12/28/08 | CommonAction Consulting

Sunday, January 04, 2009

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.

Saturday, January 03, 2009

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.

Thursday, January 01, 2009

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.

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