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.


                 

Another interview!

Booked with Joey from Power of Hope in Seattle.  Huzzah!

Break time

I never thought "break time" would mean working on my literature review and other written elements of my thesis, but I need to give the outreach a rest. 15 new groups/people emailed/called and I have.... two interviews set, (one with Adam Fletcher, director of the FreeChild Project).  Maybe another couple in the works?  It's unhelpful to speculate on the variety of reasons why I'm having trouble making more headway... I need to mostly cast aside doubt and fear at this point and just do what I can do, when I can do it.

So today's to-do list:
1.  Caffeine.
2.  Make some copies of old theses.
3.  Figure out what other writing it would make sense to start on aside from the lit review.
4.  Make a plan for organizing my historical research on the roots of social justice (which is to say, social reconstructionism) in art, education, and art education.
5.  Start on that.

Oh, and I should update my thesis overview sheets and fix some typos (blarg!) that I noticed in my thesis proposal.  All doable in the next six hours (eh, or maybe not).

Legwork

14 new organizations/people contacted in the past couple of days.  Hopefully some things will start panning out.  It's a frustrated process, trying to convince people to even respond to your email or phone call, let alone actually it down with you for an interview.

If I don't have some responses in the next couple of days, it'll be time for some to hit the streets.  Many of the organizations I'm interested in are located relatively close to each other, on the north(ish) side of Chicago, so it might behoove me to just hop on my bike and pay some in-person visits.

April, April, April.  How is this going to happen?  I'm trying to fight the fear paralysis by just doing more and more outreach, more and more Google searches for variations of "teens", "youth", "art", "social justice", "community building", "activism"....   I've traded a deep sense of dread for a middling sense of dread mixed with frustration.  Good trade?  Surely.

Sticking Points pt 2

Sticking Points:

1.  Does anyone care about this except me?
2.  "You sure didn't pick a very sexy project, did you?  Very nuts and bolts, huh?"
3.  Why won't you respond to my emails?  Is it okay to call you?
4.  I'm so. Far. Behind.
5.  Will this have any effect on my ability to work in this field when I graduate? ... a negative effect??
6.  There's so much I don't know or have.  Where do I start?
7.  There's so much I know and have.  Where do I start?
8.  I want to contribute to the field.
9.  I want to be proud of my final product.
10.  This feels really hard.

But:
"Sometimes things feel hard because they are hard."  After remembering that, I'm in a better position to decide if this hard thing is worth doing, and I'm deciding yes.

More emails out.  More searching.  More writing, soon.  Much, much more.

Sticking Points

Sometimes there is only so much support that a school, department, or mentor can offer.  And sometimes even if they have plenty more to offer, it's not what one wishes to hear at times of crankiness or frustration.  Sometimes all I want to do is commiserate.  When I started to think about this, for a moment I felt so clever:  "Ha! Commiserate? Co-miserable!" but fortunately before I got too pleased with myself it occurred to me that it wasn't much of a mental stretch to spot the root word.  MW says:

Origin of COMMISERATE

Latin commiseratus, past participle of commiserari, from com- + miserari to pity, from miser wretched

First Known Use: 1594

 

(and, further:)

Origin of MISERABLE

Middle English, from Middle French, from Latin miserabilis wretched, pitiable, from miserari to pity, from miser

First Known Use: 15th century

 

So great.  My brain's really running on all cylinders, huh?

Well, earlier today I was thinking about my thesis, mulling over the latest sticking point: The start of my actual site-based fieldwork is pushed back at least a month.  Mid-to-late February.  And I'm supposed to graduate in May?  Present to the symposium in April?  Interesting position to be in, to say the least.  And distressing.  So I was thinking about this, and about my options, about how I handle working under pressure, and I was just starting an email to someone I hope will help me when one of my favorite Art Edders walked into the computer lab where I work.  J is always incredibly kind and cheerful, even when she's very stressed out about her own thesis work, and she's a good listener and a great commiserat...er.  No.  Commissar?  Nope.  One who commiserates.  Talking with her always improves my outlook on the whole thesis situation, and today was no exception.

By the time J left, I had declared my intentions to send three emails, write one blog post, and investigate one organization and one art education/author.  So far I'm at one sent email, one discarded email, one in-progress blog post, and one organization investigation, and that's more than I've been able to do/focus on in... well, it feels like a really long time.  What a boost!

Throughout this time, I've been thinking about why it is that sometimes all I really need is to hear from a supportive peer, "It's not a breeze for me either.  I have doubts, too."  Does it nudge my senses of pride and competition awake?  Maybe sometimes, but that's not really It.  There's just something about having a person with whom I can be honest about my failures and my fear of Failure that helps to set in motion at least some little part of me that's been paralyzed by those things.  Perhaps it feels more like I wrap myself up tight in a plaster cast, every inch of me encased except my eye, ears, and mouth, and then I try to walk around like nothing's different, like I'm still totally capable of doing yoga or building snowmen or carrying all my groceries into the house in one trip... But I'm not totally capable, and instead i just bump into things and gripe about how hard it is! How incapacitated I feel! Paralyzed! And woooe!  Sometimes I can realize what I've done and snap out of it, and that's worthwhile and fulfilling, but sometimes I need more help, even when I don't know it exactly, and then it's so wonderful for somebody to stumble in with cast saw, maybe even one they didn't know they were carrying.

That metaphor got a little out of hand, but I think it does the job.  I need to be more honest and more focused and figure out how to figure some things out.  I'll post again soon touching on other sticking points.  Thanks, J.

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?