So much more

Since we last blogged, I have interviewed Joey Ashenbrenner, Program Director at Power of Hope in Seattle, WA, and Arnold Aprill, Founding and Creative Director of Chicago Arts Partnerships in Education (CAPE) here in Chicago.  Also, I've eaten a lot of chocolate, but that is besides the point.

Joey and I talked a lot about how PoH approaches its youth programs and the importance placed on ideas of relevance, community, and leadership.  We also discussed the specifics of how PoH conducts organizational assessments, and concerns related to evaluations based on the Developmental Assets Profile (DAP) and similar models of categorizing youth.

Arnold and I spent more time on the development of CAPE and on the necessity and practice of combining "layered research", art, and traditional school subjects to achieve to happier, more successful, more engaged, more empowered students.  My mind was pretty blown by the end of our discussion, and I'm very excited to start editing the video footage of the interview so I can listen again to everything we covered.

So what now?  Well, after another interview at CAPE with two of their program associates on Friday morning, I'll begin my on-site fieldwork is set to begin (yikes!) at Insight Arts.  To prepare, tomorrow I'll interview Craig Harshaw, IA's Executive Director, to get a broad sense of Insight Arts as a whole and the Living Newspaper project in particular.   Craig teaches a couple of different classes here at SAIC, (I've taken both and wish there were more!), and from the first day of Social Theory for Artists, my life was noticeably different.  By the end of my first semester here, thanks to Craig, I finally had the theoretical background and the contemporary vocabulary to really verbalize and act on things I'd been thinking about and feeling for so long.  He has played an important role in the direction my proper adult life has taken in the past year and a half, so I'm thrilled to finally be starting some hands-on work with the organization he helped to found.  /gush

What else?  I need to start video journaling.  This blog has been a good, flat way to track my progress (and vent about my lack of progress), but given my intention to produce an "alternative thesis" by June (more on that later) I'm realizing I should have been vlogging post-interview reflections since the very beginning, way back last year with Steve from EVC.  I'll probably have to block off chunks of time on my two open weekdays to re-watch each interview and then record my feelings about it.  Soon I'll be caught up and hopefully nobody will hold the staging against me...

I've got a while longer here at work tonight and then I need to go home and extract an mp3 of my conversation last week with Adam Fletcher.  With his permission, I'll post a bit of it up here in the next few days (for real this time).  After our first Thesis II group meeting last night I realized a couple of things: 1. I'm so glad I'm not in the teaching certification program. Those poor kids have it worse than we do as far as their timeline to finish, and it seems to have given them a very gloomy complex!  2. I'm actually looking forward to the nose+grindstone thing again.  Funny how that happens.  3. My thesis does not have to be finished before the Symposium in May.  Why didn't anyone make this clear a very long time ago?  We technically have all summer to write and rewrite and finish? What??  WHEW!!!  Somehow I'm more motivated now.  At some point I crossed that line where pressure shifts from being motivating to being paralyzing, and now that I have official confirmation that that need not be the case, I'm back at 100%, I think.  What a change a meeting makes.

Some exciting reads for the week:
Champions of Change: The Impact of Arts on Learning
All of this

Lots of emails sent.  New interview on the horizon.  This long blog post.  Now to work on my thesis Introduction until 9pm.  Go, go, go!

Radical Hopefulness

Earlier today I had a really great conversation with Adam Fletcher of the FreeChild Project.  I'll try to post some excerpts in the coming days.  He had so much to say about how to engage and empower youth, and our discussion of critical pedagogy and its principles as applied to education reminded me of the importance of proactively embracing radical hopefulness and radical love.

Here are some videos of some of the thinker-doers touched on today:

Henry Giroux:

Paulo Freire:

Cornell West:

                    Well, just click here for a great interview with Colbert.