Promising Practices and a chicken sandwich

The morning started with a keynote speech by Dana Fusco called, "Youth Development--Promoting equity through child and youth agency".  Essentially she explored the question "what happens when school isn't enough?"  When students do not see the significance (link to wesch) in what they are doing, they have a tough time getting motivated to do anything.  Fusco suggests that an after school setting is a good place to inject significance into their learning.  She found that a statistically significant (a different meaning of the word here) difference exists between how middle and high school students feel about "in school" vs. "after school" activities (they find the "after school" experience more enjoyable).  Contributing to the attatchment of significance to after school activities are the following:  strong relationships, celebration of accomplishments, and a relationship between what they are doing to not only their own lives, but to the world.  Basically Fusco says that connection to a greater global good (again link to Wesch), is very important to students--they feel a part of something bigger than just their own lives.  And after school youth develpment groups provide a forum for students to develop connections between what they can contribute on a personal level to the global (or at least a bigger) community.
It was a pretty good start to the day, although the speaker's point was most surely lost on the tens of undergrad students engrossed in whatever was going on in cyber space.  At any given time MANY could be observed retreating to their hand held life lines....not going to lie, it annoyed me.
So off to the first of two workshops:  "Wake Up and Smell the Environmental Racism" put on by ECO youth (Environmental Justice League of RI)

ECO youth is involved with Environmental Justice education--basically they go around giving talks on what Environmental Justice is, but don't really touch on solutions, which is fine, but I didn’t learn much about how to combat environmental injustice in poor urban areas.  So, the content was not really helpful, BUT the keynote was  about youth development and this workshop was put on by high school students---so it was cool to see youth development in action.  Fusco’s keynote in the flesh.  

The next workshop was called "Brain Dominance:  The Neurological Underpinings of Critical Thinking and Social Skills"  Wow, I was excited about this.  But the guy never showed up.  So I went back to the dining hall to see what was up and get a sandwich.  I ended up at a different workshop called "Using Open-Ended Science/ Art Activities to Build Confiddence and Competence".  I felt out of place because it was full of 3rd grade teachers.  But I did take away one nice thought about open vs. closed ended activities (I really like open ended lessons, but I've never been able to figure out how to assess the students).  The instructor suggested to build it into a class participation grade.  Thank you Bonnie Epstein, I will.  

Overall a nice day, some good things to take away.  I was disappointed to find pasta at lunch though.  I ended up buying a chicken sandwich instead.  

GK