchers
  
• Youth leadership development
  
• Youth-created media
  
• Students as teachers
  

All of these provide avenues for youth involvement. This framework can help us identify how and where we concentrate our efforts. If you are in an organization where you personally want to involve youth but the organization itself seems highly averse to the idea, perhaps you start with focusing on youth engagement. This would include doing a cultural assessment of your organization, either through a survey or focus group, and to really examine why your organization should reach out to youth. Conversely, if the people in your organization seem vested in the notion of youth engagement, perhaps its time to start building infrastructure to foster sustained youth involvement. 

Either way, its important to delineate the differences in these essential elements of effect youth programs. Good luck, and let me know if you have any questions, suggestions, ideas or other responses.

Robotic Youth Workers

Education should not be the filling of a pail,
but the lighting of a fire.
- William Butler Yeats

When I was a teen my family got a dog. Not fancy or well-bred or any that, but a mutt. He was the best, obedient and kind and fun and just a dog, ya know? How did Rudy learn to be all those things? Training. This is how we talk about engaging the people who work with youth.

Training is a one-sided model of knowledge delivery where the trainee is given knowledge to simply ingest and consume, regurgitate and perpetuate. The gross dilemma in this model is that it is inherently anti-youth allyship, as it insists that the needs of young people do not waver beyond the training's rigid boundaries. Think about it: you go to a conference presentation where for 90 minutes a presenter railroads you through his agenda. While there are interactive sections within that session, there is little time for questions, and critical questions are routinely discouraged either through ignoring or humor. This is training.

What is the favorite topic of many of these trainings? A program. You know the kind, replete with a wonderful powerpoint, a fat binder and a website for constant reference to ensure that your program is on track. There are evaluations as well, complete with prescriptive results that deny the individuality of the facilitator, the attendees, the location, the situation, or any given circumstance that may realistically change the nature of the delivery.

This type of sterile standardization has become par for the course in modern youth work. I have spent thousands of hours attending training as a participant while a youth worker; since then I have facilitated hundreds more for others. However, the entire time I was standing in the front I was struggling with the didactic models I was taught with. How much information did I ever recieve in this belittling form that ignored my individual needs in order to meet the requirements of the presenter, the host organization, the evaluators or others?

At the very least we need more dialectic learning opportunities for youth workers to grow and change, so that we don't continue to perpetuate the ills we've been taught. At the least. At the most, well, we need a radical re-conceptualization of youth work. We need to transform our models from being system-driven towards being entirely youth-driven. We need more than robotic youth workers - we need humans. Recognizing the humanity of the people who work with young people will allow them to recognize the humanity of the youth they work with. This type of progression will let us move forward; otherwise we're stuck here.

Freechild.org's Year-In-Review

One of the things I like to do at the start of every year is look back at the year before to see how Freechild.org's users used the website. What sections did they visit the most, what topics were most popular, and so on. Knowing that helps me make decisions for the future of the site.

Here are some of the overall numbers for the last year. Freechild.org saw 360,000 visits in 2008 about 1,000 visits per day, and 775,000 pageviews, with about 2,100 pageviews per day. That's just Freechild.org - it doesn't include SoundOut or the CommonAction.org downloads still at work. Those numbers are pretty typical for the last two years.

Those are some of the "big picture" numbers. Here are several more detailed lists to show the most popular content at Freechild.org during 2008.

Most popular pages on Freechild.org

As with just about every website, our home page gets the most traffic. But other than the home page, here are the five Freechild.org pages visited most in 2008.

1. Challenging adultism
   
2. Student rights information
   
3. Article: "Why play games when there's work to do?"
   
4. Youth-led social activism
   
5. Quotes for action
   

I'm really suprised that the quotes page is in the top five.

Most popular actions of 2008

This is a list of the most visited topics in our actions database. While the general topic of youth activism is always the favorite, I had a few surprises this year.

1. Youth-led social activism
   
2. Youth media
   
3. Participatory action research
   
4. Foster youth and social change
   
5. Youth-led environmental activism
   

Most popular issues of 2008

With all the issues Freechild.org introduced this last year it shouldn't surprise me that the perennial favorites repeat themselves. The following are the most popular topics from our issue database.

1. Adultism
   
2. Student rights
   
3. Youth action for peace and nonviolence
   
4. Social justice
   
5. Youth suffrage
   

Most popular resources of 2008

What are people using on the Freechild.org website? Following are the five most popular resources from our resource database.

1. Article: Why play games when there's work to do?
   
2. Firestarter Youth Power Curriculum Participant Guidebook [PDF]
   
3. So You Wanna Be a Playa? Freechild Project Guide to Cooperative Games for Social Change [PDF]
   
4. Reflection activities
   
5. Crossing the Line
   

So, there you have it - everything you ever wanted to know about Freechild.org content - and then some. Let's see what 2009 brings, shall we?!?

What is an Adult Ally to Young People?

An "adult ally" is "a person who is a member of the dominant or majority age group who work to end oppression in his or her personal and professional life through support of, and as an advocate for, young people."*

"Allies are adults who advocate and support young people. They assist young people in their lives, support them when they struggle, and let them know how important they are and that change is possible."

Adult allies have been remarkably effective in promoting positive change in society. Over the past 40 years adult allies have worked in organizations and communities around the world to make adult culture more aware of bias and discrimination against young people, and challenging of the privileges automatically given to adults.

An adult ally strives to...

• be a friend to young people and adults
  
• be a listener
  
• be open-minded
  
• have his or her own opinions about age
  
• be willing to talk
  
• commit him or herself to personal growth in spite of the discomfort it may sometimes cause
  
• recognize his or her personal boundaries about age
  
• recognize when to refer young people or other adults to additional resources
  
• confront his or her own prejudices about age
  
• join others with a common purpose
  
• believe that all persons regardless of age, sex, race, gender, religion, ethnicity or sexual orientation should be treated with dignity and respect 
  
• engage in the process of developing a culture free of age-based oppression
  
• recognize his or her mistakes, but not use them as an excuse for inaction
  
• be responsible for empowering his or her role in a community, particularly as it relates to responding to adultism and adultcentrism
  
• recognize the legal powers and privileges that adults have and which young people are denied
• believes that youth can "be youth" and be partners and meaningful participants 
• is clear about his or her intentions as an adult ally 
• fosters environments where young people feel comfortable and respected
• does not assume that youth only know about "youth issues"
• supports young people's development as meaningful partners and leaders

As important as it is to define what an adult ally is in a positive sense, it is also helpful to understand the boundaries of an adult ally’s role.

An adult ally is NOT...

• someone with ready-made answers
  
• necessarily a counselor, nor are they necessarily trained to deal with crisis situations
  
• expected to proceed with an interaction if levels of comfort or personal safety have been violated
  

Sources in this post include Washington, J. and Evans, N. J. (1991). "Becoming an Ally," in N. J Evans and V. A. Wall (eds) Beyond tolerance: Gays, lesbians and bisexuals on campus.Alexandria, VA: American College Personnel Association and (2002) Get the Word Out! Boston: Youth On Board. Some other sources I've used for this include this PDF and this PDF, this PDF and this PDF. Learn more here, here and here.

Popular Pedagogy: An Unseen Barrier

Everday young people and adult allies struggling to change the world run into an unseen barrier. As we seek to partner, teach, educate and otherwise transform the lives of children and youth we stand against an unacknowledged, yet widely felt, force whose presence is pervasive. This force, this barrier is destructive to the point of absolute, and yet it is not commonly named by the fighters who struggle against it.

Its the ads on television that teach adults to see youth as fleeting, disgusting or regretful. Its the cartoons that teach children to disparage adults because of their age. Its the music that encourages alienation, the comic books that deny reality, the television shows that idolize ignorance and the movies that encapsulate culture as a stagnate reality. But its more than simply popular media. It includes the attitudes exuded by politicians, teachers, youth workers and youth themselves.

These are the forces that Henry Giroux calls "popular pedagogy," which I will define as the forces that teach us, consciously or otherwise, throughout popular culture. Its more than theory, naming this gives us language to define, critically examine and struggle against these forces. This has helped me move beyond reducing the challenges facing youth. We have to see it, name it, call it out, and move it to the forefront. That's popular pedagogy.