Big Ideas

The ethics of program design in youth development

One of the higher compliments anyone can pay me for my work is something along the lines of “I would love to take that workshop myself!” or “My high school- / college-aged kid could use that program!” or better yet, “Everyone could use a program like that.” Technically, I design programs for so-called “at-risk” youth, but all that really means is being sensitive to certain needs and understanding the institutional context of their lives. What I am actually striving to create are programs with a much wider appeal—wider because in the end they aren’t aimed at “troubled youth,” but at our shared humanity.

As human beings we all unfold in our own time, and that process is never smooth or evenly-paced. Some of us encounter great challenges very early on. This may appear to “set us back,” but only if we succumb to the bad habit of measuring ourselves against others, or—more accurately—against some kind of social norm that demands we be self-sufficient and clearly on our way to some narrow, preconceived notion of success by our mid-twenties. Another view is to approach these challenges as tests. And if we have the tools and the space to reflect on those significant life experiences, we can use them as learning opportunities and even a source of strength.

Note that this is a very individualized and forgiving view of human development, and one that can resonate throughout a lifetime if we continue to sit with it. Within this framework, I am creating a support system for young people during the critical, early years of emerging adulthood, when many of them exit care with the scantest of resources. The outcomes I shoot for are nothing less than what many people wish for their own children: personal well-being and professional fulfillment. We want to give them the very best so they can be their very best. But how can this happen if we push them through programs that are designed according to preconceived and misguided notions of their capabilities?

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By Ysette, ago

What is the #slowbrood?

The slow brood is a notion that Brian (aka, Cartesian Faith) and I have been toying with here at Chez Guevarowe for a while now. Slow brood is an intentional riff on such catchphrases as slow food, slow brewed, cold brewed—things that are good because they require a significant amount of time and preparation. Brian may write about his own take on the slow brood, but here is mine.

The slow brood is a habit of mind I bring into my business life from academia, where ideas naturally have a long gestation period. The slow brood resists some of the trends that make me uncomfortable about business, specifically within the lean startup industry. Let me be explicit on this point: It’s not that I think that lean principles are fundamentally incompatible with social enterprise, or that lean startups don’t have the potential for spectacular growth and impact. What I take issue with, rather, is a very particular application of the methodology and the culture it fosters.

While I subscribe to the principle that fledgling enterprises should curb their ambitions and start small (I went through a lean startup for social good course myself), the way the method is taught in lean startup workshops can lead practitioners into the realm of the ridiculous. I refer to weekend bootcamps where participants are organized into teams, and each team must “develop its problem hypothesis, solution hypothesis and a series of assumptions which are core to the success of the business.”

Now consider the inspirational anecdotes we hear during these workshops. The general narrative goes like this: Oops, the “problem” we wanted to solve turned out not to be a problem for anyone at all! So what’s next? Pivot, pivot, pivot, ’til…bingo! Not only is the service/product we ended up launching totally different from what we initially planned (that can be a good thing), but the very problem itself has changed. So, ultimately, it’s not the need of your customer that you care about. In this model, who your customers are and what you’re trying to help them accomplish matter much less than finding customers with an actual problem you can solve. (more…)

By Ysette, ago

Anatomy of a workshop activity

I’d planned on blogging about what I gleaned from yesterday’s annual New Yorkers for Children Vocational Conference for Youth in Foster Care, but today a couple different folks have asked me about my approach to engaging youth in the classroom, so I thought it would be helpful to write instead about how I came up with my rites of passage activity.

Good teachers come in all stripes, and my particular talent is being able to make complex ideas accessible to young people, and to do so with a modest measure of creativity. In my rites of passage workshop I use an anthropological lens to understand coming of age ceremonies and tribal rites of passage. Now I myself did not study anthropology until I got to college, but I’ve seen that is entirely within reach for high-school aged students to make use of its tools. [Warning: Very long post, so I highlight the takeaway at the very end.] (more…)

By Ysette, ago

Bill Gates on student curiosity

People who are as curious as I am will be fine in any system. […] Unfortunately, the highly curious student is a small percentage of the kids.

—Bill Gates

Every day I have to remind myself that people on all sides of the education debates really do have students’ interests at heart, and that differences in opinion stem from the fact that we don’t all agree on the purpose of education, and moreover, that educating as immense and as heterogeneous a population as ours in the United States is a complex problem that invites us to rehearse a great variety of solutions, many of which are at odds with each other. Sometimes, though, someone makes a remark that strikes me as so deeply wrong and offensive, that it bears calling out.

Bill Gates, who has managed to insert himself into the national conversation on education in spite of his lack of experience in managing a classroom full of kids on a daily basis, believes that only a small percentage of kids are highly curious, and that we therefore need to create for them a more restrictive learning system than the one that gave him free rein to explore his interests to great success.

Pretend we’re in my classroom and let’s “unpack” Gates’s statement. First of all, how does he define curiosity and how does he know that only a small percentage of kids are highly curious? More importantly, why is it that the highly curious student is a rare phenomenon?

I assume that Bill Gates has spent a significant amount of time in the presence of toddlers. Anyone who has knows that, unless toddlers suffer from serious developmental cognitive disabilities or are neglected and abused (more on that later), they are all naturally curious. Curiosity, let’s be clear, is a strong desire to learn and know, rooted in a sense of wonder and awe about the world. Children are born to love learning, because learning is vital to survival.

I read somewhere that the infant who repeatedly tosses his food off his tray to the ground is conducting two experiments at once: one in physics, and another in human behavior. Down goes the apple slice, and off Mommy goes to retrieve it. Curiosity is not exceptional in the very young. At a tender age, learning is play.

Something must happen along the way, however, because anyone who has stood before a classroom full of kids knows that there are a certain few who approach learning playfully, while others view it as complete drudgery. What happened to the latter? Bill Gates either assumes that some people are born with numb minds or (I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt here) that the natural store of curiosity present at infancy has been depleted in the greater part of the population. Either way, though, the solution he proposes is to reinforce a two-tier education system, where the mass of kids who either aren’t “curious” or wealthy enough to get into private schools get stuck in a public system where teachers have very little liberty to pursue their intellectual projects, let alone determine how they might serve the individual interests and needs of a very diverse classroom.

What about trying to figure out how all these children lost their natural curiosity? (more…)

By Ysette, ago

A very nice tribute to teachers

I’ve written before about Freakonomics‘ Stephen J. Dubner and his blog series on the value of college. The economics professors he interviewed were able to address issues such as the cost of a college degree and how that weighs against the prospective earnings of college graduates. They were also able Read more…

By Ysette, ago

Sowing the seeds of self-actualization

One way of articulating what it is that I’m trying to build into a PYA curriculum is the “seeds of self-actualization,” a term I take from “A Theory of Human Motivation” by Abraham Maslow. (Now, I have a terrible blogging habit of burying the lede, so skip down to the jump if you’re already familiar with this.) In brief, Maslow argues that human beings have a progressive hierarchy of needs, beginning with the most basic of physiological drives, moving up to concerns about safety, love/belonging, esteem, and ultimately, self-actualization. Later on, Maslow would sandwich cognitive and aesthetic needs—the pursuits of knowledge and beauty—in between esteem and self-actualization, and top off the pyramid with the search for self-transcendence, or spiritual fulfillment.

Credit

These needs are hierarchical in the sense that the higher needs only typically emerge as each preceding need is adequately satisfied. The higher needs either do not exist or recede into the background for someone who lacks food, safety, love, and esteem. If I am hungry, homeless, and unemployed, I will be preoccupied with securing stable housing and any means of income, long before I might entertain the pursuit of creative expression. And above all, I seek nourishment. Once my most basic needs are met to reasonable degrees, there emerges my thirst for understanding, for beauty, for the meaning of life. (more…)

By Ysette, ago

Letting youth lead the way in youth development

In my work I try to integrate the principles of positive youth development, beginning with the assumption that every young person has a unique set of strengths and positive qualities that can be cultivated to his benefit and that of society. For a project with New Yorkers for Children‘s Youth Advisory Board, I’ve started looking into models and methods of youth-led community organizing, which extends the logic of positive youth development thusly: If we truly view our youth not as victims to be saved, problems to be solved, or vessels to be filled with our wisdom, then why not let them lead the way in youth development and youth advocacy? (more…)

By Ysette, ago