Listening to and with the lives of adolescents

It's been far too long since I posted an entry here. I have no one to blame but myself... but for good measure I'll also give a little credit to the very long and not always voluntary todo list that consumed me for the past many months.

But another reason is a very good one -- the publication of a new volume that brings a focus of arts and aesthetics to the work my research team and I have been doing over the past several years. Arts, Media, and Justice: Multimodal Explorations with Youth features contributions from graduate students, youth researchers, arts educators, and established literacy scholars who take up various contours of the intersections of the titular concepts of the book. The book is co-edited with Tiffany DeJaynes, a wonderful colleague and friend who is up to some amazing work of her own with high school students turned budding qualitative researchers.

Building from this volume, that draws on the Reimagining Futures Project, last year some colleagues, graduates students and I launched the Youth, Media, and Educational Justice Project -- a consortium that we are building in an effort to bring participatory approaches to the study and support of the lives of court-involved youth, including the young people involved in the Juvenile Justice system with whom we have been working for the past near decade (and a bit longer than that for some of us...!) as well as young people in foster care who will likely age out while still in the the care of the child welfare system.

What, pray tell, might this have to do with adolescent literacies? In this work we are deeply informed by the basic ideas that have always grounded my study of young people's literate lives:

• youth are engaged in myriad forms of expression and communication (thus rendering the use of "illiterate" utterly moot); 
• found within adolescents' literacies are markers of affiliation and connection (to communities, to people, to texts, and more);
• the varied contours of youths' literate lives are replete with evidence of their ways of knowing -- of knowing about the world, of making themselves known in the world.

We bring to this set of underlying assumptions new questions about belonging and becoming, questions that gain new urgency in the current and ongoing discourses of laws and policies that place adolescents' wellbeing at a far remove from decision making. Most notably, these concerns are brought into stark relief in the ongoing and deeply divided debates about the NYPD's #stopandfrisk policies, including today's ruling on the policy.

We take as our mission four entry points into the pursuit of educational justice for court-involved youth in which our position and posture is that of listening both to and with young people:

• Media making
• Mentoring
• Research
• Education

I, along with my YMEJ team members, will be blogging about these and related ideas over on our YMEJ blog. I encourage you to follow and also to keep up with us on Twitter.


Next up here -- a short post about some of the excellent reads I encountered this summer, all of which touched, in some way, on adolescents' ways of communicating, knowing, being, becoming, and belonging...

Wishing you a restorative August in the meantime.

new york: task force on transforming juvenile justice - *now* can we imagine a new way??

The recently published new york times article about youth detention facilities in new york state details a persistent state of "crisis" rampant in these institutions.  The article is based on a report written by New York Governor Patterson's Task Force on Transforming Juvenile Justice.  Juvenile prisons are described as "both extremely expensive and extraordinarily ineffective" by the report, as cited in the article.  The statistics are at once disheartening and familiar: more than half the youth in detention facilities are incarcerated for minor offenses (theft, drug possession, truancy); over 80% are black or Latino; almost all of the new york city, who comprise 76% new york state's juvenile detention population, are housed outside of the city and out of reach of their support networks due to prohibitive costs that might make frequent travel impossible.

While I was pleased to see alternative mentioned twice in the article, which has garnered attention quickly since it was published, the mentions are limited: one about the need for alternatives such as therapeutic foster care and another about an overall recommendation made by Gladys Carrión, the commissioner of the Office of Children and Family Services, "that judges find alternative placements for most young offenders."  I have spent eight of the last fourteen years involved with incarceration alternatives as a teacher, tutor, researcher, and volunteer, and in that time have come to appreciate the nuanced possibilities for reimagining futures that alternative to incarceration (ATI) programs can provide.  One of these programs is located in new york city and has a rich history of innovative programming to support the post-incarceration lives of youth.  As a researcher I have been able to document the varied and situated practices of the staff of this program for the past five years and what is consistent, amidst the diversity of approaches, is the commitment to court-involved evident.  Teachers, case managers, counselors, court representatives, administrators (for the most part) share a personal connection to the Justice System and bring with them an empathy and a sense of possibility to their work with the (mostly) young men at the program.  Education and employment work in tandem as dual objectives that are addressed by the program's offerings, which include arts and media electives and a college preparatory program.  What is readily evident in this space, and what feels quite absent from the austere environs and discourses described in the Task Force Report, is the embodied understanding of what Maxine Greene describes as the "not yet" - at 14, 15, 16 or even as young as 10 and 11, how many of us were already the person we are today, and what are the many ways in which we may continue to change years from now, if those around us will allow it.  Greene's response to her own question ("Who am I?"), "I am who I am not yet" is imbued with a deep sense of possibility - a narrative necessary for education; perhaps especially important for young people whose institutional scrapes have amounted to war wounds they wear daily like a heavy mantle.

The new york times article ends with this quote by "Clara Hemphill, a researcher and author of a report on the state’s youth prisons published in October by the Center for New York City Affairs at the New School"

“It really is barbaric,” she added, “the way they treat these kids.”

I'm reminded of one young man's story about adolescents being called "animal-escents" at the youth facility where he was incarcerated before being offered a spot at the alternative to incarceration program.  This was a term - and presumably an attitude - adopted by many of the correction officers at the facility.  The term ("animal-escents") and the implied meanings send a profound message to those same young people about how they are viewed and how they might expect to perceived in the future.

The seeing of youth as animals may not be a perspective confined to detention institutions; judges, police officers, educators, administrators are all adults who have the opportunity to redirect their gaze away from solely individualistic theories of social transgressions at multiple moments of human interaction with youth.  Yet too many choose to impose un-nuanced and simplified rationales when understanding socially complex realities.  The response to "crime" need not be an unquestioning lockdown mentality.  Rather, there is great restorative potential in the city's ATIs and alternative to detention (ATD) programs (aimed at children and adolescents who are charged with an infraction and placed under the care of the Family Courts when they are ages 9-16).  Restorative is not merely rehabilitative or remediation; restorative implicates all those engaged in the post-incarceration well-being of an adolescent - family, educators, community: the restoration of a sense of possibility, of a future re-imagined.  The ATI with which I have been involved does not dismiss the histories of the young men who walk through its hallways and participate in classrooms, nor does the program find their histories singularly deterministic of their futures.  The "alternative" nature of the site lies in the considerations that have been made to address and attend to the manifestations of multiple social systems that converge on the bodies of adolescents: education, employment, health... But perhaps most significant about the possibilities these ATI and ATD programs hold for court-involved youth to rewrite their futures is their potential to disrupt the larger (and often knee-jerk) public discourse about adjudication, incarceration, and tropes of inevitability. 

Can we imagine an approach to legal transgressions that can be described as imaginative, collective, and caring?  And lest this suggestion call up protestations about the need to punish crimes, let's remember that the majority of the cases for which youth are arrested or sentenced involve offenses that say more about our social systems than any individual proclivity.  We certainly don't want persons in positions of power to continue to manipulate the lives of youth for their own personal gain or out of some personal vendetta.  Moving through ATI and ATD programs are young people - like Patrick and Eric and Ed and Nicole and Brite and Emanuel and Tiffany and Angel and Christian and many more - who are so much than the arrest code hastily jotted on the standard intake form. They are poets and thinkers and social theorists and artists and writers and brothers and singers and sisters whose complete has "not yet" been written.  Can we imagine spaces for young people to not only make their stories known; but also to story themselves differently in the world?

Click here for the complete report by the governor's task force.

call... & response - attempts to make sense of beating, death, violence among youth

call: the beating

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response: the questions...

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...

"kids w/o education = the real weapons of mass destruction"
language makes me shudder
- wanting to problematize education; image of kids as weapons
but how are we (the collective we = educators, parents, elected officials, other youth, ...)
complicit in and also able to interrupt these moments.
whatleadstobeating/pummeling/anger
off-handed mention of "having nothing to do after school"
images of arrested youth - mugshots; (un)wittingly reinscribe existing tropes
- of desperation, of incarceration, of violence, of masculinity
how will the story go on?
(when) will this story end?

...

Conference on the Visual Study of Education (VISE) @ SUNY Albany

accepting photo submissions now - encourage your students/youth/children with whom you work to submit their work for presentation/publication at the fall conference.

more info here: VISE 2008

initial success and drug sentencing - the forecast is still grey for teens...

a couple of news stories caught my eye today. the first has to do with the mandatory sentencing of drug offenses. namely, the supreme court ruled that judges may employ judicial discretion "to reduce the disparity between sentences for crack and cocaine powder." this alleviates the inequitable treatment between crack and cocaine arrests 'on paper,' however, as noted by ny times writer adam liptak, "if history is any guide, judges will continue to use their sentencing power relatively sparingly," quoting "law specialists." his commentary continues:

"Now that the Supreme Court has again emphasized that federal trial judges have the discretion to move outside the guidelines, further departures are rather likely. But the size of that may not be huge, said Douglas A. Berman, a law professor at Ohio State University. “The really interesting question,” Professor Berman said, “is whether we get a more significant gravitation away from the guidelines."

what does this mean for how youth get sentenced? and what discretion judges use in swinging their gavels in the direction of educational and treatment programs over detention and jail placements?

i can only hope these same judges, who are sure to hear about this ruling, don't also read another news story from today:
Your initials may spell success
yes, that's right: this article details the results of a series of psych studies that report how "'name-letter effect' influences performance in different situations."
a few tasty tidbits from this article:

"Basically what [they] found was that people tend to favor the letters in their own name, and in particular, they have a fondness for their initials," said Joseph Simmons of Yale University, co-author of the new studies.

"People tend to gravitate toward life outcomes that resemble their names," Simmons explained. "So for example, we know now that people named Jack are more likely to move to Jacksonville as compared to people named Phil, who are more likely to move to Philadelphia."

In a separate study, Simmons and Nelson compared students' initials with their GPAs and found that students who had "C" or "D" as an initial had lower GPAs than students who had "A" or "B" as an initial. People with "C" or "D" initials don't want to do badly, Simmons explained, but on some unconscious level doing poorly is "just ever so slightly not as bad, and so they're ever so slightly less motivated to avoid it."

with all of this information in the ether, we can only hope that it gets filtered thoughtfully, and motivates responsible action. what responsible means is a topic for new post...

hope, with strings attached, might not really be hope at all

earlier this summer, i was invited back to the program where i have been a participant observer and teacher for the last two+ years to serve in a different capacity: as a guest speaker in a class about college. it was one of the rare times when i've readily discussed my role as a faculty member while at this organization, but was happy to share what insights i could about my own college experiences and as someone who contributes to admissions decisions at the graduate level. all of the participants in the class had been at the program for at least three months and had either already obtained their high school diplomas or had taken the GED test. most of the young men in the class were awaiting scores.

i went in prepared to engage the group in a discussion about what college meant to them, what role they saw it playing in their lives, and how they envisioned the path to achieving their higher education goals. i should note here, if i haven't done so already, that i am excited about the existence of this class within the context of a program for court-involved youth, for whom educational opportunities are significantly less accessible than they ought to be. (more on that another time)

our conversation humbled me in a way that i didn't expect to be humbled. i used a "college by the numbers" approach to initiating conversation and allowing time for their questions. on a large chart paper i wrote down prompts like, "age you entered school," "# of years you've spent attending formal education," "# of mentors you've had," etc. my goal was to point out the vast range of experiences each participant undoubtedly has already had that he might build upon when moving forward; i wanted them to see that they weren't starting at zero; they had/have a wealth of experiences to draw on when writing entrance essays, going on interviews, making plans for the future. as the program notes, they (and i) strove to create experiences of success while participants were enrolled in classes here. we moved through these exercises together and then the conversation took a turn. i asked them to consider the questions: "what kind of life do i want to lead? what will get me there?"

what resulted was a conversation laden with angst:
-how can i pursue my education when i keep getting stopped for just walking in my neighborhood?
- i can't just leave my family; my friends; my life
- i want freedom. how will going to college help me with that? how can i have freedom when everyone and everything around me won't let me have it?
- in here isn't the same as out there
- the people around me, the neverending police searches - they'll lead me straight to prison

- i want to lead a life that's free; a life of freedom.

photo essay

Incarceration: American Style

an excerpt:
ILLINOIS—At Stateville Correctional Center, the buildings are based on Jeremy Bentham's 1787 design for the panopticon prison house. The round house is the last remaining panopticon cell house. It's used for segregating inmates from the general prison population and for holding inmates who are awaiting trial or transfer, 2002.