Ideology

My ideology is critical (and more specifically social justice). I knew this going in, and was trying to avoid picking my answers to make them line up with a certain result. I do have quite a bit of overlap with positive, mostly because I don’t fully agree with the critical description of childhood as a test run for adult problem-solving and justice work. In that regard, I align more closely with the positive focus of young people as they are rather than as they might be in the future. However, that seems to support the critical belief that “teens are legitimate actors and collaborators who have important ideas and ways of contributing to the world.” I definitely feel like adults should be allies to young people, and that both adults and young people have plenty to offer. Lately, I’ve been really interested in multigenerational work, which treats people of all ages as equally valid contributors. I feel like this ideology is closely tied to my ideas about care and about what I want my youth work to look like. For example, I am feeling like the more I learn about schooling, the more I don’t think I could work in a school. The parts of me that pull on PYD recognize the need for spaces that value young people for their inherent worth and not their ability to meet messed-up standards. The parts of me that are rooted in SJYD know that I can’t just create that space in a bubble and pretend the young people there aren’t spending the majority of their time in/serving school, and that space is given meaning by also making room for discussions about and resistance to oppression and injustice.

Care

In the article, Restler uses Sarah to talk about “being” as an act of care. In past jobs, this is something I’ve thought about a lot. I’ve found myself asking “how queer I’m allowed to be” at work, and felt like I needed to balance my own security (in jobs with not-always-welcoming employers/coworkers) with wanting to show up as a queer adult for the young people in my program. People get very weird
about queerness and young people, and it can be both vulnerable and sometimes tricky to make known when you’re the adult in the room. I think everyone knows the feeling of when you first saw an adult owning their identity and succeeding, and I feel Sarah’s desire to be that for young people. It reminds me of the idea of “brave spaces” versus traditional safe spaces, with the creation of brave spaces as a way to demonstrate critical care.

At my internship, I notice sometimes that rules are bent to make sure everyone is cared for. Extra snacks might be given when people are hungry, extra bus passes if we know they won’t get home from work safely without one. I think some aspects of Nieto’s critical care could be more evident. Sometimes it seems like the adults in the space might not want to name oppression, and instead look for ways to solve its symptoms, which can make it feel like a personal issue.

Event 2

A second event of this semester was Janelle Monae’s Dirty Computer. This event was organized by Pride Alliance, and I’ve been looking forward to it for a while. Of course, from the PA side I got some behind-the-scenes perspective: a mix up with the food order, a meeting that took half of our anticipated attendance, and some issues with advertising were all part of the thrill of planning this event, which is how I anticipate a lot of my future in youth work will be, as well. Despite those snafus, the event was still pretty cool! Monae’s work explores pretty much all of the YDev anchors, which I’ll get into a little below!

Care: This is a project that is so full of love. Self-love, romantic love, love and solidarity of marginalized communities. “PYNK” and the video accompanying it highlight this best, as it celebrates queer femininity and black womanhood.

Purposeful Play: Throughout Dirty Computer, Monae uses both art and sexuality, seen as “frivolous” in some contexts, as tools for justice. This echoes the way YDev resists traditional narratives around play and recognizes its value.

Social Justice/Advocacy and Identity: These are probably the most obvious is Dirty Computer. Monae uses her sci-fi metaphor as a platform for talking about injustice. For example, in “Crazy, Classic Life” some of her lyrics talk about the differences in opportunity between herself and her white friends. She calls out how recklessness was viewed as deviance for her as a black woman, but just as a part of youth for white men in her life, which shaped what opportunities they each had access to. The song “Screwed” names a lot of injustices in the US in particular right now, including wage inequality, gun violence, and collusion. The video warns against apathy in the face of injustice when Tessa Thompson’s character is abducted/arrested.

Leading With: This one is probably the most reach-y, but it’s still true. The line “We don’t need another ruler, all of my friends are kings” from “Crazy, Classic Life” perfectly sums up the spirit of leading with. Recognize the power of everyone in the room, don’t try to be a ruler. Monae is bringing that message with the whole album, she isn’t trying to become the figurehead of a new resistance, she’s telling her story of how she had no choice but to resist.

Event 1

One of the events I attended this semester was called “Teaching to Transform: Radical Community-

Based Education,” which was at Brown University. The event was a co-sponsorhip between the John Nicholas Brown Center for Public Humanities and Cultural Heritage, the Sarah Doyle Center for Women and Gender, the Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women, Center for Study of Slavery and Justice, American Studies Department, and Swearer Center. The format was a fairly short panel discussion followed by small groups for question and answer with each panelist. The panelists included educators from high schools in Providence (traditional- Alvarez and nontraditional- the MET) and co-founders of organizations such as Eduleaders of Color RI and Diversity Talks. According to the regrstration page, the panel sought to answer the questions, “What are the radical potentials of community-based methods of education? What are modes of transformative, collective, and emancipatory education and how do they combat punitive, fear-based disciplining of learners? How do community-based models of education reorient determinations of what students should be learning?”

It was interesting and somewhat frustrating to bring a (critical/SJ) youth development perspective to this education-centered event. Although the panelists recognized the issues with traditional education, the discussion focused on ways of navigating the system with care and culturally responsive from within. There seemed to be a wall that we were hitting at some point. I was reminded of Jamila Lyiscott talking about the issue with curricula and standards that we are expecting students to meet, basically measuring how well they can perform (euro-centric, enlightenment-era) whiteness and naming it as intelligence. I think my frustration with this event is that I understood it as a discussion of how we can begin to untangle learning and education from those standards, and instead it was a discussion of how to treat young people like humans, which has an effect of making those standards easier to meet. The issue was framed as the accessibility, not the existence, of the standards and curriculum.

Overall, the event connected to the YDev anchor of care, and reinforced for me how care can take different forms depending on ideology. For the educators on the panel, care is how they make an oppressive system feel empowering to their students. They foster loving spaces and communities in their classrooms, and make decisions that challenge the system of their schools or education in general

to demonstrate care in a critical way. For a lot of youth workers, demonstrating care means co-creating spaces with young people in which they don’t have to meet the standards of education, and making space where young people are recognized for their intelligence and have opportunities to resist oppression without having to balance succeeding within the same system. Care can be both finding pockets in messed up systems that are real and full of love and make space for messy conversation, and creating spaces in which people don’t have to follow the rules of that messed up system from the beginning and can be valued apart from it.

Play

Recently, I went to (basically) my niece’s first birthday party, which was hosted at an indoor playground. The sister of the birthday girl is two, and she showed me her favorite place at the playground- the ballpit. First of all, ball pits are so fun, just in general. We played a game in which she buried me, asked everyone around us where I went, and then I would burst out from where I was buried to “scare” her. This play engaged Jenkins’ “6 Ps.”

PERMISSION
Jenkins describes the “mental bracket” we put around activities of play to give ourselves permission. I saw this in both myself & my niece! For me, even just getting into the ballpit required giving myself permission. There were a lot of adults at the party who stayed in the “event room” area and did not even enter the playground, and I had to think very consciously about whether or not it was okay for me to do so. Playing with a two year old gives a different context. I definitely still would have wanted to play in a ballpit if I was not with a very young person, but I’m not sure that I would have. As for Lemon (who I was playing with), she wouldn’t like to be scared if it wasn’t in the bracket of play, but that was her favorite part of the game.

PROCESS
The point of the game was never to actually scare Lemon, which might be the product. Instead, it was to get to roll around in the ball pit and see how well we could bury me. The experience and being silly together the whole time made it fun, not the fact that I could startle a two year old (which would be pretty weird!).

PASSION
I’m not sure if this is engaged. I know Lemon loves the playground, and she & I love each other, so I guess the play accessed that love?

PRODUCTIVITY
At first, I thought this was not productive because it’s focused around “destroying” the work of burying me. However, based on Jenkin’s definition of productivity, which includes “performing new roles, trying out new structures, redefining old situations” (Jenkins) , I think that the productivity was in trying to find new ways to present the idea of me not being there, so we could trick everyone else.

PARTICIPATION
While we played, some family members watched and eventually joined in! A few times, we tried to bury other people who joined the game.

PLEASURE
Jenkins speaks to the competitive nature of games sometimes limiting some participants’ pleasure, which makes free play that much more important. The party did include some structured, competitive games for the young people who were there, but this game was spontaneous and had no winner.

SCL Conference

The Student Centered Learning Conference was an interesting, somewhat frustrating event. There were a bunch of highlights and takeaways! Jamila Lyiscott, for example, was incredible. Her talk gave me a different framework for thinking and talking about education, which is really exciting (and endlessly frustrating) as I work on research about in/justice and learning in education. So often, when people talk about injustice in education, they’re really just talking about what access people have to mastering the curriculum. Jamila flipped the script and called out the curriculum itself (and the standards for mastering it) as the problem. One of my workshops also gave me the tool of photovoice, which I’m excited to continue exploring. However, the frustration with the conference came from the framing of the “youth researcher panel.” First of all, they are researchers. (period). As such, it seemed completely inappropriate to me to position them as asking the audience for guidance. They are the experts on their topics, and we should have been asking them the questions, if anything. Also, I noticed that those introducing/moderating the panel both felt the need to explain why youth research is important (which, shouldn’t the rest of the conference have done that?) and to summarize what each researcher said. Personally, I felt as though they did a perfectly fine job explaining their research themselves, and would have liked to see the leaders of this conference trust in youth voice a little more.

Adultism

Being a high school student was an absurdly frustrating experience. A lot of the time, adults really do not know how to interact with teenagers, and definitely do not know what to expect from them. Adultism frames young people as inferior or incomplete versions of adults, but this looks different depending on how young the people in question are. When faced with elementary aged young people, less adults feel threatened, because the dominant narrative is of children as moldable, impressionable, and (if you know what you’re doing) manageable. The discourse around teens, on the other hand, is that of recklessness and unpredictability, and most adults do NOT like feeling out of control (especially when it comes to young people). On the other hand, teens are soon to be adults (at which point they will be considered worthy of respect). This, for me, played out as an exhausting and infuriating back-and-forth in which adults both wanted me to act “mature” and responsible, and did not give me any room to prove that I was.
One particularly frustrating case in which I felt power being taken from me happened when I was a freshman in high school (so, 14). I had seen a video of a club that existed in a neighboring town’s high school, and wanted to bring a chapter to mine. I emailed the principal and made an appointment with my guidance counselor, who praised my initiative and was so excited to have a freshman taking on leadership. I then began the process of starting up a club...emailing and calling the national organization to find out the requirements of/supports for starting a chapter, finding a teacher to “advise,” collecting signatures of people who would be interested in joining if the club existed, etc. I put in a lot of work and felt really passionate about the club at the time, and was excited to be making progress. One day, my mom came to me and told me she couldn’t believe I hadn’t said anything about the club being approved. Confused, I told her that I hadn’t gotten any replies from administration yet, and she showed me the high school’s webpage. The club was not only being promoted, but apparently a meeting time had already been set. I was so frustrated to find out that way, and felt that the grown adults at my high school took advantage of my hard work, only to remove me from the conversation when they wanted control. If my mom hadn’t seen that announcement, I wouldn’t have even known the club (that I put so much into) was meeting. I remembered the guidance counselor praising my leadership, and was infuriated to realize that my voice/power wasn’t actually valued, but exploited. Compounding that belittling feeling of adultism with the racism and other forms of oppression the students at my internship experience, especially given the disparity between the student body and faculty, means that they are made to be essentially powerless, while also being told that they should be responsible. azxcvbhnjmklsdfghjkl; doesn’t it just make you want to scream

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