CommonAction Consulting

Democracy and Children: The Connection

2013-05-21T20:37:00.001-07:00

Democratic participation relies on individuals taking collective ownership and deliberate roles in the societies where they live. From the earliest age children have the interest in their neighbors and communities to warrant actively engaging them in democracy; research, and international practice codified in the CRC, demonstrates that their evolving capacities necessitate opportunities for their active involvement. Children’s participation embraces these realities by connecting young people with meaningful opportunities to share their knowledge, ideas, actions, and more.

For a long time children’s participation was seen as the obligation of child-serving organizations only. Over the last decade we have seen the expansion of this concept as children’s participation is increasingly seen as essential in and by schools; local, regional and international governments; community development organizations; and in other sectors. Initially viewing children’s participation as effective marketing, businesses also have realized the necessity of actively engaging young people. Today, they continue to enrich their activities through technology. As recent developments in the Middle East have shown us, many activists are also realizing the potential of children’s participation, as indeed, many activists in that region are children.

Children’s participation is democratic participation, and serves to nurture all of the skills and knowledge young people need in order to be successful members of democratic society. By increasing the frequency of children’s participation, organizations and individuals can deepen the impact children have throughout society. This will help alleviate many of the worst conditions facing our world today, and help democracy transition to the new forms it will be required to have in the near future as technology and necessity continue to drive growth.

The preceding was an introduction I wrote for a proposed international guide that didn't happen. Thought you might appreciate it.

Critical Questions for Meaningful Student Involvement

2013-05-20T10:22:00.002-07:00

Working with groups across the US and Canada to improve schools over the last decade, I've learned a few important points for everyone to consider before giving it a try. Here are 18 critical questions for Meaningful Student Involvement.

Are your expectations for Meaningful Student Involvement reasonable and positive?
What do you first think of when you think about Meaningful Student Involvement in your education setting?
Are you excited about the possibilities?
Are you considering the benefits and value of Meaningful Student Involvement?
What kind of students do you want to engage?
Have you selected students who are just like you, or different?
Do the students you're listening to say things that make you uncomfortable?
Is Meaningful Student Involvement integrated into your school improvement plan?
Can you listen seriously to what students have to say even though they may not express their ideas in similar ways as you?
Have you clearly let students know your expectations for Meaningful Student Involvement?
Have you done your best to provide students with the resources they need to reach the set goals?
Have you picked a time when students are available to join in?
What kind of time commitment are you expecting?
Will students be able to fit activities in with other commitments?
Have you provided teachers with enough information to give students credit for learning while sharing Student Voice?
How will you reflect on Meaningful Student Involvement with students?
What will happen to the information, resources, activities, or tools that emerged from Meaningful Student Involvement?
How will Meaningful Student Involvement sustained after the initial activity?

Once you've answered these questions honestly, you are ready to begin action planning for Meaningful Student Involvement.

Some Observations About Social Change

2013-05-15T11:24:00.001-07:00

I started my first community organizing campaign with a group of friends when I was 14. Involved in formal and informal youth engagement work throughout my teens and early 20s, I got my first job supporting youth involvement and youth activism when I was 24. I haven't stopped since then. Starting The Freechild Project when I was 25, I began reading the research supporting community organizing, activism, and social change insatiably. It's been 13 years now, and I've seen a few things.

Following are a few observations about changing the world that I could think of. Let me know what you think of them.

Some Observations about Social Change

Anyone of any age can change the world.

A person’s depth of understanding about social justice isn’t limited to age. As a young person, I had experience and grew up in a community with a lot of deep experiences with discrimination, alienation, and segregation; lacking the verbiage to express their oppression, they turned to the language of action, creating community in gangs, generating income with drugs, expressing frustration through graffiti. Conversely, I’ve sat in rooms full of adult educators and youth workers and listened to self-proclaimed youth advocates pontificate about “us” and “them,” while they launched into diatribes about the ways young people act, dress, and talk… Ignorance knows no age, either.

Critical reflection is the gateway to social change.
In my experience, the “soundness” of an individual’s understanding about social justice is directly related to the amount of critical reflection they have engaged in. This can be both self- and community-reflection that questions our assumptions, values, and perspectives as we’ve experienced them in our own life. Paulo Freire, the acclaimed father of popular education, long espoused the necessity for oppressed peoples to critically examine their own actions as well as those of their oppressors. I have shared this experience with several groups of young people in their teens, and have heard about it done with younger people. The results of this may lead in many directions, including the “firm-groundedness” of which you speak. Many educators, including authors Ivan Illich and John Holt, have cited other outcomes, including broadened questioning of schools, government structures, and other social institutions. Personally, I’ve gained deeper ownership, commitment, and hope for the future through critical reflection.

Assumptions are ignorant.
There is a particular danger in saying, "You wouldn't understand" to anyone. That gives many people permission to bombard others with righteousness, the type that popular media fills so much of our time with already. I have seen people with incredibly sophisticated, empathetic, and knowledgeable perspectives about social change; and again, I’ve seen others with extremely shallow understandings. Our perceptions shouldn’t be the determining factor for engaging people in social change work; interest and investment should be.

Authenticity means too much.

I think that by focusing on the whether peoples’ engagement is authentic, a lot of people are let “off the hook” because they don’t know how to give others their own space to speak, or how to engage them in collective community space. This is a form of scapegoating that easily reinforces the supposed “enigma” of engaging people. The real questions here may be, “Do we really want to hear the voices of other people?” and “Are we really looking for people who take risks and make decisions, or do we want to reaffirm our assumptions?”

After all, getting our ideas out of other people’s mouths is a ventriloquist’s trick, not a sign of meaningful engagement or autonomy. As a whole, society has so many attitudinal and structural barriers to engaging people that the question of whether or not anyone can or should actually become engaged needs to be answered first.

Don't think simplistically.
The systems surrounding and encompassing all our lives are complex beasts. Thinking naively about them and trying to over-simplify them does no favors. Why do we think about having people involved in protests and rallies instead of their infusion throughout the “movement” as a whole? Where are people in the planning and decision-making processes that affect them most? It is vital to engaging people to move beyond tokenism and decoration, and their further engage and infuse everyone as leaders, teachers, and organizers throughout social their lives. When Saul Alinsky wrote, "True revolutionaries do not flaunt their radicalism. They cut their hair, put on suits and infiltrate the system from within," this is what he was talking about.

Engaging people in changing the world is often trivialized by well-meaning people who, without conscious effort, often perpetuate discrimination of all kinds by patently denying others the opportunity to become deeply engaged. We must move from engaging people as decorations and start seeing everyone as a potential partners.

Popular assumptions don't determine ability.

Media, politicians, and others are involved in a plot to turn identity-against-identity throughout American society in an attempt to keep people separate and incapable to work together. That's made many organizers susceptible to their negative portrayals. However, in many cases the people who were supposedly least capable were the ones to make others aware of injustice. In one particularly poignant example, young people in the Philadelphia Students Union have led their communities in organizing for increased school funding, alternative school curricula, teacher pay raises, and more.

We have to dig into the reason WHY.
The crux of the issue is whether people truly understand why they are changing the world. Similar to many people, social change agents often believe that they are doing something for the “good” of doing it without exploring the meaning or purpose of their actions. This is how missionary-style service work has grown so popular in the U.S. and around the world, despite religious missionary work receding from popularity. Many community-based organizations actually exploit the oppressions of low-income communities and people of color in order to further their “service” work! Many of these same organizations use people as “safe” volunteers who don't "safe" activities like picking up trash, serving homeless people meals, coloring pictures for grocery stores and politicians to hang in their windows. Is this meaningful social change? No. Is it “safe”? Yes. Are people told that it is valuable? Sure! And these things do have value, since the people who are leading the activities they reinforce their power over others, they are surely valuable to them. To the recipients of the service they exhibit the “proper” place for social change (arbitrary and irrelevant).

Everyone can be engaged in deep, meaningful, and powerful social change, if that's what we want. If we want something else, we need to consider what that is and why we're doing it.

Tips on How to Survey Real People

2013-05-13T15:33:00.003-07:00

Recently, I needed to learn some basic things from a group of people at the outset of a weekend-long training. Specifically, I wanted to find out:

How capable they were at self-identifying the problems they faced;
How able they were at identifying root causes;
Whether they could determine what practical resources they needed.

To find this out, I printed three questions in circles on a 3x5" card for respondents:

Sample 3x5" survey card.

Why are you here?
What can make you come back?
What do you need right now?

From those three questions, in addition to finding out what I sought to originally, I found what participants' material needs were in comparison to their educational needs. I also identified how many participants actually understood why they were there.

I think surveys are an important tool for our toolkit on engaging all kinds of people, at least in a superficial, introductory way. You might decide that you can listen to people by surveying them. Here are some of my tips on surveying real people.

Tip 1) Remember the KISS Principle: Keep It Simple and Straightforward.
Don't over-complicate what you're asking people. Being simple and getting straight to the point will ensure that you get answers that are... simple and straightforward. Don't ask too many questions either. If you have to do multiple different question topics, make them visually distinct and keep them short. Also, keep the number of questions the same between each topic, like 3+3 or 4+4.

Tip 2) Make it interesting to look at.
The days of handing out lists of questions on clipboards are over. However, you don't need to design a complicated app just to ask questions either. Keeping questions brief encourages respondents to answer how they're most comfortable. Instructions given should be super simple, but reinforce the seriousness of the survey.

Tip 3) Avoid linear lines of questioning.
In my experience, many people don't respond well to A-to-Z thinking, let alone attempts to force them into doing the same. Many surveys do this, either on purpose or by accident. Avoid this by keeping questions short, and removing any bias you might have about getting specific types of answers from respondents.

Tip 4) Ask broad questions about the future.
It can be challenging for people from diverse backgrounds to activate their future-thinking abilities, especially when they come from adverse situations. Because of this and other reasons, asking them specific questions about the future sight-unseen might turn them off to answering any other questions you ask. However, asking broad questions about the future may activate their future imaginations and allow them to trust you more because you believe they have something worth sharing about the future.

Tip 5) Don't answer the question in the way you ask the question. Asking respondents, "What will you study in college?" assumes they'll attend college and that they value it; and asking others, "What do you need to be successful?" and providing five things to choose from narrows their options and assumes they want your definition of success.

Similarly, asking questions about life assumes they think they think about life the way you do. For instance, some people have come to accept this formula:

Life = grades K-12 + college + career.

However, for some other people, the formula looks more like this:

Life = K-2 then move, 2-5 then repeat 5th grade, 5-7 then get expelled for bringing a gun to school, 7-10 then juvie for shoplifting too much, then drop out and get GED, then tech school for a quarter, then dropout to fight addiction...

In many cases, the lives of real people are too disjunctive to attach your expectations to the questions. Don't allow your biases to influence your survey. Try to release those and ask different questions.

Tip 6) Ask questions in bubbles or circles or triangles or...

Organize paper and online surveys using a graphic interface in order to make them more visually stimulating to real people. However, be aware of the effects of shapes or colors on participants. Variation between the shapes might cause them to inadvertently put more weight towards the object they find more appealing or familiar. Here's an interesting summary of what I'm talking about.

Tip 7) Customize for your audience.
Effective surveys for real people are like effective programs: they must be to respondents' unique needs and capabilities. Here are some sample questions and the audiences they're intended for:

"What are you responsible for right now?" —To help determine what a neighborhood group sees itself capable to doing through a community service project.
"Describe your life in the next 1 year, 5 years, or 10 years." —To help a program identify what services they can provide for formerly incarcerated people in order to help them succeed.
"What do you need to change your life right now?" —To identify whether service industry workers see there are options between short-term and long-term planning.
"What's your plan for the next three years?" —To help a GED program determine how to appeal to youth participants.

Tip 8) Let respondents know you'll take it seriously. Rarely are interviewers held accountable to survey respondents. This is your opportunity to let them know you're going to do something with what they say, and that you honor what they write down. Without this reassurance, respondents might reply in one of three ways:

Refusing—"That's your job to decide," or "You tell me," respondents may protest.
Testing—Offering outrageous suggestions or responses to see if the interviewer is really serious about the invitation to answer the survey honestly.
Parroting—Repeating what the interviewer has said or guessing what they want to hear. A respondent might be asked to suggest a problem in the program and write, "We should keep our noses to the grindstone and finish the job," even though they're not planning to do this themselves.

These responses are conditioned from years of not having opinions taken seriously. Challenge respondents by letting them know you take them seriously, and then follow through.

Surveying real people can be richly rewarding and almost immediately beneficial to your program, nonprofit organization, school, or other location. For more information contact us.

Issues Addressed by Student Voice

2013-05-09T13:13:00.000-07:00

Planning the winter dance, setting the price for Valentine’s Day candies, and deciding the new school colors are decisions some schools allow student voice to influence or even drive. However, Meaningful Student Involvement amplifies student voice much further than this. There are literally countless issues throughout the education system where engaging students as partners can be crucial for success, and yet rarely happens.

This SoundOut class is at work addressing issues in Miami.

There are countless issues that schools are facing and that are being discussed by people working in schools as well as those working for school change from outside schools, including politicians, community groups, and the media. Focused exclusively on school transformation, Meaningful Student Involvement catalyzes student/adult partnerships for education change. Students can be partners with adults to address these issues and many more through both convenient and inconvenient student voice. The following list is just a beginning of what can happen though.

The Goals of Education and Student Success. Defining the purpose of schools focuses the direction of schools, teachers, and students. While some originally intended for public education to provide basic learning for successful democratic citizenship, others saw schools mainly as a way to support the economic workforce. Today, educational goals and “success” have become defined by student performance on standardized tests, in addition to measures like student attendance and graduation rates. While these might be part of the purpose of education, many school reformers are seeking ways to broaden the goals of education to include students’ social, emotional, and intellectual development, as well as helping students gain the skills needed to build a better and more democratic world.

Voice and Engagement. The question of who has control and authority in schools has long been answered with “leave it to the professionals,” meaning administrators and policy-makers. However, as more people push for participatory structures throughout the government, there are also efforts toward more participation throughout the educational system. Creating opportunities for meaningful involvement for students, teachers, and parents is growing in many communities, while the federal government is increasingly asking how and where nontraditional voices can be engaged in decision-making. Businesses, community organizations, mayors, and others want roles, too. This is a topic that many people can rally around.

Curriculum. The question of who decides the curriculum in schools has a big impact on what goes on in schools. With influences ranging from textbook companies to politicians, and from school boards to businesses and more, schools and teachers somehow have to sort this out and provide a meaningful learning experience for students. The federal government, along with a coalition of private organizations, is supporting the concept of “Common Core State Standards” that would create the same standards throughout the country, and many governors have urged their states to follow them.

Time in School. The length of the school day has been a popular topic for decades, and particularly in recent years. Recent brain research has shown youth have different sleep needs than adults, while it’s been popular to say that students in the US have less “seat time” than students around the world (as a matter of fact, this is incorrect: while students in some countries have more days of school than the US, most of those countries have shorter school days that actually results in less seat time). The length of the school year is also a consideration, as some advocates are determined to add more seat time by replacing traditional summer breaks with more frequent shorter breaks throughout the year. The amount of years a student needs to attend school is also an issue, as more public education leaders consider a “P16” system essential: pre-kindergarten through college graduation.

Schedule. The schedule of a school often drives the learning and curriculum in the school. The traditional 45-minute period of high schools, for instance, means that projects and activities are harder to do and fit within that time, as is traveling outside of the school for field trips or connecting with the community. Block schedules often have 1.5 or 2 hour blocks of time for classes, which provides some of these opportunities. Other schools provide classes for part of the time and give students self-directed learning time to pursue projects that earn them credit.

Out of School Time. Offering activities after school, in the evenings, on the weekends, and throughout the summer are common in some schools, while other schools do not provide them at all. Tutoring and mentoring, sports and extracurricular clubs, and other learning or social experiences are out of the norm for many students, as their families or their schools are fiscally incapable of participating. Schools and communities could come together to devise creative ways to offer these opportunities to all students, regardless of income.

Charter Schools. In most states that have them, charter schools are schools that are publicly funded and privately operated (outside of the typical school district), and which students and parents can choose to attend instead of the local public school. Charter schools are all different, some are experimental and innovative, while others are very traditional but with longer hours. Studies are mixed about the benefit of charters, but the issue is becoming one that dominates education today. Many political leaders are supporting the creation of more and more charter schools, while those opposed believe charter schools take the most engaged parents and students, leaving the least engaged to stay in the regular public schools.

Class and School Size. The number of students to teachers, called “student/teacher ratios,” has been shown to affect how well students learn. Many advocates call for smaller class size, while others claim size makes little difference. School consolidation, where small schools in local communities are merged into a single large school for a large surrounding area, has been happening since the 1940s. Now many of those larger schools are being closed, such as in New York City, to create smaller schools.

Teacher Development. Thinking about what teachers learn and how they learn it is important to making schools work better. The idea is that more and better opportunities for support, mentorship, and professional development for teachers will lead to better teaching and improved teacher quality. In some countries, teachers have far less teaching time than in the U.S., and have more time to plan with other teachers and observe the teaching of others. Half of all teachers leave teaching within their first 5 years, and new teachers have a steep learning curve.

Teacher Quality. Teacher quality is one of the biggest issues being discussed now by teachers unions, politicians, and teachers themselves. Many are saying that we need to determine who is a good teacher and who is a bad teacher. What some are saying is that when students are not succeeding in schools at sufficient rates, it must be the teachers’ fault. While teachers certainly have impact on their students, outside factors are also a big issue, including poverty, home life, and the outside community. Getting rid of teacher tenure (which gives teachers extra support from being fired) and firing low-performing teachers based on student test scores is the new approach taken by districts around the country.

Technology in Schools. The issue of schools maintaining their relevance in the face of technological developments isn’t new. In the 1950s the US became engulfed with the Cold War, and schools were forced to innovate their educational goals with the supposed purpose of keeping America competitive with the Soviet Union. Today the issue of how to teach about technology in schools continues, as some schools limit access to the Internet, raising concerns about free speech, while other schools are increasing their use of technology in the classroom. Virtual schools and online classes are becoming more and more common, and many educators believe the future of education is found in technology.

Special Education. The questions facing special education include the labeling of students, funding the support services that special education students receive, and “mainstreaming” special education students throughout the school population. There are concerns about disproportionate representation of males and students of color as special education students, as well as equal access to support for such learners. Charter schools and other schools of choice are sometimes criticized for weeding out special education students since they have more leeway in which students they accept.

Funding Priorities. Traditionally funded by taxpayer dollars at the local, state, and (at a smaller level) federal level, in recent decades schools have actively sought funding from corporations, philanthropic foundations, and private donors as well. Funding basic education is an increasing issue in times when government support is waning, and as a result teaching materials and school buildings are becoming neglected or worn out. Teachers often purchase supplies out of their own pockets, or simply go without in communities where schools are underfunded. In affluent school districts students generally have access to better materials and teachers get paid high salaries, affording those students better educations. In turn, this reinforces the “academic achievement gap” that separates many students. Calls for equitable funding are frequent, and have found mixed success.

These are some of the issues students can address in schools as you consider what to change and how to work with adults. By learning more about these issues and taking firm stands, young people can contribute to the conversation and take action in sophisticated, relevant ways that make you a partner in working with adults to improve your school.

Visit the SoundOut website for more information on issues addressed through student voice and Meaningful Student Involvement.

100 Ways To Engage The World

2013-05-07T12:51:00.001-07:00

An engaged world is one where everyone lives fully and wholly, everyday in every way. Since 2010, the bevy of consultants and trainers with CommonAction have been working across the U.S. and Canada to promote the concept of an engaged world. We define engagement as the sustained connections people have to the world within and around them. We teach that becoming engaged in any way affects everybody. Read this list and learn why.

Engagement can happen in every way you can imagine. Here are 100 ways to be engaged.

100 Ways to Engage the World

Home—Get engaged in your day-to-day life.
Family—Engage with people you are born to and choose: brothers, sisters, parents, children, others.
Learning—Find ways to engage in your own learning no matter how old you are.
Water—Engaging in the surface cover of 72% of Earth includes swimming, drinking, and enjoying it.
Beauty—Becoming engaged in beautiful things can mean a lot to the beauty around you.
Work—Engaging in what you make your livelihood in may be the key to your happiness.
Reading—Exploring literature about new topics, your interests, or art can be engaging.
Play—Find engaging ways to dig into the things you enjoy, and enjoy them more.
Hospitals—Develop sustained connections with people who are recovering and emerging from care.
Breathing—Get consciously engaged in the moment-by-moment function of living, with purpose.
Advocacy—Standing with others and empowering the powerless can be very engaging.
Self-Empowerment—You can engage within yourself and discovering the role of yourself in the world.
Art—Engaging in art can mean creating it, viewing it, critiquing it, and more.
Peace—Fostering nonviolence in your life and the lives of others can be very engaging.
Friendships—Developing short or long term connections with people we choose can be engaging.
Wildlife—Surveying animals, studying birds, sustainable fishing and hunting can all be engaging.
Communication—It is engaging to share thoughts and wisdom with others in creative or direct ways.
Pets—Engaging in sustained connections to the animals kept as pets or helping others doing the same.
Critical Thinking—Developing sustained connections with honest, authentic, and real responses in you.
Parks—Go and walk, lay, eat, draw, paint, climb, run, paddle, swim, and have fun.
Friendships—The people you spend recreational time with want to be engaged with, too.
Physical Activity—Movement that supports healthy bodies can be very engaging.
Ethnic Backgrounds—Engage in learning about the backgrounds of people from specific places.
Nature—Find engagement in the gardens, forests, ocean, lawns, and air around you.
Neighboring—Actively knowing and interacting with the people around us can be engaging.
Community—Stand with people you relate to and engage with them.
Culture—Engage in the shared attitudes, traditions, and actions of a connected background.
Libraries—Be in these public places designed to share free learning with the masses.
Coaching—Engage in provide encouragement and support to people trying to achieve things.
Music—Sharing melodies within or outside yourself can be very engaging.
Health—Getting engaged in your health and well-being can connect you deeply with your body.
Neighborhood—Engage in the place you live, work, play, and grow everyday.
Homemaking—Nurturing family by building the capacity of children and parents can be engaging.
Community Centers—Get engage in the places where community is fostered in play and sharing.
Anti-Racism—Challenging racist thinking and action can be very engaging.
Music—Listen, share, create, dream, sleep, and breathe engagement in the sounds of life.
Place-Based Connections—Living rural, urban, or broadly can be engaging when done intentionally.
Teaching—Facilitating others learning experiences can be a deep avenue for engagement.
Mediation—Developing deep connection in resolving self-conflict and other's can be illuminating.
Self-Development—Engage in challenging negative assumptions or building skills and knowledge.
Globalization—Engaging in enriching world perspectives and uniting cultures.
Hiking—Walking, climbing, and otherwise traveling by foot can be very engaging.
Nonprofits—Engaging with staff who are building on missions to help the world.
Poetry—Engaging in the feelings, motions, ideas, and thoughts of others can happen through poetry.
Refugees—Supporting people who escape from oppression or suffering can be engaging.
Love—Know the greatest engagement in deep love for the universe and all that is within it.
Cooking—Engaging in foods and meal-making can be sustained throughout a lifetime.
Homelessness—Create lasting connection with youth, families, and others without a permanent home.
Farming—Growing food and consuming local farm food can be deeply engaging.
Heritage—Become engaged in the history of your neighborhood, family, or other identity.
Disconnection—Engaging in fostering healthy disconnection and bridging new ones can be vital.
Construction—Fostering lifelong connections to building homes and places for others matters.
Volunteering—Engaging in supporting others, places, or issues can be rich and exciting.
Relief—When places cannot get enough of what they need, it is engaging to provide relief.
Nutrition—Learning about healthy eating, food knowledge, and diverse food sourcing is engaging.
Sports—Being engaged in athletic play, competition, or achievement can be sustained.
Finances—Engaging in personal, community, company, or cultural economics can be rich.
Politics—Develop lasting connections to the formal and informal structures of influence and power.
Crafts—Creating homemade supplies, arts, food, clothing, and other items can be engaging.
Orphans—Engage with children and youth without parents through mentoring and other ways.
Schools—Teach, learn, or help others do the same in the formal places where education happens.
Outdoor Education—Deep connections in facilitating outdoor learning can change the world.
Decision-Making—Lean into the decisions you make everyday to engage in them meaningfully.
Government—Engage deeply in the social structures designed to ensure people can engage.
Education—Engaging in the challenges and opportunities others face in learning can change your life.
Small Business—Supporting and creating local, small, and nimble business can be very engaging.
Writing—Making imagination and knowledge pour on paper can be engaging.
Travel—Becoming engaged in visiting places you aren't familiar with can defeat ignorance.
Restoration—To engage in bringing life to old things can be enlightening and powerful.
Evaluation—Look at your own life, the world you live in, and the people you are engaged with.
Repairs—Fixing broken things can be engaging.
Protesting—Engage in sharing concerns with lawmakers and officials about issues that concern you.
Internet—You can engage in connecting, learning, and creating content on the web.
Reporting—Engage in sharing news, stories, and details with others in dynamic ways.
Senior Centers—In can be very engaging to be with learned wisdom goes towards the end of life.
Tutoring—Helping learners discover their capabilities in any topic can be very engaging.
Strategic Thinking—Become engaged in new and logical avenues for seeing wisdom.
Environmental Restoration—Engage in rebuilding and enriching the natural cycle of life on Earth.
Emergencies—Engaging with others in times of need and crises matters immensely.
Clubs—Connecting over professional and personal interests can be engaging.
Parenting—Engaging with being intentional in childraising can be vital.
Philanthropy—Engage with issues that matter by fundraising and giving money to causes.
Trees—Examining, learning, reforesting, planting, preserving, or caring for trees can be engaging.
Media-making—Engage in creating websites, newspapers, television, videos, and other media.
Fun—Engage in creating, becoming part of, or expanding fun in your own life or with others.
Driving—Exploring new spaces and examining where you already live can be engaging.
Languages—Engaging in languages can mean listening, speaking, or exploring communication.
Solar Power—Connecting deeply with alternative energy can change the world and yourself.
Identity Issues—Fostering and exploring connectivity between and within identities can be engaging.
Playgrounds—Engaging in play with your children is supporting their engagement in play.
Clothing—Establish deep connections with other's and your own clothing needs.
Dance—Creative movement, motion, rhythm, and melodic play are all engaging activities.
Self-Teaching—Learning new things and developing your understandings can be engaging.
Intergenerational Partnerships—Engage in forming deep connections beyond your age group.
Civic Action—Volunteering, voting, connecting, and building in communities can be engaging.
Healthcare Access—Engaging in making sure everyone can access healthcare is important.
Social Engagement—Fostering sustainable connections to the world around you is vital.
Personal Engagement—Recognizing the ways you're engaged within yourself can be essential.
Languages—Learning, examining, and exploring different ways people communicate can be engaging.
Inequality—Bridging social, cultural, and structural differences can be engaging.

I have written a lot about how to become more engaged, and simply acknowledging the things you're already engaged in. How would you engage the world?!?

10 Steps To Youth Integration

2013-05-06T16:59:00.002-07:00

Challenging youth segregation can be tricky.

Anyone who advocates for youth involvement, youth engagement, youth voice, youth empowerment, or youth rights is ultimately calling for the same this: the integration of young people in our society. As it stands, young people are routinely segregated from a lot of places. This includes the institutions that serve them directly, such as schools, nonprofits, governments, and faith-based communities. It also includes their homes, as well as places where they should be treated without bias but aren't, including businesses. Ultimately, youth integration has to happen in all relationships between young people and adults.

This work has been underway for more than two decades, and needs to unite now. It starts with re-envisioning the roles of young people throughout society. In the last decade, I've worked in more than 200 communities across the US to help them re-envision their work with young people. Its been successful in some ways, challenging in others.

Through my efforts with The Freechild Project, along with similar programs across the country, a generation of young people and their adult allies have come to believe that our society can do more than simply do things to young people. Instead, we can co-create the world together. This notion reflects the wisdom, "Nothing about me without me is for me."

Studying my own work and the vast library of literature I've collected focusing on this approach, I've devised some key points for integrating youth throughout society.

10 Steps to Youth Integration

Think Sustainable—Identify practical ways to ensure youth keep being integrated after an initial planning period. Begin by sitting down with a group of adults young people together and talk about the world today, their specific lives, and what they think needs to change. From the beginning, infuse youth in facilitation, evaluation, research, decision-making, and advocacy right into the culture of your group. If you must involve children and youth in a one-shot activity, let them know of real opportunities for them to be integrated with adults in their lives outside your group.
Clear Purpose—Name a clear purpose for integrating young people in your community. Come up with a mission statement. Let youth and adults, organization leaders, parents, community members, and local schools know what you're doing and why you're doing it. Clarity of purpose is often missing from young people's lives, as school is done to them, family is done to them, and stores are done to them. Anywhere in society looking to actually integrate young people needs to let young people know the world be done with them, and they should know why that's important.
Integrate The Non-Traditionally Engaged—Create space and help children and youth who haven't been especially engaged in your community to become integrated. Actively integrating both traditionally involved young people and non-traditionally involved young people can radically transform your community in all sorts of ways. If you don't know how to do this, get trained; if you need a reason, read this.
Real Connections—When young people see themselves in your program, real connections are happening. When real connections happen, children and youth become engaged. While they may have obvious expertise or interests in a specific topic, its important for your group to help young people discover what they know right now, and to see what they know inside what you're doing.
Equity, Not Equality—Develop equitable roles between young people and adults. This means that groups don't pretend all things between children, youth, and adults are 50/50 split equally, because in our adult-centered society that is simply never true. Equity allows young people and adults to enter into responsible relationships that acknowledge what each other knows and doesn't know, and to work from that place instead of assuming everyone has equal ability and capacity. We're all different; let's not pretend otherwise.
Grow Their Capacity—Grow the existing capacity of children and youth to become involved in planning. Both young people and adults can learn from training about work styles, assumptions, skills, and more.
Make A Clear Plan—Having a specific pathway for young people to see how their integration will change their community. Are they contributing to an existing program? Opening a brand-new course of action and learning? Working with the same adults in new ways, or partnering with new adults? Its important to remember that creating a youth integration plan is not the culmination of work, but the starting point of a group's efforts to create a more democratic society. A clear plan should include: 1) Practical next steps; 2) Roles and responsibilities for youth and adults; 3) an integration structure for your community; 4) group member evaluation opportunities. Setting priorities, using timelines with dates, and developing clear benchmarks for measuring success in each area can also enhance your community.
Get Systemic—Encourage youth integration beyond your group. Young people can be engaged in researching their community, school, nonprofit program, or anything through PAR. They can facilitate, teach, and mentor peers, younger people, and adult. They can evaluate themselves, their organizations and communities, workplaces and businesses, and other places. They can participate in organizational, family, community, or other decision-making. They can advocate for what they care about. Ultimately, they can be engaged throughout society in every way you can imagine.
Connect The Dots—Establish deep youth/adult partnerships wherever possible. Collaborations that reinforce learning will deepen any effort to integrate youth. The partnerships established in this process can deepen efforts through the future, and mutually support youth and adults throughout your community.
Eyes Wide Open—Open the doors to critical examination. Use critical lenses to examine your assumptions and effects in your group. Identifying strengths and weaknesses allow groups and communities to improve the overall integration of youth, especially through your particular effort. Make space by giving young people permission and skills they need to be partners in mutual accountability with adults. In your group, set clear benchmarks and agree on celebrations when they're met and consequences that young people can see for when those benchmarks are not met.

Aside from ethical considerations for youth integration, there is a practical basis to integrate youth throughout society. A variety of recent research demonstrates that there may be no parallel to making schools, youth programs, government agencies, and even families more effective. The most intuitive outcome is true: Integrating young people throughout society changes young people who experience integration.

Less obvious are the effects that youth integration has on adults throughout our communities. When they're actively infused throughout the broader community, young people can actually affect the broad community beyond your group in a variety of ways over the short and long term. The effects include lifelong civic engagement, and developing strong and sustained connections to the educational, economic, and cultural values of their neighborhoods and cities. Youth integration can dream no higher goals. (See here, here, and here for some studies.)

More importantly though, this pathway shows that youth integration is feasible. What are you doing to get it going in your community?

18 Myths of Education

2013-05-05T20:06:00.000-07:00

Here are 18 myths of education in the United States. The resolve to number 12 is the essence of our work through SoundOut all these years. What else have you seen meeting these myths?

These are important points, and you can find the citations for each one at the bottom of the graphic. Leave your thoughts in the comments section!

An Infographic by Open Colleges

1. More Homework Means More Learning

Researchers have found that the connection between more homework and greater learning is tenuous at best. This is especially true for grade school and middle school students. In an effort to redesign the student workload, many districts around the US have begun prohibiting homework on weekends, holidays, and even week nights.

2. More Money Means Better Schools

Although school spending has increased over the past several decades, neither graduation rates nor test scores have budged from their relatively dismal standings. Since 1970, the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) has been administered yearly to a representative sample of US students, and the scores have not correlated positively with the boost in expenditure and the rise of technology over time.

3. The Myth of Insurmountable Problems

Many policy makers are quick to blame society for underperformance in schools. But the belief that education can’t help is dangerous. Reforms that focus on the incentives of public schools lead to educational gains, and accountability and choice have often been shown to deflate the significance of social problems like poverty.

4. Test Scores Are Related To Economic Competitiveness

Consider Japan, whose current economy flags while its students continue to ace assessment tests. Or Finland, New Zealand, and Sweden, each of which produces at least as many research engineers as the US per 1,000 full time employees. Quality education can prevail in an economically challenged nation. There’s no doubt about it.

5. Schools Alone Can Close The Achievement Gap

The achievement gap is already apparent in students on their first day of kindergarten, due to a number of factors including economic background, educational background (how educated are the student’s parents?), nutritional intake, genetics, and parental guidance. Because of this contingency, researchers have argued that it reflects poor reasoning and poor policy to believe that school reform alone could ever close the gap.

6. Private and Charter Schools Are Educating Kids Better

NAEP scores of private and charter school students are no higher than those of public school students. Studies suggest that the “boons” of private schools may amount to nothing more than the exposure to other students with educated parents and affluent backgrounds.

7. Teachers Are Clueless About The Content They Are Teaching

Twenty-eight states require secondary-level instructors to have majored in the subject area they plan to teach. All candidates must pass content exams before completing their program or being certified to teach. Twelve states require elementary school teachers to have earned a content degree, and nineteen require middle school teachers to do the same.

8. The “Teacher-Proof Myth”

There are no teacher-proof solutions. None to be legislated, none to be bought, and none to be accessed virtually. The human task of helping a student cannot be replaced by automated learning models, nor by one all-purpose instructional method arising from trial and error. More trust must be placed in our teachers.

9. Our Teachers Work Less And Get Paid More

According to an OECD report, US teachers spend between 1,050 and 1,100 hours per year teaching – much more than in almost every country. Argentina and Chile are also high on the list. Despite high spending on education, teacher salaries across the world are far lower than those earned by other workers with higher education credentials.

10. Unions Defend Poor Teachers

Between 2006 and 2010, 245 teachers resigned or were dismissed in the US. This is because the unions have made an effort to monitor underperforming teachers in school districts across the nation. If students in one classroom are performing worse than students in another, it makes little sense to blame the teacher before considering other factors.

11. Student Achievement Has Been Deteriorating For Decades:

Contrary to popular belief, today’s students perform about as well as their parents in terms of standardized assessment tests and high school graduation rates. There is simply no hard evidence for the statement that student performance has been declining for decades. These are myths put forward by teachers’ unions and education policy makers.

12. Teachers Are Solely Responsible For Learning

Learning is an interactive process. Teachers are not the only people in the classroom who have valuable knowledge to share or responsibility to shoulder. Students, too, can teach each other and benefit from working together. A teacher is a facilitator, first and foremost.

13. The Disadvantaged Don’t Have The Same Capacity To Learn

There is no evidence that students from disadvantaged communities have a lower capacity to learn than students from privileged backgrounds. Economically challenged students may perform worse on assessments; experience anxiety and lack of control, which lead to underachievement; react negatively to authority; skip multiple classes on a regular basis; and abandon formal learning - but none of this is due to lower educational capacity.

14. Schools Don’t Matter

Intellectuals and politicians alike have claimed that education can’t save disadvantaged youth, and that the problem lies in socioeconomic policy and reform. However, since the instatement of acts like No Child Left Behind, schools have been instrumental in giving underprivileged students a chance to escape poverty. Education is power for the impoverished.

15. Small Classes Would Produce Big Improvements

Although research has highlighted the perks of reduced class sizes, especially in college settings, there is little evidence that it benefits students on a wide enough scale to make a difference. Considering the financial challenges of breaking students up into smaller groups, hiring more teachers, and investing in more resources, reduced class size should not be looked upon as a means of “saving” education.

16. Teacher Preparation Matters Little For Student Achievement

Although Teach for America has produced some excellent teachers with little to no training, the National Bureau of Economic Research has shown that beginning teachers with more extensive clinical training (like internships or certification programs) produce higher student achievement gains and retain their positions longer than teachers with less preparation.

17. Most Teachers Don’t Care:

If student performance is low, it doesn’t mean that teachers don’t care. Teachers become teachers precisely because they do care. But it is not an easy job. Educators face many challenges every day – say, with a particularly disruptive child or a time-crunch due to a school assembly - and do their best to help students succeed despite these difficulties.

18. Credentials And Experience Don’t Matter. Only Content Knowledge Does

It benefits every teacher to be an expert in his or her subject field, but experience is key. If instructors don’t know how to engage and audience and relate their knowledge to others, their expertise will be as good as useless in a classroom setting. Credentials and experience count.

When educators teach the same subjects and grade levels consistently, especially during their first five years of teaching, it behooves them – and their students - to be not only experts in their field but to have experience relating their subject to others. Experienced teachers are more organized, strategy-driven, and creative in the classroom.

[*]

The Need to Take Action for Schools

2013-05-01T13:59:00.000-07:00

I don't advocate for "free children".

Almost a century ago, English author and educator A. S. Neill wrote, "Free children are not easily influenced; the absence of fear accounts for this phenomenon. Indeed, the absence of fear is the finest thing that can happen to a child."

It was in 2001 that I was sitting with a group of "non-traditionally engaged" youth in Olympia, Washington, brainstorming about changing the world, when they suggested I start "Free Children" and promote youth activism. Finding a Canadian organization already took that name, I modified it and began working.

The Freechild Project has never advocated for "free children" though, and neither have I. I have written about this concept of the free child before, but rather than an anarchistic sense of radical self-entitlement, I advocate for freedom. Early on in my work I learned its important to acknowledge that while it's true that there are 74 million people under the age of 18 in the US, and 2.5 billion people under-18 worldwide, they aren't the only ones here. As the feminist hero Fannie Lou Hamer once said, "Nobody's free until everybody's free." So I don't advocate for "free children", but for freedom.

That said, the road to freedom is through education. bell hooks once wrote, "To be changed by ideas was pure pleasure. But to learn ideas that ran counter to values and beliefs learned at home was to place oneself at risk, to enter the danger zone. Home was the place where I was forced to conform to someone else’s image of who and what I should be. School was the place where I could forget that self and, through ideas, reinvent myself."

That is what I am most interested in: public schools as a site to examine, invent, and reinvent oneself. Because of this, they are still roads to freedom, and for that, we engage with them, not against them.

I believe that a substantive, child-centered, child-driven education is absolutely essential to the health of democracy, and that's what I advocate for. Public schools have the capacity to delivery that education. Towards that end, I work to actively engage them with the knowledge, skills, and abilities they need to transform their own educations and the educations of succeeding generations; I also work directly with educators, school leaders, and community advocates to transform public schools to become the kinds of places that infuse the "passion, free will, freedom and joy" of all young people throughout the education system and the democratic society we share. Ultimately, public schools are the only places in society where that collective, conscious enterprise can occur, and in that way I support them.

Critics who suggest that any and every public school is incapable of genuinely benefiting students in any way are generally offering misguided criticism, if only because in the vast majority of schools benefit some of the students some of the time. There are a growing number that make many students richer all the time. I support schools if only because that's the institution where the vast majority of young people spend their time. I believe we must engage them where they're at and revolutionize places we can affect, rather than extinguish those places without paying attention to the rest of their lives that may actually be more harmful.

Saul Alinsky once wrote, "True revolutionaries do not flaunt their radicalism. They cut their hair, put on suits and infiltrate the system from within." I'm going back inside now, and I'll get quiet again soon. This is why I believe we need to engage in schools.

Footnote:

This post is stemming from an interesting dialog. On this blog a few years ago, a writer named Laurie Couture took the privilege of grandstanding and wrote,

"The Free Child project is a great idea, but I think it fails to indict the most mountainous, enormous force in society's hatred and oppression of children: Forced/compulsory schooling. Public schools abuse children in every way possible. Everything about the school environment is antithetical to children's basic physical needs (food, hydration, elimination, movement, play, connection with parents), emotional needs (connection, safety, freedom and affection) and their creative and intellectual needs. Children are truly treated as hostages in public school, and their passion, free will, freedom and joy are stripped from them and their ability to learn. You cannot work for children's rights as long as you support a system that was designed to oppress children. Please consider working with the unschooling and Attachment Parenting movement."

Curious about how to respond, yesterday I took the liberty of posting this comment verbatim to The Freechild Project facebook page. It received more views than average posts, and elicited some impassioned responses from readers. You can read that conversation.

While Couture's position is thorough and not wholly wrong, her analysis is ultimately misguided and ill-thought through. In America, the privilege of leaving school and succeeding in life by one's own terms belongs mostly to well-to-do white people. Similar to how the experience Couture describes isn't true for all students, the experience of dropping out is rarely positive for most students.

Stay tuned for updates, but know that this is why I do what I do. And this. Why are you doing what you do?

Coming May 2013: "Inconvenient Youth" by Adam Fletcher

2013-04-30T16:11:00.002-07:00

CommonAction is proud to announce

Coming May 2013

"Inconvenient Youth: A Guide to Discrimination Against Young People"

by Adam Fletcher, founder of The Freechild Project.

Email info@commonaction.org

Phone (360) 489-9680

7 Steps to ConnectYoung People And Social Change

2013-04-29T12:24:00.003-07:00

You can take action and connect young people with social change right now!

1. Engage Young People in Social Change
Who better to work with children and youth than their peers? Learn how to empower young people to change the world by building engaged neighborhoods, schools and communities. START EMPOWERING YOUNG PEOPLE

2. Connect Young People + Social Change in Communities
Nonprofits, faith-based communities, and other community-based organizations should actively engage young people throughout their lives. This includes educational, recreational, religious, government, and other activities that happen out-of-school—before school, after school, during school breaks, and in the summertime. MAKE COMMUNITIES MORE ENGAGING

3. Do It in Schools

Young people spend the majority of their day at school. Students, teachers, school support staff, education leaders, parents, and other communities members can support in engaging young people to change the world. GET RESOURCES FOR SCHOOLS

4. Donate to the Freechild Project
Your donation will go toward our efforts to engage young people in changing the world. Its NOT tax-deductible and it still makes a difference. DONATE TO CHANGE THE WORLD

5. Train Others
Want to be more active along with your donation? Lead by example. Use our resources to train others to successfully engage young people and transform communities. START TRAINING NOW

6. Get Your Organization Involved
Engaging young people to change the world is a goal many people can support. Become a local collaborator or establish a volunteer relationship with us and together we can do great work. LEARN HOW WE CAN WORK TOGETHER

7. Transform Your Own Actions

Work throughout your own life to engage young people more effectively. Also work throughout your organization to create more engaged, more active, more just, and more engaging places for young people to change the world. ADD TO YOUR TOOLBOX

Let us know what YOU are doing to connect young people and social change today!

PETS: People-to-People Partnerships

2013-04-24T16:16:00.000-07:00

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When we interact as neighbors, parents, coworkers, children, students, lovers, customers, or supervisors, we're engaging with others, person-to-person.

People-to-people partnerships are ways that we experience Personal Engagement in intimate, intentional connection with others. Intentionally formed, they can enhance, stabilize and deepen relations between people of all ages, in many different kinds of situations, from every background.

Beginning with a commitment to co-developing a people-to-people partnership, two or more people can identify common ground between themselves, throughout their lives, and within their currently existent Personal Engagement.

Fostering these partnerships throughout our lives helps us trust others and ourselves more. They also build self-respect, personal communication, and self-sustainability. You are the powerfully creative force behind your own life, and developing people-to-people partnerships can help show you that reality. As the real catalyst for change in your own world, sometimes having conscientious, deliberate partner to understand that can allow you to live remarkably engaged within yourself. You know your life better than anyone else; people-to-people partnerships can help you turn your passion for living into a strategy for engagement.

3 Tips to Build People-to-People Partnerships
Building meaningful people-to-people partnerships requires intention and action. Here are three critical points:

Acknowledge Personal Engagement. Nobody is alive without having sustainable connections within themselves and throughout the world around them. Create a definition or share the Heartspace Teachings definition of Personal Engagement. After you have a shared platform to work from, acknowledge the Personal Engagements your partners have and share what you experience with them.
Examine Commonalities and Differences. Your People-to-People Partnerships don't have to be based on similarities alone. Difference is good, despite the people who preach sameness when it's obviously not true. The question is really about how we behave towards and treat differences, and People-to-People Partnerships show how to embrace those differences.
Embrace New Engagement. Embracing new engagement means that you understand your own and others' Personal Engagement and holds engagement as valuable. Create an inclusive space for your People-to-People Partnerships so everyone feels valued for their skills, and emphasize the differences that our individual diversity brings to the partnership. Finally, recognize things that happen that are a result of differences. By seeing the tension within ourselves and our partnerships instead of trying to get rid of it, your People-to-People Engagement will be able to produce more imaginative and creative Personal Engagement.

These tips are meant to build our Personal Engagement within intentionally formed people-to-people partnerships. We can have these types of relationships throughout our lives, using these tips as a starting point.

The Tree of Engagement

2013-04-22T15:52:00.003-07:00

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As a young man, I was taught the art of storytelling by one of Omaha's greatest, Idu Maduli. His graceful, courageous work brought me into neighborhoods throughout my area of the city where most people would never go, fearful of poverty or people of different races. Idu went though, over and over, to teach kindergarten through twelfth graders about acting by combining his storytelling abilities with techniques he'd learned from Augusto Boal.

He brought me along for three summers to help him teach, and along the way sparked the imagination of his journeyman. Since then I have strove to become half the teacher and storyteller I remember Idu being.

In his distinct way, I remember the gritty naturalness of the stories Idu shared. Many of them were focused on Anansi, the trickster spider of many West African cultures. Others were draw from European folklore, and others from other places. Wherever they were from, all these stories conveyed a sense of connection, dependence, and interaction with the Earth and all our relatives.

Its from this place that I originally conceived the "Tree of Engagement".This model is a metaphor meant to illustrate the sustained connections that drive all of our lives. Its made of three sections, each of which represents an area of engagement in our lives.

Adam Fletcher's Tree of Engagement

Engaging in the Universe. The sustained connections between all things, everywhere, all the time is best summarized by the term Universal Engagement. It is what the seemingly unrelated things around us depend on in order for the world to go around. Universal engagement allows people to see how the most minute thing affects the grandest, and vice versa. The relevance of the butterfly effect echoes this idea. Each of us demonstrate Universal Engagement through the things we create and share outside ourselves, including our work, our children, our cooking, and our conversations. We acknowledge Universal Engagement in all we consume, including food and clothing, others' feelings and ideas.

Engaging in the Community. As humans, we are constantly surrounded by other people, places, and identities. The community around us includes our families, friends, work, neighborhoods, cultures, and other things we identify with. Community Engagement is any sustained connection we have with those people, places, and identities. We express these connections every time we see the people, places, emotions, ideas, wisdom, and things around us. We foster these connections through all that we sustain outside ourselves, including families and friendships, forests and gardens. Shared values, built structures, and other creation we share with our immediate circles are all forms of Community Engagement.

Engaging in the Self. Within each of us is a unique configuration of blood, guts, and soul reflecting a singular engagement of everything in the Universe within one creation. Within our selves are infinite connections that are lastingly established in order to personify Universal engagement. Each one of us, individually, creates, builds, demolishes, nurtures, sustains, expands, and explores the universe in our own ways, thereby justifying our existence. The sustained connections of each self are what I call Personal Engagement: the sustained connection we have to the worlds within ourselves. Anything we do to connect with ourselves shows this, including knowing, nurturing, examining, and deconstructing ourselves. Personal Engagement is our root, the tap root of which digs deep into the Earth for inspiration, dedication, and health; the smallest of which roots contribute to the health and well-being of our whole selves.

The Tree of Engagement is a metaphor for all these things. How does it grow in your life? Where has it fallen over? Since its impossible to be truly disengaged from everything, all the time, what would you say is your weak spot of engagement?

Reflect on the tree and let me know what you think, please! Thank you, and get to climbing- if you want to.

Student Voice Alert!

2013-04-22T14:51:00.002-07:00

Dana Mitra of Penn State has been working to create a Student Voice, Participation and Partnership Special Interest Group at the American Educational Research Association annual meeting starting in 2014. It would be a regular, ongoing home where researchers and practitioners can share work on student voice, partnerships, and participation.

She need to collect 70 signatures on the petition to submit the paper work. PLEASE support the movement by signing your name to this survey, no matter if you're an academic, a student, an advocate, a teacher, or a house mover. PLEASE do your part!

Thanks!

The Student Voice, Participation and Partnership SIG Survey is at https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/98FRZRF

PETS: What is the Community's Job?

2013-04-22T06:00:00.000-07:00

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The community around us includes our families, friends, work, neighborhoods, cultures, and other things we identify with.

Our communities can influence, drive, cause, or otherwise influence our Personal Engagement all of our lives, from the time we're babies through our old age.

However, our communities do not have to be forces of oppression, alienation, pain, or suffering. Instead, they can serve as our mirrors, and we can allow them to help us understand exactly who we are. Following are some tips on using our communities for this reason.

More than 800 years ago, the Muslim teacher Shams Tabrizi wrote, "The real dirt is not outside, but inside, in our hearts. We can wash all stains with water. The only one we can’t remove is the grudge and the bad intentions sticking to our hearts." Our communities can help us see ourselves, and see that the dirt outside us is only a projection of what's inside us.

5 Ways to Support Personal Engagement through Community

See difference for what it is. The universe is made of diverse genetic formations infinitely conformed into different configurations of time and space. Albert Einstein wrote, “Everything is energy and that’s all there is to it. Match the frequency of the reality you want and you cannot help but get that reality. That is not philosophy… That is physics.” Your community can help you become more engaged within yourself when you realize that difference is only on the surface.
Experience others without ignoring them. When people begin to understand their interdependence with the community around them, there may be a temptation to simply breeze past others without actually knowing them. Learn others, be with them personally, and go through what they present you with. Stand as close to others as you can and experience them as much as you will, because that is life presenting you with another opportunity to even more sustainable connections within yourself.
Understand the mirrors we hold up. We are only capable of seeing ugly in others, beauty in others, and life in others when those things are within us. If you want to become consciously engaged within yourself, become consciously engaged with the world around you. Our communities offer logical avenues to do that.
Hold Personal Engagement highly. In becoming engaged within your community, hold Personal Engagement highly. Know that your sustained connections within yourself allow you to experience community's richness in a more genuine way, and that your community will hold you tighter when you hold your Personal Engagement higher.
Know yourself. In the same way that community engagement holds Personal Engagement, knowing yourself allows you to know your community more thoroughly. You are an infinitely complex and simple person holding vastly diverse ideas and experiences. Your community is the same. Experience one in the other and you've learned more keys for Personal Engagement.

Let me know what you think by responding in the comment section below, and please share these tip sheets with your friends!

PETS: More Than One Way to Engage

2013-04-21T06:00:00.000-07:00

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More Than One Way to Engage

There's nothing that you have to do in order to be engaged. Your existence here is enough. Learning about Personal Engagement is intriguing to some people though.

Yoga, art, science, and poetry are lovely, and a loving way to express your Personal Engagement, but they aren't the only ways to be engaged. Raising a family, hosting a potluck, and sharing your thoughts are great ways to act engaged with life, but aren't the only ways to sustain the connections with yourself.

Some people want to enhance, enrich, or otherwise make their own lives different because of their sustained connections to the world within and around themselves. There are a incredible numbers of ways to be personally engaged in your own life. Here are a few.

12 Ways To Be Personally Engaged

Acknowledge yourself. Start the relationship out right: let yourself know you respect you and are engaged within yourself. When you start seeing yourself you will see there is a life that you're trying to live. For a while you'll struggle with that life, and then you'll accept it. Eventually you'll rest into the person who you are and know that is person enough.
Validate yourself. Act personally engaged in the ways you do. Living your life as it presents itself is a gift, a way of being that requires no specific energy. Personally engaging within what already exists without having to do anything more means being with yourself, doing what you do, and knowing that is plenty. You have plenty, you are plenty, right now. Live engaged in this moment, and let the next one reveal itself.
Look at yourself. Check in with yourself about your own Personal Engagement regularly, not just in times when you're anxious, stressed, or suffering. Being personally engaged within yourself means consistency, because the essence of engagement is sustained connection.
Examine yourself. Know as much as you can about your own Personal Engagement. Write, read, draw, sing, build, demolish, scheme, daydream, and know all that you can about what you're personally engaged in, if you want. You don't have to dissect or examine what you're engaged in if you don't want to, but if you do then hold that, be with it, and see how awesome it is to be engaged in you right now.
Dig into your self. Ask yourself why you're engaged in what you are and pay attention to how you respond. We are the only people who can determine whether the ways we're personally engaged are right or wrong for ourselves. There's nobody else who can be a meter. That judgment, if you want to make it, comes from within yourself and nowhere else. You may have unpaid bills, misaligned relationships, or a disconnected lifestyle, but whether those things are right for you is only up to you. Listen to what you have to say.
Expand yourself. Follow up on things you think you should change. We can become engaged with the urge to change as much as the thing we're actually trying to change. Instead of spinning our wheels on feeling that urge, we should simply get busy changing things.
Open up yourself. As you go about your regular day, make sure you consider new things to become engaged in. Doors open and close throughout our lives all the time. Sometimes it can behoove us to clear the clutter from our souls, minds, and spaces, and allow newness and freshness into our lives.
Inquire within you. Ask the people around you about what they're personally engaged in. Connect with others about what they're engaged in. Find out what the people around you are passionate and interested in, and hear about those things from them. Experience others' engagements if they let you. And hold your own personal engagements open to share with others when you want to, too.
See yourself. Pay attention to chances to communicate your thoughts and feelings about Personal Engagement with others. When people ask what you care about, feel, know, or believe, they're looking to connect with you about who you are and what you do. Everyone is always looking for Personal Engagement, even if most of us never say that. Pay attention to these opportunities when they present themselves, and open yourself to them when you want to.
Be with yourself. Assure yourself that you will follow up on Personal Engagement issues. Is there something in your life that you are concerned about? Don't stuff it or otherwise run from it. Instead, walk towards it and lean into it, and know that you're taking the right steps towards Personal Engagement right now.
Release yourself. When problems come up with people around you, honor that they're personally engaged in their own ways, too. Sometimes, people are engaged in things that are negative or challenging for them. You have a choice about whether you engage with them; however, your job isn't to change their engagement. That's their own. Honor their personal engagement and move along.
Learn about yourself. Make sure you have the information you need to be personally engaged in your own life as often as you can. Be rich in the knowledge that you're engaged as much as you can be right now. When your sustained connections are supposed to grow, they will. If they can't, literally, they won't. We will never give ourselves more than what we're supposed to have; everything we have we were meant to be with. When we're not supposed to be with our engagements anymore, we'll release them. Its that easy.

These are some of the ways you can engage within your life and throughout the world around you. Let me know what you think by responding in the comment section below, and please share these tip sheets with your friends!

PETS: What is Personal Engagement?

2013-04-20T06:00:00.000-07:00

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What Is Personal Engagement?
I define Personal Engagement as the sustained connection a person has to the world within themselves.

A person can be engaged within themselves through many different ways, including creating art, working, family-raising, baking, construction, and meditation.

There are many pathways that show the sustained connections we have within ourselves. There are no wrong ways to be engaged within yourself either. Some ways that people engage within themselves that others may disagree with include video gaming, reading, dancing, or house cleaning.

If those all sound commonplace, that's because they are. Personal Engagement, being self-focused, relies on every single person having connections within themselves that they see, feel, know, believe, understand, or do every single day in some way, some how, some time. There's simply no way to do it wrong.

That doesn't mean that our engagements within ourselves are always right, positive, productive, or powerful. Instead, they simply exist. Here are three ways to recognize your own Personal Engagement.

Three Ways To Recognize Personal Engagement

1) Say that you are living engaged right now. Personal Engagement is not a gift or an award, and there's nothing you have to do. It is you right here, right now, and by existing you are engaged—without doing anything more. Whether or not you know it, you are personally engaged. Say, "I am personally engaged right now."

2) See that have done the work of becoming engaged in many ways. You've been personally engaged since you were a child, playing with toys, being with your parents, learning at school, and doing the hard work of growing older. All that required Personal Engagement. Consider all the ways you've been engaged throughout your life:

Talking about the things you've done, sticking with the life you're living, and sharing what you know with other people.
Connecting with your own ideas, thoughts, wisdom, and knowledge about living, and following those lessons.
Realizing there are other ways to go and other things to do in your own life, and seeing the tangible connections between how you've lived in the past and how you're going to live in the future.

3) Know that engagement is part of your life every single day right now. Every day you live through positive things, challenging things, things you'd change and things you'd always do the same. Your Personal Engagement begins with living towards, through, and within your every moment. Whether you're doing that consciously or unconsciously is irrelevant. As an engaged person living a full life, you know the fruit of Personal Engagement already. You also know, intuitively right now, that acknowledging your Personal Engagement will only make you richer.

So, that's Personal Engagement. Keep reading this blog for the next entry in the CommonAction Personal Engagement Tip Sheet Series.

Let me know what you think by responding in the comment section below, and please share these tip sheets with your friends!

PETS: Why Live Engaged?

2013-04-19T06:00:00.000-07:00

Click here for more topics in this series!

Why Live Engaged?
While its easy enough to see what Personal Engagement is, it may be harder to understand why it's important to live engaged. Knowing that we're engaged personally whether or not we're conscientious of our engagements, it can be harder to pin answer the question, "Why live engaged?"

In my 20-plus years experience working with adults and youth to engage them throughout our communities and around the world, I've learned that there are six main reasons to live this way.

Seven Reasons for Personal Engagement

Personal Engagement lets you know yourself. Engaging within yourself intentionally allows people to know themselves more deeply.
Personal Engagement builds self-reliance. Without living in a bunker or sequestering yourself in a hovel, becoming self-reliant begins with knowing who you are, but then meeting your own needs in rich ways.
Personal Engagement broadens horizons. By digging within yourself, you can connect all the broad parts of yourself, remove masks that aren't you, and open your own doors to the world around you.
Personal Engagement meets your needs. Personal Engagement allows us to see what we actually need in our lives, remove the things we don't need, and finding room for our wants to be okay instead of smoothering them.
Personal Engagement encourages you to name your biases. Knowing what you stand for and what you stand against can let you decide whether or not those biases serve you accordingly.
Personal Engagement lets you become the person of your dreams. Life is filled with infinite chances to become who we really are, and as we become consciously engaged within ourselves we get a clearer picture.
Personal Engagement allows you to live cohesively. As whole people, our lives have play, work, creativity, dreaming, resting, and so much more in them. Personal Engagement allows us to draw all this together on purpose and be who we are.

There are so many reasons to become personally engaged, and these are merely the beginning of a tremendous list. Make your own and see what you already know! Then let me know what you think by responding in the comment section below. Thanks!

PETS: CommonAction Personal Engagement Tip Sheet Series

2013-04-18T06:00:00.000-07:00

Welcome!
Welcome to the CommonAction Personal Engagement Tip Sheet Series!

These posts are meant to be a simple, hands-on introduction to Personal Engagement. After introducing the concept back in 2011, I've continued to write about it sporadically. This series compiles tips, examples, and more that highlight different parts of Personal Engagement.

Table of Contents
Topics for this series include:

What is Personal Engagement?
Why Live Engaged?
More Than One Way to Engage
What Is Community Engagement?
People-to-People Partnerships
Get Engaged in Your Life
How Big is Personal Engagement?
What Does Personal Engagement DO?
What If My Life Doesn't Work?
Choose Your Own Engagement
Get Your Self Engaged
Five Steps to Re-Engage in Your Life
Engagement and Disengagement
And more...

Let me know what you think by responding in the comment section below, and please share these tip sheets with your friends!

How to Make Student Voice Matter

2013-04-17T08:35:00.005-07:00

Thinking about doing massive school reform projects, teaching a class on school improvement, or trying to get students on school boards and change other policies might feel overwhelming to any adult who works in schools. Yet, this is what a lot of student voice advocates demand of schools.

In addition to focusing on whole systems school reform, I want to encourage adults who work in schools to consider Meaningful Student Involvement part of their daily motions in schools.

Here are nine ways to make student voice matter every day in schools, including teachers, counselors, afterschool workers, and others, can take to meaningfully involve every student in schools.

9 Ways to Make Student Voice Matter

Teach about school. Show students of all ages how learning happens, how the school system works, and what school improvement is. Teach classes to develop your students' leadership, communication, problem-solving, and partnership skills.
Promote self-advocacy. Teach students of all ages how to necessarily and accordingly advocate for themselves and their peers in schools.
Encourage public support. Teach students about state and local education laws without manipulating them to become involved.
Infuse Meaningful Student Involvement. Make roles for students to research education, plan learning, teach course topics, evaluate teaching and learning, make systemic decisions, and advocate for their own education within and throughout your own classes.
Engage new voices. Create roles for nontraditional student leaders on regular decision-making committees you belong to in school, work with students to organize a student union in your school, or be active with student-led organizations in your school.
Share knowledge. Reach out to other teachers and students who aren't in your classes to share information about schools and school reform.
Be an ally to all students. Build community within your school and create opportunities for students to engage with each other and share student voice.
Foster support. Recruit and train community volunteers and mentors for student school change agents who reflect the diversity of the broader community.
Share the love. Thank local businesses, nonprofits, and leaders who engage in school improvement, and encourage students to do the same.

These are practical steps that any adult in every school can take to make student voice matter every single day. What would you add to the list?

6 Ways To Share Student Voice Every Day

2013-04-16T20:38:00.003-07:00

There are many ways that student voice can be actively engaged throughout schools. One of them is in classrooms. Much of my early work was centered on engaging students as partners in changing schools by positioning them in rich roles during their classroom learning experiences.

Now, though, I'm becoming more interested in how students themselves can make their voices heard throughout their typical learning experiences. Students should not always have to rely on adults to involve them meaningfully in schools; likewise, schools should prepare students to share their voices throughout their educational experiences.

6 Ways To Share Student Voice Every Day
Following are six ways students can share student voice on their own.

Tell teachers about your needs in the classroom. This could mean talking about your learning style, asking clarifying questions about assignments, seeking help when needed, advocating for what you need to be successful, or standing up for your rights.
Share your personal life with a safe adult. Find an adult in your school who can be an ally to you. This could be a teacher, counselor, or other person who you could share changes in family with, issues in school, or other personal issues.
Challenge schools to change. If you're not satisfied with getting in deeper, work with your friends to challenge schools to change. Gather information about school, classes, clubs, and community issues, and identify issues agree need to change. Then work in your school to change your school.
Stay on top of it, and sit out when you need to. Participate in class, hand in your homework, keep going to class, and pay attention to your grades. That is a form of communication. So is not talking in class, not doing your homework, skipping class, and letting your grades drop.
Share it with your parents. Make sure you, or when needed, your parents, respond to all messages from school. Give them opportunities to get involved and show them you care about your learning.
Partner with your parents. Show your parents that you want to be involved and attend school meetings, events, and parent/teacher conferences.

There are many ways that students can make their voices heard on their own. This is just a short list. What are some ways you'd add?

The LIVE ENGAGED Manifesto

2013-04-15T05:30:00.000-07:00

Last night I announced my new LIVE ENGAGED Manifesto on Facebook. This manifesto is meant to summarize my beliefs about where this work is going and
what it should be doing. Let me know what you think!

Share your thoughts about the LIVE ENGAGED Manifesto on my website!

Constant Conscious Hopefulness

2013-04-14T12:08:00.000-07:00

Since I was young, its always been said that I'm optimistic. That's not totally true, and as my friends know, there are days when my optimism wanes. Freedom isn't free for any of us, and there are many days when I felt like I was paying a lot. However, I have worked to maintain constant conscious hopefulness, the basis of which is apparent to me in the hope that fills the world around me.

Growing up in the constant stress of poverty in a working class and poor neighborhood, I struggled to
escape the pressures that surrounded me. I didn't escape; I couldn't. There was no relief for me in drugs and alcohol, and joining a gang just didn't seem feasible. I grew up in a black neighborhood, I often felt excluded from the families, friends, and strangers around me. By the time my family moved away when I was 20, there were just a couple other white kids in the neighborhood. While we knew each other, I didn't feel close to them. I also didn't feel close to my best friend growing up, a mixed kid who wrestled with his own identity, or my siblings' friends.

What connected us all though, beyond the appearance of difference and division, was the suffering and neglect. We didn't know it then or talk about it, but the streets we lived on were falling apart and the teachers that taught us weren't from our neighborhood. Cops roamed our neighborhood and beat us up without cause, and the parks department took down the rims on our basketball court.

Reign died when he was racing away from a cop and ran his bike into a bus. There was the neighbor's son didn't get special treatment when he was busted for cripping even though his mom was a juvenile detention officer. The year I graduated from high school, our class's leader was kidnapped and disappeared, only to be found pregnant and dead later. Inside those bookends are stories about Absolom and Kenny coming to my house to buy guns, or people close to me dropping out of school, the almost nightly drivebys across the street from our house for almost four summers in a row, and the girl who couldn't date me because I wasn't black, or this or that or the other thing... And I haven't even mentioned my part in those stories.

I could focus on all that, but I don't. When I can't shake it off, I don't let it hang me down. Instead, I recognize these realities as some of the roots of my work. But I know they're simply part of that launching board, and not all of it. Before then was childhood homelessness and constant family transience. After that was a career filled with being among the working poor, and despite the support, what felt like a constant uphill battle against a lot of society.

Honestly, it takes work for me not to feel that all the time, too.

But today I know—constantly—that the dehumanizing effect of society, history, schools, the economy, government, and much of society cannot push me away. They cannot scare me into running or make me turn away in disgust.

Instead, the past I've had and the present I live in drive me to want to storm this life wildly, abandon all remorse or reluctance, and go to fuck things up. I live by a dictum that Toni Morrison gave a while ago when she wrote,

"I tell my students, 'When you get these jobs that you have been so brilliantly trained for, just remember that your real job is that if you are free, you need to free somebody else. If you have some power, then your job is to empower somebody else. This is not just a grab-bag candy game."

This is our real job. In finding our own freedom, we're obligated to do something to live that freedom. What anyone does to live that freedom is up to them; but whatever it is, it needs to free other people. Our actions reflect our consciousness, and if we're not freeing others then we're not free ourselves. Maintaining constant conscious hopefulness means making the world a better place.

This consciousness doesn't make us naive, a Pollyanna, or overly optimistic. Its not about rose-colored glasses or turning the other cheek, either. Instead, it makes us honest and real. Despite appearances, the world isn't falling apart and we're not going to hell in a handbasket. We simply have a great deal of work to do in order to be free and to free others.

What are you doing today?

Students Assessing Student Voice

2013-04-13T19:54:00.002-07:00

Students showing me their research on their school during a statewide project I led in 2004.

I think that one of the dilemmas facing the student voice movement underway in the United States and worldwide today is that there is not a clear agreement on what student voice means. This has been the case since the earliest research specifically citing the term "student voice" was conducted in the late 1970s.

At that point, student voice meant one of three things:

the distinct self-representation of students in classroom teaching practices;
student representation in school governance activities, and;
active student participation throughout the school environment.

In my early writing on student voice more than a decade ago, I sought to move towards embracing all the different research on student voice by saying that student voice is, "the distinct perspectives and actions of young people throughout schools focused on education." Recently, I've made that more succinct by simply saying that student voice is any expression of any student anywhere related to education.

Tools

From that understanding, I have sought to identify related work since 2001. Building and maintaining SoundOut.org website since then, I compiled a number of tools that allow students and/or adults to assess the climate of their learning environment in general. I also found several tools that allowed them to assess their classrooms, schools, and activities as they pertain to student voice.

The Government of South Australia designed the Student Voice Indicator Tool to measure several aspects of student voice throughout schools. The document was based on a study conducted by the Australian Council for Educational Research, and measured how students relate to others; whether they're committed to community well-being; their interest in learning; conformity to rules and conventions; self confidence; and optimism for the future.
Prof. Michael Fielding first published the Framework for Assessing Student Voice in 2001 based on research he'd conducted in UK schools over the previous decade. Projects across that nation have used it to evaluate their efforts.
Students at Lexington High School in Lexington, Massachusetts, created their own "Best Practices Club" to assess teachers' classroom performance in 2006. Their Student-Designed & Delivered Classroom Observation Tool was a loose measurement to determine what they had to share with teachers.
Consulting Pupils About Teaching and Learning is a spectacular tool series created by some of the UK's most accomplished academics focused on student voice. Its absolutely essential for schools committed to engaging students as assessors of the learning environment, both in terms of preparedness and implementation.
A private consulting firm in Kentucky called Roberts & Kay, Inc. created Turn Up the Volume: The Students Speak Toolkit for usage by Kentucky schools and published it in 2002. The Partnership for Kentucky Schools used it in hundreds of schools to promote student voice and integrate student voice into school improvement.
The Northwest Regional Education Lab, now called Education Northwest, published Listening to Student Voices in 2001. It provides a process for K-12 educational leaders and school-based teams to include students in continuous school improvement, and involves use of one or more of four Listening to Student Voices tools.

On a page called, Student-Led Research on Schools, I brought together a collection of student-written research studies focusing on school climate and performance. These studies were conducted by students in order to share their own and their peers' perceptions of schools. On another page I identify examples of students as school evaluators, and on another, students as education researchers.

Challenges

All of these tools take different aims at identifying the culture necessary to foster student voice that benefits the school improvement process or improves the learning environment. After studying and using each of these tools over the last decade, I can say that they're all missing a few things.

While all of them examine student voice and make concessions for preparedness, few take into account the necessity of training students and adults in schools to support student voice. Few others talk about infusing student voice into the ongoing practice of school improvement; instead, they rely on a one-time gathering of student voice without mechanisms for sustaining activities. They also neglect to identify the need to integrate student voice throughout all school improvement activities. Thorough research conducted by Mitra (2002), Fielding (2005), and Levine (1999) all identify the necessity of this, along with others' studies.

My hypothesis on Meaningful Student Involvement includes all of these characteristics, and more. I created a series of proprietary evaluation tools for SoundOut that includes these measures and others. I will detail them in a future post.

In the meantime, its important for schools, nonprofits, and others to know that much of this work has happened before. What needs to happen next?

Ending Youth Voice

2013-04-12T10:37:00.000-07:00

There aren't too many deliberate attempts out there to stifle youth voice. But without knowing it, many adults unconsciously undermine their own attempts to promote the unique perspectives of young people on their own lives.

A while back I wrote an advisement for all youth voice practitioners designed to raise our consciousness about the things we unconsciously do that undermine youth voice, ultimately ending it. Find the original article at http://freechild.org/YouthVoice/end.htm