YDEV501

  What ideas here feel close, like you can touch them? What ideas feel far away/ hard to wrap your mind around/ impossible? What does this have to do with youth work? With social justice? With your daily practice? In A Letter to Teachers: On Teaching Love and Learning Freedom , there were many things that felt close, but at the same time felt out of my reach because one person can't do it all. It takes a community to work together to move forward. I certainly understood that "classroom management is not a technical or a mechanical skill; it is deeply relational."I recall my first year of teaching and often times feeling the needs to pull students aside to talk to them to find out what was going on with them that was leading to misbehaviors and outbursts. However, the thought would go away when I realized I couldn't do that simply because I had to be in the front of the classroom teaching. Because of this I often found myself not being able to create a relationship wi...

In the At Our Best: Introduction it was interesting to read about how OST program workers typically see their roles as working "with" youth rather than "for" youth. This is something that truly resonated with me because with the term with I viewed it as typically being inclusive of all youth and respecting them and the space that we shared. From my perspective, I didn't see a difference between both, so it hit differently reading it, but it made sense. In my current role I have always been someone to push for being able to explain to scholars that when decisions are made, it is important for the adults to be able to explain where is coming from, why its important, and where is going. While the youth is not always part of making the decisions, knowing where and why they are being implemented is truly valuable. It opens a door of transparency and understanding, and leads to better results. Another part that resonated with me from this chapter, was the part a...

  The Creative Underclass: Youth, Race and the Gentrifying City [Chapter 3- Chillaxin] (Tyler Denmead) Pleasure Activism [introduction] (adrienne maree brown) Resonances/ Questions/Critiques Reading "Chillaxing" was an understandable piece. Discussing the importance of creating spaces for youth without putting pressure into the outcomes. One piece that stood out to me was when the author discusses that "in their quest for funding, programs must produce evidence that there outcomes are occurring, and they inevitably pass this pressure on to their students." I took this as, while giving student space to breathe the program also has the pressure of making sure that their programs are giving results within the arts, often times creating a push on the students. Recently I learned that some of the high schools and one middle school in Providence have changed their focus to be geared toward specific majors, however, I question this because we have students that don't...