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Teach Youth Radio
Are you looking for a unique way to bring an awareness of the outside world into your classroom? Would your students like to hear from other young people about issues of pressing relevance to their own lives and studies?
Youth Radio, an award-winning producer of youth voices, has released a new curriculum resource called Teach Youth Radio, which adds radio to our traditional line-up of reading, 'riting and 'rithmetic. Radio produced by young people contains powerful opportunities for students to develop new literacies, build critical thinking skills, experiment with digital technologies, and express important ideas about the most pressing social and cultural issues we face today.
On the first Tuesday of each month, Teach Youth Radio releases an on-line News Break, providing free lesson plan suggestions and standards alignment linked to a radio story written and produced by youth. Stories featured in Teach Youth Radio series have aired on some of our nation's most influential public media outlets, and they are sure to engage your students in lively discussion and debate, just as they have for tens of millions of radio listeners. Each News Break includes:
1. How teachers can align the Youth Radio story to National Standards in the classroom.
2. Suggestions for lesson plans that link the story's content to your classroom's themes and subject areas.
3. Suggestions for lesson plans that explore media literacy, using the story to re-read mainstream media.
4. Bios of the Youth Radio reporters who produced the story.
5. A list of resources and further research related to the story's themes.
6. Links to Youth Radio's media production techniques as guides and inspiration for your students' creative media-making projects.
Teach Youth Radio content applies to a range of school subject areas, including English, social studies, and health classes. The stories also address a range of issues driving community organizing efforts and positive youth development projects taking place beyond classroom walls. Written transcripts and audio links for each Teach Youth Radio story are included in every News Break. These materials are especially helpful for struggling readers and English Language Learners. Teach Youth Radio is a great curriculum resource regardless of whether your students are using high-end computers or pencils and paper.
We are currently piloting this program in the San Francisco Bay Area and look forward to launching nationally in the fall of 2006. We'll be inviting teachers using Teach Youth Radio to submit their students' stories to Youth Radio's website, so the project is an exciting way to connect your students to real audiences and publishing opportunities.
If you have any questions or would like us to add your contact information to our database, please send your name and email address to: Lissa Soep at lissa@youthradio.org and Dawn Williams at dawnw@uclink.berkeley.edu.
 December's News Break:
That Sickening Smell?, By Sophie Simon-Ortiz
What's the story?
Where you live can have a significant impact on your health. Youth Radio’s Sophie Simon-Ortiz grew up in West Berkeley near a steel manufacturing plant, and still has vivid memories of the smell that poured regularly from its smoke stacks and permeated the neighborhood. Her friend, Katri remembers how much the smell used to bother her dad:
Katri: We would go for walks every now and then around the neighborhood and every now and then he would start complaining about the smell in the air and be really grossed out by it and I didn’t really know what that meant…I think I thought that was just what the neighborhood smelled like, like what are we gonna do?
The smell is still there. So Sophie decided to find out why, after so many years and complaints from nearby residents, not much seems to have changed at all.
Check out this News Break if...
You are a high school teacher interested in new ways to inspire student writing, or if you are exploring any combination of the following issues in your classroom:
. Language Arts:This News Break provides tools for students to solicit various perspectives and map assets in their communities, in order to compose compelling stories. Techniques introduced here apply in a wider sense to the process of constructing and analyzing persuasive essays and authoritative arguments.
. Science and Environmental Health: Use this story to engage your students in projects and discussions centered on the relationship between environmental conditions and public health, with lesson plan ideas for analyzing the differences and similarities between “anecdotal” and “scientific” evidence.
. Economics: This Youth Radio story promises to inspire provocative conversations and inquiries surrounding the ethical, political, and policy-level considerations that arise when a company that is among a neighborhood’s most powerful employers is also linked to some of its biggest environmental risks.
. Critical Media Literacy:
Use this News Break to encourage your students to think critically about news sources and employ strategies of media advocacy to draw press interest in campaigns and community efforts they support.
Check out December’s News Break: That Sickening Smell?
 November's News Break:
Living in Richmond,, By Bianca Butler
What's the story?
In this commentary, Bianca Butler talks about how her life changed when she moved from a suburb of Sacramento to Richmond, California when she was 15. The move meant leaving behind the freedom to take long walks and ride her bike. Now, she’s home by sunset, because of her dad’s fears and her own:
When I see my neighbors through those barred windows,
I wonder if they feel trapped and isolated like I do.
Bianca’s dad wants to relocate with his family to a more “peaceful” place, but she worries about what will happen to her neighborhood if the “old timers” like her dad move away, in what she calls “black flight,” taking their memories of Richmond with them.
Check out this News Break if...
You are a high school teacher interested in new ways to inspire student writing, or if you are exploring any combination of the following issues in your classroom:
. Language Arts: Bianca’s relationship to Richmond is shaped by her dad’s memories and old photos she’s seen of the city the way it used to be. This News Break describes activities through which students can use interviews and visual documents to tell new stories, reframing personal and collective histories in the process.
. Geography and Environmental Health: Bianca’s commentary offers a powerful starting point for discussions and projects exploring the relationship between place, quality of life, and environmental health as well as risk. Look here to find ideas to inspire your students to get involved in organizing efforts to bring needed resources to their own neighborhoods.
. Critical Media Literacy: Bianca wrote this commentary at a moment when Richmond was drawing major news attention for escalating rates of violence. Officials at the time even considered declaring a state of emergency. But while reporters covered the rising violence, Bianca noticed that the media paid almost no attention to a phenomenon she was very concerned about: “black flight.” The News Break provides resources for your students to learn more, and to think critically, about how the media both covers and helps produce sociological shifts in Richmond and other places across the United States.
Check out November’s News Break: Living in Richmond
 October’s News Break:
Hunger’s Diary,, By Lauryn Silverman (Short version broadcast May 16, 2005 on NPR’s Morning Edition)
What's the story?
When Youth Radio’s Lauryn Silverman was in high school, she developed an eating disorder, and after she and her parents consulted with health providers, she spent time in a hospital unit for treatment. In this story, Lauryn interweaves diary entries, poetry, music, and reflections to describe the onset of her disordered eating, her time at the hospital, and her process of recovery. Eating disorders affect all genders, ages, ethnicities, and social classes, but more than 80% of people living with anorexia report that their symptoms started before the age of 20. So it is especially urgent that educators working with teens understand this and other eating disorders from the perspectives of young people who can share insights from first-hand experience.
Check out this News Break if...
You are a high school teacher interested in new ways to inspire student writing, or if you are exploring any combination of the following issues in your classroom:
. Language Arts: Lauryn chose to write about her eating disorder using some inventive literary devices, from personification to inter-textuality. Her juxtaposition of various genres, from dated diary entries to poetry, provides a model for students seeking rich vocabularies for expressing personal narratives in unexpected ways.
. Health: Youth Radio’s website links to several resources and referrals for young people seeking help and understanding with respect to eating disorders, and for the adults who want to support them. Lauryn’s story can be a powerful starting point for educators interested in teaching young people about the range of eating disorders and the various schools of thought related to root causes, diagnoses and courses of treatment.
. Critical Media Literacy: While some health providers suggest that eating disorders reflect a desire for control, many young people also see a connection between disordered eating and distorted body images promoted through popular culture. Use this story to launch discussions and projects related to the ripple effects of the body “ideals” young people see in advertising, entertainment, and websites that glorify thin-ness and even self-starvation.
Check out October’s News Break: Hunger’s Diary
 September's News Break:
Likka Stoes (Liquor Stores), By King Anyi Howell (Broadcast January 3 on NPR's All Things Considered)
What's the story?
Youth Radio’s King Anyi Howell was inspired to write this commentary when two liquor stores in his neighborhood were vandalized. In response to the incident, residents held a town meeting to discuss the high concentration of liquor stores in African American neighborhoods.
Anyi Howell didn’t need a town meeting to point out the number of liquor stores in West Oakland and other low income neighborhoods throughout the U.S. He’d been noticing the stores, often directly across the street from churches, since he was a little kid, driving around with his family. In this story, Anyi draws on his own experiences and his analysis of city politics, to examine how liquor stores contribute to neighborhood struggles.
Check out this News Break if...
You are a high school teacher interested in new ways to inspire student writing, or if you are exploring any combination of the following issues in your classroom:
. Language Arts: Anyi draws on a striking range of perspectives in composing this narrative, inviting students to explore the use of multiple voices in their stories. While emotionally charged, his commentary is also filled with facts, which are opportunities for your students to practice research skills necessary to present convincing and accurate arguments about issues that tap their passions.
. Health: Anyi links a wide range of public health struggles here: drug use, violence, obesity, smoking, and he draws attention to city policies and practices that he thinks contribute to these struggles. This story provides a point of departure for your students to “map” their community assets and consider policy-level solutions to gaps in health resources.
. Economics: This commentary raises key issues related to small businesses and their relationships and responsibilities with respect to surrounding communities. It offers a way to open relevant discussions about supply and demand, resource scarcity, and local ownership.
. Critical Media Literacy: Anyi was inspired to write this commentary based on a news event, which he believed was not covered with full accuracy and nuance. Your students, too, can use this piece as a model for generating their own accounts of events directly affecting their lives, which they also read about in mainstream press.
Check out September's News Break: Likka Stoes/Liquor Stores
 July's News Break:
PTSD, By Jesus Bocanegra (Broadcast November 23 on NPR's All Things Considered)
What's the story?
Jesus Bocanegra spent four and a half years in the military, including a year as a cavalry scout in Iraq. He’s now out of the military and living with his family in the town of Elsep in South Texas. But the war is still with him, so much so that he’s been treated for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, or PTSD. He shares this story.
Check out this News Break if...
You are a high school teacher interested in new ways to inspire student writing, or if you are exploring any combination of the following issues in your classroom:
. Language Arts: This story was produced out of a conversation between a reporter and soldier who were very close in age. It provides a model for students interested in developing stories based on interviews and oral histories with people who’ve gone through life experiences very different from their own.
. Health: Men and women can develop Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) as a result of a broad range of factors, from family abuse to fighting in war. This News Break provides insight into how some young people in the military are affected by their experience, and also serves as a point of comparison for understanding how PTSD affects others in society.
. Critical Media Literacy: Especially in the early stages of the Iraq war, rarely did the mainstream media cover perspectives from young soldiers like Jesus Bocanegra. Young people are among those fighting this war on the ground, and here young reporters are the ones covering the story as well, bringing a different sensibility than that dominating national press.
Check out July's News Break: Living with PTSD
 June's News Break:
Living with HIV/AIDS, By Quincy Mosby (Broadcast May 25 on NPR's All Things Considered)
What's the story?
When Quincy Mosby was fourteen, his mother called him into her room. He says he knew she was about to tell him she was HIV positive. But Quincy hasn’t always known how to make sense of his feelings as his mother confronted her illness, and when her diagnosis shifted to full-blown AIDS.
Check out this News Break if...
You are a high school teacher interested in new ways to inspire student writing, or if you are exploring any combination of the following issues in your classroom:
. Language Arts: Dealing with illness can be a private and lonely experience, and yet here Quincy provides a powerful example of highly personal writing with wider social resonance. The News Break suggests strategies for analyzing Quincy’s imagery, as well as other literary conventions for writing about illness and death.
. Health: Effective HIV/AIDS prevention campaigns draw on student knowledge and experience. Young people know better than anyone else how to communicate with peers about this illness. Quincy’s story personalizes the physical and mental health effects of living with HIV/AIDS, and provides a springboard for involving young people in school-based education and prevention.
. Critical Media Literacy: This News Break engages students in critical thinking about how people living with HIV/AIDS are portrayed in the news media, pharmaceutical advertising, and within sex education programs in schools.
Check out June's News Break: Living with HIV/AIDS
 May's News Break:
Map of My Mind, By Belia Mayeno (Broadcast January 19, 2005 on National Public Radio)
What's the story?
Some young people keep mental health struggles to themselves because they are not sure anyone can relate. In this News Break, Belia Mayeno breaks the silence and shares her personal story of dealing with what she calls the “tumult” inside her brain.
Check out this News Break if...
You are a high school teacher interested in new ways to inspire student writing, or if you are exploring any combination of the following issues in your classroom:
. Language Arts: Belia uses striking imagery to describe her perceptions of mental health and mental illness. Her story can inspire others to write about their own life issues, to think about how they communicate with their parents, and to see and describe their worlds through a creative lens.
. Health: This piece can be a springboard into an investigation of the controversies surrounding psychiatric drugs and mood stabilizers prescribed to young people. It can also be an exercise in resourcefulness, providing tools for young people to examine causes for diagnosis, types of treatment, and safe places available to youth who suffer from mental illness.
. Critical Media Literacy: “Map of My Mind” promotes discussion that gets beyond stereotypes and looks at how age, race and economics affect the diagnosis, social labeling, and treatment of people who experience mental illness.
Check out May's News Break: Map of My Mind
 April's News Break:
Black Market for ADD Drugs, By Michelle Jarboe (Broadcast February 9, 2006 on American Public Media's Marketplace)
What's the story?
Sales of popular Attention Deficit Drugs like Ritalin and Adderall added up to over 2.7 billion dollars in 2004, with more than 33 million prescriptions filled in the U.S. That’s according to the prescription auditing firm IMS Health. Youth Radio’s Michelle Jarboe is part of what some people call the “Ritalin generation” because her peers have been familiar with Attention Deficit drugs since elementary school. Now that her generation has hit college, ADD drugs have become a hot commodity as a study aid and even a party drug. Michelle reports from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, her alma mater, on the black market for these drugs on campus.
Check out this News Break if...
You are a high school teacher interested in new ways to inspire student writing, or if you are exploring any combination of the following issues in your classroom:
. Language Arts: Michelle has created a newsbreak that looks at a controversial issue from various angles, including her own. This creates an impetus to discuss “point-of-view”, balance of perspectives, and context in writing.
. Health/Science: For Health or Science teachers, this newsbreak lends itself to both scientific and social conversations. It is an opportunity to engage students about the effect drugs have on the human body and an opportunity for students to engage their peers about their own experiences with drugs and stress.
. Economics: Drug dealing is a prime example of supply and demand. Teachers can use this curriculum to discuss economic principles and to analyze who profits from, and who pays the price for, illegal distribution of legal drugs.
. Critical Media Literacy: Students can use this story to critique the ways that radio, television, and film industries target the public, especially youth, promoting drugs.
Check out April's News Break: Black Market for ADD Drugs
 March's News Break:
Oakland Scenes: Snapshots of a Community, By Gerald Ward II, Bianca Yarborough, Bridget Taylor,
and Ise Lyfe (Broadcast December 07, 2002 on National Public Radio)
What's the story?
In Oakland, California, more than 100 people died in 2002 as a result of homicide. Many of the victims were youth — sometimes as many as three in a single week. Violence is now a topic of conversation among young people. Youth Radio documented a street corner conversation from East Oakland, interweaved with poetry by Ise Lyfe.
Check out this News Break if...
You are a high school teacher interested in new ways to inspire student writing, or if you are exploring any combination of the following issues in your classroom:
. Language Arts: Gerald Ward and Ise Lyfe have teamed up together to present a piece, which is an example of intertextuality, or weaving of different medium. Part of the story consists of
interviews and the other part is a spoken word piece. As kind of a modern day Romeo and Juliet,
Oakland Scenes can be used to compare and contrast to the traditional Shakespeare. This piece can
also lend itself to students looking introspectively at the patterns of behavior in their own
lives.
. Geography: "Oakland Scenes" also depicts an urban landscape quite different from the original definition of the word "urban". Students can unravel how and why the term "urban" has come to mean what it does today.
. Economics/Critical Media Literacy: Gerald and Ise have created a piece that sparks a conversation about violence and how people in an urban community cope in sometimes menacing conditions. They inspire further discussion about how the economic situation is shaped and how academicians have
both criminalized and celebrated youth in their scholarly contributions to resolving societal
problems.
Check out March's News Break: Oakland Scenes: Snapshots of a Community
February's News Break:
The Turf, The Village, By Dru Harshaw (Broadcast May 18, 2005 on National Public Radio's News and Notes with Ed Gordon)
What's the story?
Youth Radio's Dru Harshaw recently spent two weeks in the West African country of Ghana. The trip was his first time ever leaving the United States. It took being half a world away to finally understand why home is home.
Check out this News Break if...
You are a high school teacher interested in new ways to inspire student writing, or if you are exploring any combination of the following issues in your classroom:
. Language Arts: Dru’s “The Turf, The Village” piece deals with ideas of home and points of reference, and how identity attaches to a sense of place. How do your students see, feel, hear, and experience their home, neighborhood, or block? To what extent does their connection to home reach across geographic distance? You will additionally find suggestions on how this News Break can be used to look deeply at personal experiences with dreams, a search for someone to confide in, and homesickness.
. Geography and Global Politics: Is it possible to find a sense of home in a place where you have never actually lived? Tracing familial roots back to Africa can be a difficult process for African Americans, since in most cases slave masters used divide and conquer strategies and violent tactics in an attempt to control black people, and to erase African lineage, language and culture. And yet a unique black culture has emerged in the United States from pain, struggle, strength, and creativity. Dru takes a fresh look at his own “village” of Oakland, California, after his trip to the West African village of Dogbe, in Ghana.
. Critical Media Literacy: Africa is the mother of civilization and the continent richest in natural resources. When Africa does appear in the mainstream U.S. media, stories typically draw attention to war, poverty, and disease. It is important to find out the truth about how colonialism and globalization have affected African people and the African Diaspora. Who is writing the articles that you read or taking the photographs that you see? How do those images shape what Africa means in the United States?
Check out February's News Break: The Turf, The Village
January's News Break:
A Border Story, By Elena Alvarez Huerta and Viry Martino Ruiz (Broadcast May 24, 2004 on National Public Radio's All Things Considered)
What's the story?
Elena Alvarez Huerta and Viry Martino Ruiz live on the U.S.-Mexico border in Tijuana, Baja California. They share a decided privilege in their industrial, arid border city. They can both live in the United States if they like, but neither of them wants to. In this story, the border is both a concrete barrier and an imagined space. The story highlights the girls' voices, as well as conversations, scenes, sounds, and songs that provide a window into the construction of border identities.
Check out this News Break if...
You are a high school teacher interested in new ways to inspire student writing, or if you are exploring any combination of the following issues in your classroom:
. Language Arts: Youth Radio's "Border Story" deals with big themes through an intimate, small-scale narrative. Viry and Elena use various styles of communication to tell their story. They keep their tone natural and conversational, intercutting their own voices with sounds and music. Models for the construction of believable dialogue can be found in this story, as well as ideas for how to introduce contemporary popular culture into students' first-person narratives.
. Geography and Global Politics: The fast-paced flow of information, money, ideas, goods, and people across national borders is transforming our sense of where we come from and where we're going. At the same time, with today's "Global War on Terror" and the decades-old "War on Drugs," national borders are militarized and policed like never before. The border is both a symbol and a very real line of separation that is continually reinforced and crossed.
. Civics and Urban Studies: Young people growing up at the edge of national borders also move within and across boundaries within their own cities-lines of difference inscribed by class, race, gender, and other markers of history and lived experience. Friendship and popular culture are sites through which young people see what's distinct about their families and communities, and what they share with others whose lives, at least on the surface, may seem very different from their own.
. American History: The border between Mexico and the United States is 2000 miles long and crosses four states. In 1848, the United States declared an end to it's war against Mexico by moving "la linea" to the Rio Grande, thereby seizing the northern half of the country and making the little desert town of Tijuana an international city. Migrant workers have crossed that border ever since, and generations of youth have grown up "Chicano," living culturally and linguistically between the two countries. In 1994, President Clinton launched "Operation Gatekeeper," which deployed more than 2,000 Border Patrol agents to San Diego. Since that year, more than 2,500 people have died in the deserts hoping to escape "la migra" as they crossed to the U.S. without papers. That's also the year NAFTA was signed by the U.S., Canada, and Mexico.
Check out January's News Break: A Border Story
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