A group in the United Kingdom just put out a useful PDF documenting a "pathway to participation." YoMo is a "community interest company" that is committed to youth participation. Their work across the UK looks great, and I am enjoying reading their website and blog, and looking forward to reading their materials soon.

In the meantime, I have dug into their PDF and the blog entry about it and have decided that they are on the way to discovering something powerful. The author talks about creating this "pathway":

The ‘pathway’ is the ‘journey’ that young people are able to take through the organisation - its how young people are able to progress from their initial involvement and then on to whatever positions of responsibility/involvement the organisation can offer them.

The challenge for me here is the linear thinking represented by the imagery of a "pathway." One thing experience has shown me is that youth participation - in all of its vibrant, divergent and chaordic ways - is not linear. That means that in no way can - or should - young people and adults working together in partnership be expected move from "here" to "there" in a predictable way, no matter what adults want. There are rhythms to their involvement, patterns that emerge and submerge that can be sussed out and made obvious. But as for a pathway, I think it may be too elusive, to say nothing of confining, to predict.

Hart's Ladder of Children's Participation is predicated on this notion of linear involvement. The dilemma inherent in that popular tool is that sometimes it may appropriate for young people to merely participate as consultants rather than full partners - just as the opposite is true, too. We have to move past this kind of oversimplification and recognize that if the building is burning down we don't need to build consensus - we just need to get outta here. The same is true at different times in different parts of our communities, and these types of models just don't evidence that reality.

My most concentrated attempt thus far is the Freechild Measure for Social Change By and With Young People. In this piece I simply reinterpeted Hart's rungs and laid them out in a spiral form. When I originally laid this out in 2005 I thought it was fine, but now I see that there is a lack of elegance and applicability in it, and perhaps that what draws me back to Hart's Ladder itself. Its also why I can appreciate YoMo's thinking, because frankly, I have tried to say the same thing myself.

We need new dreams, new visions for how to move this movement forward, instead of spinning our individual and collective heals, no matter which side of the world we're on.

In the late 1990s the Swedish education agency invited all new high school students across the country to be part of a process that identified new educational priorities and develop new school policies for their nation. More than 200 students said they wanted to do it.

Students were asked to send letters that explained what they thought the priorities of schools should be. Researchers and education officials read the letters and analyzed them for the main themes that arose. Each year for the next three years students were asked to write a letter that focused on those issues. At the end of the the four-year cycle in 2000, the responses were compiled into a report which is has been continuously used to inform school policy.

It continuously blows me away how far removed European practices are from those here in the States. And this is not to put anyone on a mantle: YoMo, DK, and the ESSA would probably all admit the UK is just coming along now. But in the long run the practices that have been instituted in policy and practice there are by and far a long run ahead of where we are.

I want to keep this short and recommend three publications for anyone who wants to learn more about student voice in Europe:

• Schooling as Violence: How Schools Harm Pupils and Societies
• Consulting Pupils: What's In It for Schools?
• The Euridem Project: A Review of Pupil Democracy in Europe
  

Once a youth advocate understands the reality that segregating youth is an injustice unto its own, they have a responsibility to undo that damage. They have a responsibility to integrate youth. For too long that notion of integration has been limited to simplistic notions about youth participation.

"All we need to do is invite the youth."
"We need some youth sports!"
"Let's get a youth on our board."

Unfortunately, this well-intended and often poorly-executed idealism often leads to further alienating young people, as the traditional youth leaders who are targeted for participation quickly become dissatisfied with the token roles they have in these situations. Otherwise these opportunities serve as mass pacifiers, undermining the very essence of being young by rerouting the mental power of young people towards physical aggression and competitive brainwashing. This gesturing is designed to develop children and youth in the mold of a mass marketplace stereotype that is stuck on accumulation and consumption and dismissive of community, interdependence, and radical democracy.

The alternative to that painful reality is much more complex than previously acknowledged, and yet, much more accessible than is portrayed by traditional youth participation practitioners. I would suggest that in the majority of communities across the United States the alternative to traditional youth involvement can be juxtaposed against engaging young people as partners. In Europe this phenomenon is called youth mainstreaming. Their explanation:

"It [youth mainstreaming] is a strategy for making (youth) concerns and experiences an integral dimension of the design, implementation, monitoring and evaluation of policies and programmes, in all political, economic and social spheres so that (youth) benefit equally and inequality is not perpetuated." - UNESCO

Those political words are powerful, but stiff. While I support strategic approaches, I don't think the verbiage inside a lot of policy is particularly accessible or appropriate for the activities that are intended to happen because of the policy.

That much said, I want to offer a more familiar term for this burgeoning practice: Youth Integration. When civil rights leaders have referred to integration in the past, they have largely meant desegregation, leveling barriers to interaction, creating equal opportunity, and developing a culture drawing on multiple perspectives instead of just bringing the minority into the majority culture. That is the goal I have for Youth Integration: The equitable, sustainable and holistic infusion of children and youth throughout society.

We can't continue to settle for anything less.

The underlying assumption behind all youth involvement programs is that youth are segregated. American society has relied on the ongoing and consistent alienation, isolation and institutionalization of young people for more than 10 decades now, only to the detriment of families, communities, and ultimately, democracy.

Youth segregation happens throughout our lives. Starting from the first moments of a child's life, newborn infants are oftentimes removed from their mothers immediately after birth. Incubated like chicken eggs under glaring lights, babies are immediately wrenched away from the healthy grips of the mother-child bond, and mothers are immediately trained to believe and trust that the segregation of their children is a normal, acceptable, and even beneficial thing.

As children grow they continue to experience this alienation and abandonment. Daycare, schooling and many community programs all rely on the isolation of children and youth from adults, and worse still is that our adultcentric economy relies on this isolation as well. In addition to serving as captive audiences for promoting violence, consumerism and nationalism, these programs oftentimes also become the many purveyors of social values for young people, effectively negating the ability and responsibility the larger community has for "raising its own," as Hilary Clinton profess in her book It Takes a Village and Other Lessons Children Teach Us.

Our society has created more than a few industries that are reliant on enforcing this child-dumping behavior. Surely the childcare and basic education fields come to mind; but we also have to consider mall owners, fast food franchisees and sports manufacturers all in the benefit from the economic behavior imposed through youth segregation. The government benefits too: in addition to the taxes they levy on each of the aforementioned services, police, government-led afterschool programs and a bevy of social welfare agencies are reliant on communities being unable and indifferent to the youngest among us. We need children and youth to just "go away," and we expect that when the marketplace doesn't cover those costs the government will pick up the tab.

Schooling is the main vehicle for reinforcing the necessity of youth segregation throughout our society. As John Taylor Ghatto powerfully explains in Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling, schools teach students about segregation by routinely, systematically and overtly separating them by race, socio-economic status, gender, ability, perceived ability, age, interest, and test performance. In turn this activity normalizes segregation for young people, which makes the fact that they are isolated from adults in mainstream society for at least 1/3 of their waking hours okay. No one teacher or principal is responsible for this abdication of responsibility: the entire education system is culpable, as curriculum, classroom management, building leadership, school climate, educational leadership and political representatives are all in on the act.

Segregation only begins to let up by the time high school rolls around, when we expect youth to transition to adulthood. However, no matter how precocious or assertive a young person may be, they are still routinely dismissed through adultism and ephebiphobia. Voting rights, free speech and economic security are among the many human rights that society denies to youth simply because they are young.

The moral imposition of youth segregation is that it requires almost every adult to be complicit. We all have to support the person who says, “I know better – I’m older” in order for this shenanigans to pass. As soon as there is a critical mass of folks who simply will not take it any longer, adultism, adultcentrism their benefactor, youth segregation, will have to take a back seat until there is better judgment that will more effectively help us treat these social scourges. Until then we continue to struggle.

In 2005 I completed a booklet called the Meaningful Student Involvement Guide to Students as Partners in School Change. After working with a dozen schools over the previous three years, studying hundreds of examples from literature and in schools across the U.S. and talking with students and educators about engaging student voice, I wanted to pull it all together. In that publication I wrote that,

"Meaningful student involvement is the process of engaging students in every facet of the educational process for the purpose of strengthening their commitment to education, community and democracy."

For the last few weeks I have been beginning my work here in New York in conjunction with Learner-Centered Initiatives/Communities for Learning, and the Cloud Institute for Sustainability Education. It has been exhilarating traveling across the city and getting out into the suburbs and learning about other peoples' interpretations of meaningful student involvement and engagement of student voice - there really is a grassroots movement among educators and administrators here!

Today we are here in Morristown, New Jersey and I with Jaimie Cloud meeting with teachers and the principal from a K-8 charter school here, learning about some good examples of MSI in action. Jaimie's expertise is focused on sustainability education and systems thinking. Jaimie has a spectacularly complex and broad perspective that I definitely have a lot to learn from.

I love this exposure. As my own analyses are deepening I am discovering that meaningful student involvement sinks in throughout the learning environment. I believe there are deep connections between meaningful student involvement and sustainability education, and I look forward to the combination of those. So deep. Send me your thoughts about where and how meaningful student involvement should happen throughout the educational system, including which places within the educational system should be treated as learning environments that are not currently.

Youth empowerment is a tricky concept that makes a lot of adults feel good about themselves. They see themselves as "handing over the reigns" and "giving up" control in order to teach young people magical lessons about power. Comparing themselves to others, these same adults often preach the value of youth empowerment and advocate its great abilities throughout our society.

Something is not right about that.

While my daughter is growing up I take it as my responsibility to be consistently conscious and aware of her needs, responsibilities and rights as a fellow human being who I am lucky enough to share those needs, responsibilities and rights with. And by "share" I don't mean "give to"; instead, I am talking about the reciprocal exchange of authority and duty, by which she allows me to care for her needs while I am allowed to expand and build her mind, her hands and her spirit. That's an awesome thing. Here are some rules I follow to help really empower my daughter:

Don't dismiss everything the adults in your life did. Parents, teachers, preachers and scout leaders had some right ideas mixed in there. Those times your dad let you run the power saw after he taught you how to do it? That was good. Him coming along after you were done and recommending how you could do better? That was great. I know it can be hard for young people to hear criticism from adults, but honestly that is our responsibility. It is wrong to demean or destroy a young person, but it is right to offer corrections and identify opportunities for growth.

Don't do everything you learned in Youth Development 101. While Erik Erikson, Jean Piaget and many others had good and right concepts regarding the development of children and youth in Western societies, they aren't always right. Around the world these days more credence is given to the concept of evolving capacities than youth development, and those readers in the U.S. should check out that idea, too. There's more to the world than convenient staircases; let's look at the options.

Avoid youth programs that claim to empower youth. There's an old Buddhist saying to the effect of "Those who say they are humble are not." That's true a lot of the time with youth empowerment programs, too. Organizations and adults that are in the business of building the capacities of youth, creating and fostering opportunities for "wide-world learning" and breaking through the barriers of oppression that young people face simply do that work - they don't make grand pronouncements about their desire to see youth running the world because they are busy seeing to it that young people can run the world, either today or in a near future.

Get out of the office. If you are a youth worker who spends five hours a day in an office and three hours with youth, make a resolution to flip those numbers. If you're a researcher who meets with young people twice monthly, flip that number. Real youth empowerment requires real youth, and that's an important key for all adults to remember. In the same way, if you are constantly exposed to the same youth, go find some others for a day. Reflect on why you like your constituency, why you love your job, why you want to really empower young people.

Don't look for a magic bullet. We have to get past quick fixes and simplistic responses to the sophisticated, complex worlds that young people occupy today. There are no magic bullets. Cooperative games don't work in some groups; community organizing isn't effective in every situation; youth voting won't cure political corruption right away; intergenerational equity will take lifetimes to achieve. Let's stick in it for the long haul and do the good things we need to do.

These are some simple tips - let me know if you have anything to add.

According to a lot of different sources, last week was an amazing week for young people in the U.S. Wiretap and the League of Young Voters both reported that according to CIRCLE, 13 percent of eligible Iowans under the age of 30 participated in the Iowa caucuses. Researchers report that the youth turnout rate rose to 13 percent from 4 percent in 2004 and 3 percent in 2000, as about 65,000 Iowans under the age of 30 caucused.

These types of stories do a wonderful job of sensationalizing the present. Reporters and statistics downplay the significance of anything that's ever happened before by hyping everything that is happening and now, because frankly, that's news. But what does that do to the past?

A few weeks ago I sat down with Ben Quinto in Manhattan. Ben is the founder and E.D. of Global Youth Action Network, and his brain occupies some of the same spaces as mine, particularly around movement-building and strategic thinking. We had a great conversation about a lot of things, but maybe the most exciting was something he and I had no part of. Ben and I got talking about the past, as far back as 80 years ago, and had a great conversation about the history of "youth power," for the lack of a better phrase.

We have both discovered some of what I think as hidden or silenced histories of young people. It turns out that none of the current momentum behind engaging youth is a new thing: Mother Jones led 10,000 children on a march against child labor in 1903. Oh yeah - they were mostly under the age of 10, and they were all child laborers in Pennsylvania's coal mines. And in 1936 more than 1,000 youth rallied together to present the American Youth Bill of Rights in the U.S. Congress. So Ben and I talked about how this idea of engaging young people around the issues that matter most to young people is nothing new.

The differences between now and then are significant. Technology has drawn together so many different perspectives in so many different ways, especially in the form of connectivity: Never before has it been so easy for youth from across the country to rally together to stop a local curfew law from being enacted.

But never before have we had the chance to learn so much from history. I know that there have been several books published specifically about youth activism, dating from at least 1967. But books don't cut it. We need trainings that are reaching deep into the youth activist community, workshops that are educating the ongoing leadership structures, and dialogues that cut across race and class in order to identify, share and build upon what and who has come before.

As Ben and I talked about, that's the only way to successfully grow this thing forward into the future - by acknowledging what's come before and what we should not repeat again, as well as what we should. We're getting together again this week to continue our conversation - look for more later!

In an article for Suite101, D.C.-area consultant Khadijah Ali-Coleman proposes that "We can begin to stop adultism by listening and actually hearing. Stop belittling. Speak respectfully." However, that's just not enough.

Too often practitioners in the fields of youth development, community youth organizing and service learning rely on simplistic mantras to help themselves feel better about perpetuating the very injustices they claim to be addressing. However, this kind of gross oversimplification does no justice to the intricacies in the lives of young people face, or the complexities of oppression in American society. The first step in stopping adultism may be actually acknowledging that adultism isn't the only force at work in the lives of youth. Adultism is an insidious and pervasive weapon in the toolbelt of oppression.

However, other forces, or tools, are at work, too. Racism affects young people in ways that transcend their age: As a force of oppression throughout society racism affects youth before their lives begin, after they are born, and throughout all of their years. Gender bias is another tool that pervades the lives of young people. Whether a person identifies as a male or a female, the forces and effects of gender discrimination supersede all behaviors in all components throughout all of life. Other weapons in the toolbelt include classism, homophobia, and misogyny.

Now, adultism is bad, and it is huge. The descriptions I use above can be applied equally to adultism, too. However, we cannot simply call out adultism as the sole force affecting the lives of young people. Let's not ignore or deny the realities that affect youth throughout their lives by overemphasizing one above all others.

When youth workers, educators, counselors and parents learn to identify the range of oppressions affecting their lives and the lives of the young people they work with, we can begin an honest dialog about the causes, effects and outcomes of adultism. Until that point I have to ask: Are we just thinking in vain?

A lot of people are talking about civic engagement these days. Suddenly there is a popular terminology that captures all the energy for service learning, youth voting, community volunteering and other forms of establishing strong connections within and among a broader community. Suddenly there is a way to embody the best intentions and inherent benefits of democracy into a simple catch phrase. Suddenly...

That energy has constantly informed my work for at least the last seven years. After serving three terms in AmeriCorps I decided that I wanted to combine the energy I had for civic engagement with the commitment I felt towards youth work, and thus began my quest with Freechild. When I started delving deeply within schools I discovered similar opportunities to enrich civic engagement within schools, and consequently I started SoundOut. That is how I became a practitioner of the notion that as members of a democracy we need to strengthen community connections and enriching the roles of young people throughout society.

I believe that same notion imbues schools and community youth programs with a purpose, a goal that is much more relevant, burning and impressive than simplistic youth development. So it is with great enthusiasm that I finally found an exciting and (I think) riveting study from CIRCLE that came out last fall. In it authors Hugh McIntosh, Sheldon H. Berman of Jefferson County Public Schools (Massachusetts) and James Youniss of the Catholic University of America analyze mid-project outcomes from what they called a "Comprehensive High School Civic Engagement Intervention in Hudson, MA." While the title is clearly not intended to jump out at you in the school library, it definitely tells us that there is a level of intentionality and depth inherent in this piece that has been largely absent from a lot of school-oriented studies in the last dozen years.

They explore the effects of two particular civic development efforts initiated at Hudson High School in September 2003. The first, called "clustering," focuses on bringing together students in small (150+) student groups around central career/interest areas in order to bond them tighter as co-members of the same learning experience, as well as enrich collaboration among school staff. The second effort is schoolwide governance, which was derived from the idea of establishing “just communities” in schools. The report uses these two major change areas, along with several other significant changes, to frame the research.

The report identifies large school meetings, low participation and the breadth of student leadership as major issues in their evaluation. Major areas of change among the schools' twelfth grades over the four year study period include:

• Likelihood of giving money to a political candidate or cause
• Likelihood of having worked or going to work in a political campaign
• Likelihood of having participated in any community service (voluntary/required) during past year
• Likelihood of having participated or probably will participate in a lawful demonstration

Students reported that their political knowledge and community concern had changed significantly, as well.

This is an exciting study because it adds another measure that enriches the case for student voice in schools beyond the simplistic reading/writing/math analysis. To learn more about the study check out the CIRCLE website.

I admit it, I am guilty. For years I've been working to over-complicate youth engagement. In my partnerships with some of the leaders in the field of youth engagement we have sought to identify, explore, examine, re-identify, re-explore, and re-examine youth engagement in its parts and particulars. We have been looking for the sophisticated components, the complex inner-workings of a rather simple thing.

The closest I've come to finding that simplicity has been with my friend Greg Williamson, who used to be the student engagement guru at Washington State's Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction, and who is now among the best independent consultants in the Pacific Northwest, among other things. A few years ago during one of our brainstorming meetings Greg proposed a simple measure for determining youth engagement from a young person's perspective. He said we could ask children and youth a really easy question, and let their testimony be the marker for determining whether youth engagement does or does not exist. That question? Do you feel engaged or do you feel detached?


In our conversations we decided that was the most simple, most apt way to illustrate the nature of youth engagement.

Now, I know there has to be some framing done, perhaps to the extent of asking the participant what their personal definition of "engagement" is or even sharing a definition with them, but I think this is a good start to finding an authentic, powerful, and simple way to get to the heart of youth engagement: Its about the young people. I want to get back to that place.


Oh, and thanks to Doug Smith for kicking out this graphic, and the others I've used throughout this blog.