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Teach Youth Radio Lessons from the Field
To mark the end of the school year, it seems like a good time to post thoughts from educators who have shared their ideas for how to use Youth Radio materials in their classrooms and community-based sites. It is so excellent when we hear that educators, organizers, clinicians, and other folks are out there spreading youth media stories to new audiences, and using young people’s words to inspire student thought, debate, critique–and hopefully their own productions.
Here are some lessons from the field…
Language Arts: Oakland Scenes
A humanities teacher, Trevor Gardner, working in an Oakland, California public school used an episode of the Boondocks, where Martin Luther King Jr. comes back to life, and Teach Youth Radio’s “Oakland Scenes” News Break in his class during a unit on the Civil Rights Movement.
Introductory questions:
Do you think we have made progress since the Civil Rights Movement? If Martin Luther King Jr. or Malcolm X came back today, what would they say? What is a legacy? What legacies has the Civil Rights Movement left for future generations?
Media Analysis:
The teacher played the Boondocks episode. How was Martin Luther King Jr. affected by the post-Civil Rights generation? What stood out to him and shocked him as he walked around a street that was named after him?
“Oakland Scenes” was played first without the transcript. Then, the teacher handed it out and played the story with the transcript and asked students to highlight passages that related to anything they had seen or heard in their community or made reference to struggle.
Follow-up questions:
Ise Lyfe’s poem captures the concept of cyclical patterns of behavior. In this sense, it can be read as a kind of socio-cultural analysis of how inequalities are produced and reproduced. What are the various sources the story identifies that contribute to patterns of violence? Are there sources not highlighted here, which students feel are important? Students can use this story as a model for tracing patterns in their own lives that have recurred in their families or communities for two to three generations. They can explore patterns that they do and do not want to repeat.
The terms hegemony, counter-hegemony, and agency from a previous class were used in discussion. Is it more difficult to follow a hegemonic structure or be counter-hegemonic?
History: A Border Story
In Biko Eissen-Martin’s history class in Berkeley, California, students were doing a unit on globalization. The teacher used the Teach Youth Radio News Break for “A Border Story” to revisit and deepen some ideas the class had explored earlier in the unit.
Journal writing:
Have students explore the following questions: Where are the borders in your life? How do you recognize an invisible border? What’s the biggest border you’ve crossed? What borders do you erect for yourself? What borders have others created for you? What access do you have to the world across “your” border? What do you imagine about life across that border, and how it compares to your own life? These prompts were used for individual journal writing, pair share, and then whole group sharing.
Listening and reading:
Students listened to the Youth Radio feature, “A Border Story” and took turns reading a Washington Post article about NAFTA aloud as a class.
Discussion questions:
What does “globalization” mean to you? Do you feel like borders are more or less important today than they have been in the past? In what ways do new technologies connect you to people and ideas that are geographically far away? In what ways are national borders, and national identities, policed and reinforced? To what extent do you define yourself on the basis of the country where you live?
Health/Science: Living with HIV/AIDS
Because at Youth Radio, we understand that the term “educator” is not limited to a classroom teacher, we contacted adolescent health advocate, Vicky Valentine of Health Initiatives for Youth (HIFY). She shared some suggestions on how she would use Quincy Mosby’s story, “Living with HIV/AIDS.”
1. How would you use the suggested curriculum in your classroom? What ideas did the curriculum provide for you?
I might use this piece during our HIV 101 workshop. I might ask students to read the piece, do a 5 minute free write, then have volunteers share what they feel comfortable sharing. I think that sometimes our HIV curricula can be received as too factual, and not personal enough, given the fact that most people know someone who is positive. I think we need to create space … for talking openly about coping with your own or someone else’s positive status, and not focus entirely on individual prevention.
2. What did you like about this youth-written and produced work? How could it work with your curriculum?
I liked how personal it was. I could relate to it, and really felt for Quincy. His perspective is not one that we usually hear. I might use his mom’s story as a scenario to be discussed in small groups to highlight how HIV still can affect anyone of any age.
3. What are some of the ways that we can make this more appealing to health educators/community educators?
I would add in stories of triumph--real life examples of people who have lived with the virus, had healthy families and who maintained a positive outlook. It surprises me sometimes to hear how so many young people still have a sense of this virus being an automatic death sentence, an idea which several generations at this point have internalized. Especially since your target audience is the exact population that make up the largest percentage of newly infected persons, it is important to talk about how HIV is now considered a chronic, treatable illness, and not a death sentence. This balance might be appealing to educators.?
Critical Media Literacy: Reflections on Return
Drawing on the work of Sophie Haroutunian-Gordon, media artist and educator Mindy Faber shared some great thoughts for using stories from Youth Radio’s Reflections on Return series to spark student engagement. In that series, Youth Radio’s newsroom profiles young U.S. troops returning from the war in Iraq. Faber, whose work with youth was recently recognized with a Peabody award, has had great success using a pedagogical approach called “interpretive discussion.” She says this method focuses on a key question that meets two criteria:
“1) genuinely concerns the group and 2) centers on a point of ambiguity or doubt. It should be debatable and not lead necessarily to an answer that the discussion leader or teacher has in mind but one that the group comes to on their own. In other words the discussion may end up with a deeper and more genuine question than the one originally posed. So the responsibility for youth to construct and evaluate arguments means a different type of classroom discourse and engagement.”
Faber says facilitators using this approach keep drawing student attention back to the text itself, insisting on specific references. What’s cool about applying this approach to youth-made media is, for once, the text students need to consider deeply, interpret, and interrogate is actually crafted by someone their own age. The hope, then, is that students exploring these finished pieces will see a path to telling their own stories and/or chronicling lives around them.
Faber offered two examples of “Interpretive Discussion” questions linked to Youth Radio’s Reflections on Return series, and we’re quoting her here, but we added the links:
Basic Question: Did the experiences in Iraq help these soldiers gain more control over their lives or do they feel less capable of making choices upon return?
Sample Subquestion 1: What does Jesus mean when he says, “It’s like you’re watching a black and white TV; you’re just not there?”
Sample Subquestion 2: When Brandon Coles says “Once you’re a soldier you are always a soldier,” does that mean he is powerless to change or he has made a conscious choice to be that person?
Sample Subquestion 3: When Abby Pickett says “the greenness and kind of luster that surrounds my youth is diminished and gone,” is this a sign of maturity and growth or a signal of sadness and regret?
Basic Question: Do these soldiers wish they were still in Iraq because their deployment gives their lives a higher purpose or because they need to be with those who understand them?
Sample Subquestion 1: What does Jesus mean when he says he “wished he was still in the military because his unit was sort of a bubble”?
Sample Subquestion 2: Why do you think Daniel wants to spend his last nights in the states with his fellow soldiers rather than his girlfriend?
Sample subquestion 3: What does Richard mean when he says, “You know, if you’d give me the choice, I would rather be deployed than not be deployed. In Iraq, I knew where I was” ?
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