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Adam Fletcher
Finding Your Vision
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There are people in our society, myself included, who live according to vision. You may be one of us. When I was 20 I was a bit of a rambling man, floating from job to job, college to college, city to city looking for my vision and seeking clarity. I had decided a few years earlier that I wanted to teach young people for all my life, but had no idea how that actually happened. After trying to go to college and working a handful of youth-focused jobs, as well as roofing houses and waiting tables, I decided that I needed to find my vision. That year I packed my crappy little car with everything I owned and took off for New Orleans. Before leaving I consulted the ring of mentors and friends in my life, mostly listening to the adults I looked up to. I heard all kinds of advice. My pastor told me that shallowly rooted trees that blow over easily on the beach and that I needed to have deep roots before trying to face storms. Other people told me that New Orleans was the most violent city in the country. All the same, I was determined to simply move there and "make it" - find a job, get a place to live and just live my life. My car broke down halfway there, and after taking the Greyhound the rest of the way and spending all my money on hotels I arrived broke in the Big Easy with just the bags on my back. I roamed the city looking for work for 3 weeks, calling home to my mom and my pastor and my friends and looking for anything familiar. Coming from Omaha and Montana and Alberta before that, I had no context for the palm trees and rats and opulent Southern houses and exquisite craziness that N.O. is at Mardi Gras. After those 21 days I counted more than 100 churches and nonprofits that I'd dropped my resume off with; I slept outside for 17 nights; I got jumped twice and had one of my bags stolen; and I had absolutely no money or food. Eventually I convinced my older brother to buy me a bus ticket back to Omaha. Arriving back in the city I was not the same as I had been just weeks before. Experiencing the intense loneliness and self-fullness of homelessness and discovering the world at that point had few material comforts to offer me in those moments, I had to become more self-reliant and less imposing on the world around me. But I couldn't hide my flame - I had to burn brightly. I stormed my career ambition after that, regaining my footing by working in a warehouse for a while, and then starting a part-time job working with kids in my neighborhood. When I could afford it, I left the warehouse and swapped loading trucks and driving forklifts for helping kids with their homework and supervising basketball games for teens. Since then I have come to understand myself as an intensely determined person who wants nothing less than to share his vision with the world. That time I spent scrounging for purpose was important to me though, and I will not disparage anyone their own vision quest. You have to find your vision, too. Each of us has to. One of the reasons I built the Freechild and SoundOut websites was to help seekers, people looking for their visions, to find inspiration and hope in the world around them. Let me know if I can support you.
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| February 8, 2010 | 8:02 AM |
You Owe Us.
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“All people are interdependent. Whether we realize it or not, each of us lives eternally, ‘in the red’. We are everlasting debtors to known and unknown men and women. Before we leave for our jobs we are already beholden to more than half of the world… All life is interrelated. Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly.” - Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Raised as children, taught as students, involved as youth, engaged as young people, thrived as young adults, and onwards... None of us are completely independent. None of us are free of others' help, assistance, input or ideas. And that is not bad.
You owe us.
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| February 8, 2010 | 3:02 AM |
Happy 4th B-day YoungerWorld.org!
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Hey, we almost missed this! Last month marked the fourth birthday of the YoungWorld.org blog! On January 6, 2006, I began writing about youth, social change, youth activism, meaningful student involvement and student voice, among many other topics. Happy reading!
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| February 8, 2010 | 1:02 AM |
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Engaging Students as Policy-Makers
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How can teachers create personalized learning experiences by infusing student-led policy-making throughout the education system? Can students make more effective policy than adults when it comes to the environments they spend eight hours in everyday?
Students rarely have a voice in the direction of school. We know that students today want learning to be meaningful - which means powerful, relevant and democratic. How do we create experiences that meet the needs of today's learners? We should start by engaging students by incorporating their tools of learning outside the classroom into their learning experiences inside the classroom. Design learning experiences that empower students to be creators of education policy.
- What tools can we use to engage and empower students in education policy-making?
- How can you accommodate different styles of learning through education policy-making?
- How can we create learning environments that engage students in education policy-making?
- How can students drive education policy-making?
- What are students' roles in school board decision-making? Building decision-making? Whole system decision-making?
- How can student policy-making be assessed?
You can learn more at the SoundOut page on engaging students as decision-makers.
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| February 7, 2010 | 10:02 AM |
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Ways Adults Can Support Student Voice
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Are you an teacher who is concerned with how student voice is ignored in your school?
Are you a principal who wants students to be involved in making the decisions that affect them everyday?
Here are some ways adults can support engaging student voice in school every day!
- Make students' concerns visible in your school by posting them in your classroom and sharing them at meetings where adults are.
- Use participatory action research in your classroom for students to take action in your school.
- Be an advocate for students at school meetings.
- Make sure students are at the table whenever your school is making choices about students.
- Create classroom lesson plans that actively engage students in critical thinking about education and action that changes schools.
- Sponsor a letter with students to the building or district or state administration
- about student issues.
- Respect students as you do adults. Don't expect more from students than you do adults and don't interpret for students what they can say for themselves.
- Listen specifically to students whose voices are seldom heard in schools.
- Connect with other adult allies who want to involve students meaningfully, both in your school and others, and around the community.
- Help students create a listing of all opportunities for their involvement in your school and community.
- Join or form a community task force with students to address youth issues and coordinate responses in schools.
- Prepare students for multiple roles in your school, including learner, teacher, and leader.
- Recognize student involvement. Don’t assume that just because someone is a student that they enjoy school. Help them appreciate it by giving class credit or through other meaningful recognition.
- Hold students accountable for their mistakes and challenges. Be honest and forthright with young people and support their efforts to improve.
- Speak to students with respect and avoid interrupting students.
You can learn more at http://www.soundout.org/article.101.html
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| February 5, 2010 | 2:02 AM |
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What Do YOU Care About?
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I believe that whether we know it or not, everyday we show what we care about, how we care, and why things matter to us. What are you showing?
When you have kids running around you all the time, either as a parent, a teacher, a youth worker or a neighbor, you have an opportunity to show what you care about. As a consumer who buys and consumes and disposes, you have an opportunity to show what you care about. As a poet who writes and observes and espouses, you have an opportunity to show what you care about.
Every moment of every day is a demonstration of engagement. You have the chance to show the world that yes, indeed, I do care and I do want to give something back. Because for all of the caring you do or do not show, there is an undisputable web of mutuality and interconnectedness that brings us all together. When your friends don't show you love and kindness, you feel it. When your family doesn't put you in the family way, you feel it. That's why Dr. King wrote, "Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. This is the interrelated structure of reality."
That is why the homeless guy cringing as you walk past him represents more than just an endemic problem in our culture: he represents a part of you. That's why the school building full of kids calls out to your heart because you know they probably aren't learning how or what they need to: that building represents a part of you. More close to home, that's why you feel bad about missing Mother's Day or a birthday, or why your neighbor's death struck an odd chord in you: their death represents a part of you.
So take a minute and think about what you care about. How do your actions show that, and what do you think you should do differently? The real challenge is to move from thought to change, because it's only through action that words take meaning.
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| February 1, 2010 | 9:02 AM |
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My Professional Biography
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My professional work with youth began in 1989 when I was 14 with a local nonprofit in North Omaha, Nebraska. I worked for them over the next 7 years teaching drama programs and leading after school programs and a basketball program. My activism began when I was 15 when I started an environmental justice group at my high school as a protest against the existing science club. My systems change efforts focused on meaningful youth involvement started when I was young, as well, founding a youth council for my neighborhood when I was 17. I have continued working both inside and outside of systems since.
Since 1998 I have worked with approximately 50,000 children, youth and adults, focusing on youth engagement, meaningful student involvement, community organizing and service learning. Through a variety of speaking, professional development, training and program development activities. My activities have reached almost 250 elementary, middle and high schools, along with more than 300 nonprofit organizations across the United States and Canada, and in United Kingdom and Brazil. I have consulted more than 100 schools on how to effectively infuse youth voice in service learning. Aside from schools and nonprofits, I have also worked with foundations, government agencies, colleges and universities, publishing companies, and other organizations. My writing has included more than 100 different items, including educational materials, website content, curricula, training manuals, promotional materials, grant proposals and evaluation reports. After founding The Freechild Project in 2001 and SoundOut in 2002 I began working with clients locally, nationally and internationally. I have written extensively for both websites, developing site navigation, content, and publications to offer specifically to their target audiences. I have used social media extensively for Freechild, incorporating technologies such as Wikipedia, Facebook, Twitter and delicious into the fray. I have designed projects, written guides, evaluated programs, and provided an array of public speaking, professional development, youth training, consulting and technical assistance to thousands of children, youth and adults since then. I founded a national nonprofit organization in 2007 that was focused on youth engaging, serving as the executive director for two years. Working with a variety of volunteers and professional partners, I obtained 501(c)3 status from the IRS, established a variety of local, national and international relations, upheld professional obligations, and secured a variety of funding supports.
My work in the area of school improvement has continued to grow over the last 10 years. It began when I served as the first-ever Student Engagement Specialist at the Washington State Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction starting in 2001. There I developed and led a statewide action research project focused on engaging students as partners in education decision-making in state-level administrative processes and school improvement planning. I developed an introductory guide and a website for the state, as well. After completing my bachelor's degree focused on critical pedagogy, youth studies and community development at The Evergreen State College, in 2006 I began my graduate studies in Educational Leadership and Policy Studies at the University of Washington College of Education. Since 2008 I have worked as the Coordinated School Health Manager at the Washington State Department of Health. In that capacity I have served as a liaison between the DOH and the state education agency, facilitating interagency collaboration focused on an array of school health issues. I am also the agency's lead school health policy analyst, leading agency-wide reviews of state and federal legislation and rule-making. My budget management activities, supported by an interagency agreement funded with a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention grant, include interagency agreements and external contracts, negotiations, sub-contracts, federal reports, program deliverables and evaluation. As the co-founder and co-coordinator of the Washington State Coordinated School Health Network, I facilitate professional development, technical assistance, and information-sharing activities for a variety of partners in K-12 schools, districts, within state agencies and at local health departments across Washington. I am also co-coordinator of the Washington Youth School Health Cadre, the co-chair of Washington Action for Healthy Kids, and the coordinator of Students Taking Charge, a student-driven school health improvement program working in several schools across the state.
I have served several terms of community and national service. In 2000 I participated in a fellowship program for the Points of Light Foundation and was the Youth Engaged in Service Ambassador for Washington State. My service in AmeriCorps ended with a term as an AmeriCorps Leader with the Corporation for National Service lasted from 1999-00. In that capacity I worked with the Rocky Mountain Youth Corps in Taos, New Mexico. My terms as an AmeriCorps Member included an individual placement running a ropes challenge course on the Hood Canal for the Washington Service Corps out of Tacoma, Washington and as an AmeriCorps Member with the Changing Trends AmeriCorps Program in Lincoln, Nebraska. In that term I created a tutoring and mentoring program for Kurdish and Iraqi refugee students.
Outdoor education, team building, and experiential learning were a major area of emphasis early in my career. My first work as a ropes challenge course director was for Boy Scout Camp Cornhusker in DuBois, Nebraska in 1996. For two years I worked as a Teacher/Naturalist at Pioneer Park Nature Center in Lincoln, Nebraska from 1996 to 1998. I was a Ropes Challenge Course Director Certification Instructor at the National Camping School in Spokane, Washington in 1998, and operated the COPE Course at Camp Hahobas in Belfair, Washington, for two years. I directed summer nature programs at Camp Cedars in Fremont, Nebraska, and Camp Kitaki in Louisville, Nebraska prior to that.
Other youth work I have done has included operating a youth center for the City of Tumwater, Washington, in 1998 and 1999. From 1995 to 1997 I worked as an Independent Living Skills Instructor for the YWCA in Lincoln, Nebraska. I was a Teen Floor Attendant for a drug treatment facility operated by CentrePointe, Inc. in Lincoln, Nebraska.
This is my professional biography. Let me know what you think!
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| January 30, 2010 | 9:01 AM |
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The Silence of the Children
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"What makes people smart, curious, alert, observant, competent, confident, resourceful, persistent - in the broadest and best sense, intelligent- is not having access to more and more learning places, resources, and specialists, but being able in their lives to do a wide variety of interesting things that matter, things that challenge their ingenuity, skill, and judgement, and that make an obvious difference in their lives and the lives of people around them." - John Holt
A young man, maybe 8, sat quietly for the first 10 minutes of a half hour of reading time. Suddenly he discovered that his reading foundation logo sticker fit perfectly over his mouth. Looking at his neighbor he wiggled and began talking to her through the sticker, and she giggled. First a teacher swarmed to his side, sternly looking at him until he sat still. Then another adult sat beside him, and the first left. This is a perfect metaphor for a program I attended last night.
For an hour I attended an elementary school's reading night program with my girlfriend and her kids. Sponsored by a local reading foundation, the agenda for the evening began with the school's black, brown, and white students singing an anthem about love for the world. It was very kind, and from their mouths it felt sincere and real. However, the tone for the evening was really set in their follow-up, the school principal, a well-dressed white man nearing retirement, speaking to a diverse crowed of apparently working class parents and students. After he clicked off instructions, many of the kids and parents swarmed to the school cafeteria, where they were read to by a librarian and a teacher. Afterwards a yellow bear mascot floated around the roam while students alternated between stations, making bookmarks, eating cookies and picking books to keep.
The books were used. The milk served with the cookies was standard issue school lunch fare. The teachers were uninspired, though well-meaning. Students were crammed into sitting in the center of the multipurpose room, which at that moment had all the allure of a gym, but all the seriousness of a library. While the students were in the middle, adults congregated along the outside of the group, standing in awkward clumps, jostling for position to watch their "little learners" (as one teacher referred to them), or meandered around the room entertaining young children (the sitting was explicitly for kids older than 4, and as old as 3rd grade).
I understand good intentions, and I've perpetuated more than my share. In my capacity at the state health department I constantly have the opportunity to propagate these characteristics through grant-making, curriculum writing and policy development. That does not release me from my critical responsibility to ask for a more democratic, more responsible way to educate students.
Simply arriving in a school and dropping books on the heads of kids doesn't make for a successful reading program. Even couched in teaching parents how to read to kids or decorated with cookies and mascots, these programs are at best designed to meet the needs of greedy adults whose apparent need to see themselves as useful in the lives of children overrides their own well-intentioned ideas about how to make their lives better.
Rather than driving children to distraction, these programs could potentially help young people re-envision their roles and purpose as learners and leaders throughout society. One-on-one reading between parents and students, coaching from teachers and reading specialists, and activities designed to get kids active and reinforce their commitment to reading and learning could complete a learning cycle of empowerment. By actively engaging kids and parents together as co-readers, co-teachers and active partners, these events could have a truly revolutionary effect, particularly in a climate as disengaging as a traditional suburban elementary school.
The reality is that distractions of the setting, the culture created by the authoritarianism and adultism, and the ill-conceived program of action are singularly to blame for students' "bad" behavior and disinterest in reading. As ethical parents, teachers, and co-participants with young people, we have to accept responsibility and take action to change this paradigm throughout our society. It is inherently unethical to be anything less fully engaged in the struggle for educational transformation, and social change, if we know there is a different way. And we know there is.
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| January 27, 2010 | 10:01 AM |
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Making Public Policy
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The levers of public policy aren't often considered when it comes to youth involvement and youth voice. Sure, there is a group of America's Youth Councils that is rallying the nation's youth councils to unite and take action and everything - and I'm with them 100%. But honestly, what this movement needs are strategic agendas that are designed to secure actual support from actual politicians in order to foster actual change.
Governments at all levels across the US can create changes in law, rules and regulations in order to promote youth voice and youth involvement. Those policy changes could look like this:
- Local, county, regional, state, and federal governments mandated to create policies that ensure youth civic engagement;
- Lower the federal voting age from 18 to 12;
- All federal agencies that affect young people must create an Office of Student Engagement to foster youth involvement in the management, evaluation, programs, planning, research and decision-making of programs affecting them;
- Eliminate all age restrictions on public office;
- Create youth-adult partnership councils for all substantive public offices, including state governors, city councils, and more.
These are just simple ideas. More complex governmental change strategies must be designed to meet the realistic and practical goals of government, in order for advocates to successfully navigate the complex inner workings of democratic government. Making public policy is the one step of many to re-envision the roles of young people throughout society.
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| January 27, 2010 | 10:01 AM |
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The Tyranny of Freedom
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"To me, it brings a feeling of pit and concern when I interact with families who experience the 'tyranny of freedom,' in which children can do everything: They scream, write on walls, threaten guests, because of the complacent authority of parents who actually think of themselves as champions of freedom." - Paulo Freire There are young people today who care less about changing their own lives, let alone the world. They feel disconnected and dis-concerned about the society they live, belong to and benefit from. Growing up, they are surrounded by the opulence of consumption and the facade of success, allowing them to grow comfortable, complacent and disconnected from the world they live in.
We have to provide opportunities for these youth to connect to others in meaningful, substantive and real ways. And don't get me wrong, I'm not name-calling here: the inability these young people have to relate to the realities of the world they live in with the rest of us is not reflective of narcissism insomuch as it's reflective of a society-wide malaise fostered by generations of crass consumerism, social alienation and growing antipathy towards social responsibility.
This is a call for those who care to invest in those who apparently don't; these is a request for those who act to take action for those who won't; this is a hope that we can engage, create, critically examine and re-construct the world we live in - together. The "tyranny of freedom" is that it's not free at all; it's that no one is free until everyone is free; it's that freedom isn't free - everyone of us pays the price everyday, consciously or unconsciously. Let's wake up and get it together.
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| January 26, 2010 | 10:01 AM |
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