First Interview

Well, well, well. Somebody's finally making some progress!  Yesterday I skyped with Steven Goodman from the EVC in New York City and asked him about how the EVC addresses issues of social justice and community and how they then assess those efforts.  I was tremendously nervous but I think it went well and it gave me some good things to think about, one of those being the immense value of direct participant responses as a measure of success, and how those responses can be solicited in a way that encourages and aides teens in being deeply self-reflective and critical about their work and their ideas.

For my Cyberpedagogy Lab course, we spent the semester across the street working with the museum's After School Matters teen program, Teen Lab.  As the program participants got familiar with the museum and learned stop motion animation, our class of five employed a variety of documentation strategies and then assessed the pros and cons of each (feasibility, usefulness, input-to-output ratio, etc), all in an effort to understand these things better ourselves while also giving the museum education staff a packet of ideas that will hopefully be helpful to them in the future.

When we presented our findings to the museum education staff, one particular piece of data seemed to stand out to them as it had to us:  a simple paragraph written by one of the students that clearly, concisely, and excitedly detailed what she'd gotten out of the experience of participating in Teen Lab.  Who could ask for more than a direct positive statement from one- or ideally all- of a program's participants to reinforce the excellent work being done?  Similarly, who could ask for more than a direct critical statement that would allow program organizers to immediately address issues and concerns?

The Teen Lab experience was on my mind as I spoke with Steve about the difficulty of assessing the successes and failures of arts programs for organizational, funding, and other purposes, and I was so pleased to hear about how EVC pushes its students to examine and convey their experiences within EVC in a start-to-finish way, always encouraging self reflection and expression.

Paper (or digital) surveys are a quick and easy way to ask direct questions and get direct answers that are clearly valuable, but check boxes and yes-or-no answers leave much to be desired in the way of detail, nuance, and actual human experience.  How can more arts organizations effectively adopt strategies that will elicit more elaborate and candid responses from their participants?

So many books...

Last Monday I went to the lecture that Bill Ayers and Ryan Alexander-Tanner gave about To Teach: The Journey, in Comics.

I could go on and on about how neat it was to get a behind-the-scenes look at the making of the book, and how cool it was to go through the comics workshop with Ryan afterwards, but the book itself is the obvious star.  I've read it through a time and a half so far, and I imagine it will get a couple more reads before I talk much more about it, but it's added now to the reading list on the right side of this page.  Yay progress!

Also, yesterday I checked out six books from the Flaxman and ordered another four or five from i-Share, all about social justice, Living Newspaper, and education in a multicultural, multiracial setting.  First up:  Becoming and Unbecoming White: Owning and Disowning a Racial Identity .

A big thing to consider...

I need to re-read Lisa Delpit's Other People's Children.  One of the major things I'll be thinking/reading/writing/talking about over the next couple of months is what it means for me- a white, middle class, American woman- to go into and dig around and document an organization that serves largely minority and immigrant populations and- for my specific project- teens from low income families.  How will I navigate that space and document the interactions and the progress and ultimately draw conclusions from my collection of data without setting up a structure of Researcher-Subject that parallels so much of what these kids already deal with on a daily basis (and hate)?  Is it important to be accepted as a part of their group? If so, in which role: as another adult educator or as a peer?  Does it injure my research (both in terms of what I get and how I process it) to become a part of the group rather than a friendly-but-removed observer?  What matters more?  What matters most?

Big questions.  I'm glad to have time to contemplate them and conduct an interview or few on the matter.  Any ideas? Any anecdotes?

FINALLY! A SITE!

After much fretting, much redesigning, and much unanswered outreach, I was beginning to feel like I would never find a fieldwork site.  I do have some fairly specific requirements for my partner-group; They

1. Must be a non-profit organization
2. Must work with underprivileged urban teens
3. Must address and advocate social justice and community building
4. Must employ primarily video in the above endeavor
4. Must employ primarily art (mural, sculpture, theater, dance, video, etc) in the above endeavor
5. Must be in Chicago (my surveys will go to organizations in other places, but I had to be realistic here)
6. Must allow me to document with video the goals and progress of the educators and the teen participants. Sticking point.

But today! Today, over some very tasty sushi and in between political and academic discussions, it was determined that, starting in January, I will follow a group of students at  Insight Arts as they address issues in their immediate community through a theatrical form called Living Newspaper.  I've got a ton of surveys to send to other arts organizations in the meantime and the end of the Insight Arts program will still give me two full months of writing sans fieldwork.  I think this is going to work out just fine.