Sophie Ward

Cynthia Taines begins by defining the difference between two strands of increasing student engagement in decisions made by the school: student involvement and youth activism. In this article youth activism is when, “students’ participation is promoted externally, frequently by community-based organizations, affording a base of support that is independent of the school.” This is different from student involvement, which is when students share their experiences with school administrators or staff who end up making the final decision. Taines later on details a nonprofit community organization, Mobilize 4 Change, that visits schools in the Gorham School District in which she was observing examples of youth activism. Mobilize 4 Change visits these schools, through the schools’ administration, holding membership drives during lunch. Later on in the article Taines interviews multiple groups within the school, specifically teachers, asking for their take on youth activism within the school. Some of the suggestions teachers had were along the lines of getting feedback directly from students on said teachers’ lessons and demeanor in the classroom. They also discussed times when they would have the students be heavily involved in the process of structuring and decorating the classroom. While this was the general consensus for feedback on youth activism, teachers seem to feel, based on the results from opinions of M4C, that they prefer when youth activism is partnered with following or working with the school guidelines. 

This article gave me some ideas on how I want to structure not only my classroom but also my relationships with my students in order to create a space where every one of them feels comfortable. Within the article, the author outlines the difference between unilateral power and relational power, unilaterally meaning that someone directly has power over someone else, and relational meaning that power is shared as partners within a community. Based on this I know I would like to structure a classroom environment where relational power is at play which will allow students, who will most likely be in their mid to late teens, to rightly feel that they have a say in their education. I would also like to implement the strategy of having students involved in the layout or design of the classroom, where students either discuss or fill out a survey about what they have enjoyed in the past. What this does is show students, on a lower level, that advocating for themselves can work out in their favor and that there are people who will listen. Overall, this article and research do a great job at outlining the foundational issues with youth activism within the school and how to build a better one that can cultivate skills students can bring into the real world. 

Within this article, a strategy is introduced that encourages the idea that in order for students to grow intellectually and simply as a person, they need to become aware of themselves and their position in society. This is Paulo Frier’s Praxis where in order for students to have the ability to recognize social and economic conditions in their communities or world, they need to first understand how they perceive themselves. This is because however students or the youth, in general, might view themselves, they see that as a direct result of the world around them. Students are naturally involved in what closely relates back to their personal bubble, so in order to get students to engage, it is best to relate it back to how they see their own person. They will then be able to identify something they feel passionately about or a change within their community they strongly want to see happen. 

I feel that this is a very important strategy that I would like to implement in my future classroom. The article discusses the Social Justice Education project, and I think these are good components to orchestrate a lesson that would get the engagement discussed above. Within this project, students are encouraged to write “I AM” poems that demonstrate positive views on their identities and the opportunity to reflect on them. This is something I would like to have my students do but not require them to share with their peers and family if they do not want to. There is a student participating in the program, who was a part of the school's Structured English Immersion program where he felt that they were chipping away at any positive self-identity he had and perception of himself.  He brought his own schooling experiences into the Social Justice program and presented it to larger audiences within their community like the school board. These are practices that I would like to bring into my classroom to show students that youth activism is not something that they will only see in history textbooks. It will be something that they either come across when other people their age are taking a stand or when they themselves find an injustice happening that they feel strongly about and do something about. 

This article is about a workshop that was held with students from New York City High Schools, along with students from Teachers College, Columbia University, to facilitate discussions. The purpose of this project was to expose the students to articles and writing written by the people who have been directly affected or “shortchanged” by the history being studied to play a critical role in the study of that history. A few examples of how this was implemented in the project were the students reading multiple primary sources written by the students of the Little Rock Nine and another young activist, Claudette Colvin. These took the forms of quotes, testimonies, articles, and books from the time period leading up to and during the Brown v Board of Education court decision. One example I really liked was the book written by Melba Pattillo Beals, one of the Little Rock Nine, who wrote an autobiographical account of her experience. 

I appreciated this strategy of including these types of sources within a project because, based on the student feedback, it seemed to be well received by the students and accomplished the goals the authors aimed to achieve. The biggest impact these types of sources had on the students was that the students were exposed to the thoughts and words of students their age. I would like to incorporate these types of sources for this reason when studying activism or examples of it throughout history. By doing this the students can make a better connection with the activists themselves and what is being fought for. If I was centering a lesson around this I would also encourage students to do some research on local instances of activism either within their own community or school. These students are living in an age where many of these instances could have been recorded in digital articles or videos where the youth or students were interviewed. Something else I would love to also accomplish would be to create a similar connection within the lesson with either college students or upperclassmen if we are dealing with freshmen or sophomores. Students learn so much from their peers while also bringing in so many more voices and indemnities. This strategy would introduce a new level of connection due to the closeness these events would have to the lives of my students allowing them to further their understanding of the event, their research skills, and confidence in their own activism abilities. 

Within this article, there was a detailed study of how Mr. Davidson, a first-year high school history teacher, implemented culturally responsive teachings, culturally relevant pedagogies, and culturally sustaining pedagogies in his lessons. His lesson stood out to me because it was focused on student choice, “He communicated to his class and to me during our interview that he was opening the door for students to explore topics related to their racial identities and to connect them to big- picture analyses of structural and systemic issues.” (Castro, 5) Throughout the interviews Eliana Castro had with Mr. Davidson it was clear that he fully respected student choice when it came to not pushing students to explore certain parts of their identities with students who were more reluctant than others. Through this strategy, Mr. Davidson allowed students to center their research around race and other areas they were interested in such as sports or specific movements.

What drew me to this strategy was the use of student choice because, in the end, allowing students to steer their education towards topics or areas of interest will keep them invested in their own learning experience. This allows students to easily connect what they are learning in class to their lives and what is important to them outside of school. I would like to create a lesson such as this one where students are given a time period or broad topic and their assignment is to find something that connects to themselves and their identity within that. Throughout the assignment, I would make it a point to discuss with students to see where their head is at and be a sounding board, but I would not try and steer the students towards any direction or identity of theirs, similar to Mr. Davidson’s approach. In the end, this can show students examples of people similar to themselves as youth activists and bridge that gap from having ideas to actually trying to implement them.

In this text, the authors bridge the gap between local and larger-scale youth activism, breaking it down into different perspectives. In the course that is discussed in the article students are tasked to “create culturally relevant research projects about an area of development and human rights to present to the teachers and administrators at a volunteer site where they have been working all semester.” (Velez & Power, 392). Students are then encouraged to share their research with local media or attempt to implement their findings within their communities. The strategy that stuck out to me within this lesson was the way the authors pushed their classes to venture from the typical academic perspective of the world. Students are taught to challenge perspectives of events that would be deemed as the “norm” and to bring that line of thinking further into their research. 

This strategy encourages students to focus on the specific and pick out a broader meaning behind the narrow view of the issue. As stated in the article, the world is constantly changing and I agree that this line of thinking suits these changes much better than a more statistical perspective. While this strategy is designed for a more advanced or college-level class I still think there are many components I would be able to incorporate into the classroom. In my classroom, I would like to teach students how to observe or interpret the information given to them and allow them to form their own perspectives on it. I would hope that this could give students the opportunity to explore their own morals and values that they can then apply to the current world around them. This would hopefully change how students conduct their own research and analyze any data or evidence that might conflict with their newly formed perspectives.