Education

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

The goals of youth in care

As part of the Lean Startup for Social Enterprise course that I took through Be Social Change, I started conducting customer development interview with youth in care. This exercise forced me to step back from all the generally positive feedback I’ve had from social workers, child welfare administrators, and other adults in the youth development space to ask a more fundamental question: Will the youth themselves find my programs useful?

So far I’ve interviewed three young people either in care or recently aged out to determine how they set goals for themselves, what internal qualities they possess to help them along, and what other tools and supports they have to reach their goals.

My conversations with them tended to meander, but I was able to gather a lot of knowledge and insight from each young person I spoke to. Already there are some common themes emerging. Note that this is a totally unscientific study with a tiny sample size, but what I learned seemed worth sharing:

1. Young people in foster care develop systemic thinking skills early on. Because they are exposed to the workings of a massive bureaucracy that impacts their daily lives, youth in care know where the pain points are. They see exactly where all the moving parts fail to connect because a lack of communication and coordination. And they sense the irony of how a system meant to serve the interests of children can come woefully short of its goals.  (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

Someone must light a fire

Life’s mountain top work is helping a young person have a better life. _________________ Effective programs for young people and families do not happen by spontaneous combustion; someone must light a fire. —Dr. Michael A. Carrera, Lessons for Lifeguards: Working with Teens When the Topic is Hope With anxieties running high Read 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

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

Humanities in service of others, pt 2

This post elaborates on an idea I wrote about last week, namely that framing the intellectual work of the humanities as a service to others (other people, other disciplines, other causes) might free us from the current bind of fixating, either positively or negatively, on the uselessness of the humanities. The word “service” might sound sacrilegious, but humanities scholarship—as interested as it is in the arts—is not itself art, so why should it have the privilege (I almost typed the ‘luxury’) of uselessness accorded to the arts?

Let’s not even raise the issue of university funding and employment. Let’s talk about the marketplace of ideas. Great ideas are not only intellectually sound, but they are, in the academic parlance, “productive.” That is, they break new ground, provoke debate, suggest further areas of study, and even reanimate fields that have gone fallow. Come to think of it, great ideas often may not be bulletproof, but they still possess the power to create something of a cottage industry across different disciplines. (See Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities.)

The truth is, although humanities scholars tend to be allergic to the word “useful,” the currency in this economy has an undeniable use-value (valuable, as Marx defines it, “only in its use”). In fact, academics are trained to spell out the use-value of their ideas to interested audiences. This work entails describing the state of their research area(s) to date; explaining how their particular intervention promises to shake things up; and then suggesting further questions for others to tackle, in light of their contribution. In this way, an academic publication doesn’t aim to be the last word on a topic, but an invitation to engagement.

This consideration brings us closer to what I mean about putting humanities “to service,” although commonly scholars generally think primarily about serving colleagues in their field or related disciplines. What does it look like when the humanities are put in service of “outsiders”? Here are the examples that I promised in my last post: (more…)

By Ysette, ago

Humanities in service of others, pt 1

This promises to be a long post, so let me get straight to the punch line here and explain that the text below is my attempt to get out of the intellectual stalemate in the debate on the humanities by reframing the conversation not in terms of use, but of service. If this is your kind of thing, read on: (more…)

By Ysette, ago