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Published: February 19th 2012
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Community Views of Youth
Students brainstorming the positive and negative images that the community has about its youth. Four months have passed in the flash of an eye… a whirlwind of lesson planning, managing behaviours, trying new strategies, ditching said strategies, all the while tottering on the edge of a plate much too full for one’s own good. Despite the rocky road that the first few months of my teaching career have been, I have also learned a great deal – about myself, the demanding nature of this job, and the many sides of my students. Not a day goes by that I do not reflect on one or more of these topics! Alas, the halfway mark has been reached, incredibly enough. We are now entering into the last four months of the academic year, and time seems to be speeding by faster then ever.
Despite many challenging times in the classroom over the last few months, I have also been able to do some exciting projects with my class. The most recent of these endeavours has involved a partnership with the non-profit organization Right to Play. Over the last two years, RTP has designed and piloted a number of programs for Aboriginal youth in Canada, including the Youth Leadership Program, which I have had the pleasure of
Negative views brainstorm...
At the end of the activity, the purpose was to create a visual of getting rid of the negative views, and focusing on the positive ways that the community views youth in order to build on this. implementing in my classroom. Upon learning of the program through a friend who works with the organization, I decided it would be an interesting project to take on with my class.
Essentially, the Youth Leadership Program is a series of modules designed to build self-esteem, confidence, and the leadership abilities of youth to create change within their communities. While each module focuses on developing leadership and event planning skills, the end result is a little different in each one. In the first module, which I just finished implementing in my classroom, the end goal was to have the kids plan and run an event in their community. What a journey it’s been!
Over the last five weeks, I incorporated many of the activities outlined in the first module. This included defining leadership and having guest speakers in the community come and speak about leadership, including the chief and an active member of a community event-planning group here in Fort Hope. It also meant exploring how the kids thought the community viewed youth, how they viewed themselves, the issues and assets they thought their community possessed, all the while building their leadership and teamwork skills. Being integrated into a
classroom setting, I also found a lot of ways to tie the program into the curriculum. It gave the class an amazing opportunity to practice their oral communication skills in the form of public speaking and listening through a variety of presentations. In order to learn how to budget for their event, I tied the money unit in math into the budgeting activities from the YLP. I also had the kids practice their leadership skills by taking turns planning and running our daily physical activity periods for two weeks – a venture which was so widely enjoyed by the kids that I no longer have to plan DPA myself!
The culminating aspect of this whole process was to have the kids choose an event they wanted to run, plan it down to the last detail, and run it. And did they ever! Through an egalitarian voting system, the class decided that they wanted to run a dance, a popular weekend activity in the community. Over the course of three weeks, the kids worked in smaller groups, called Action Teams, to plan out the necessary parts of holding a successful dance – Music, Food & Drinks, Lights & Equipment, Dance
Contests, and Recruiting. The students worked really hard to plan out what they would need to do before the dance, during the dance, and after the dance to make it a success.
The night of the dance dawned on February 3
rd and I was a bit apprehensive – would people show up; would the kids pull their weight; would parents show up to help out? Turns out that a big YES was the answer to all those questions! There were over 100 people that showed up that night, and the kids really stepped up to the plate. I saw them demonstrate so much positive leadership that I couldn’t help but smile all night. There were kids covering the canteen, getting pop and food for customers and counting change. There were other students who were the sole DJ’s for the night making sure that the good tunes kept on pumping. And there were students who kept the dance alive by getting on the microphone and having a variety of dance contests such as Best Shuffler, Group Dance, Kids Only, Adults Only, and a crowd favourite, “Moves like Adam” (where dancers were asked to mimic the dance moves of an awesome
youth dancer in the community in order to win). Dance contests are a popular way of getting people out on the dance floor out in Fort Hope with incentives like cash prizes, food, iTunes gift cards, etc. The kids did a great job of running the contests and selecting the winners!
Overall, I was so impressed with their efforts and the work that the class put into making the event successful. I could tell by the excitement that buzzed around them throughout the night and the pride on their faces at the end that they were pumped at not only having planned the dance, but that they had successfully pulled it off! A comment I heard a lot in the early stages was “we’re actually going to run our own dance?!”. This compared to their comments at the end asking if people had a good time supporting their youth leadership and their ability to reflect on what went well and what they could work on for next time has shown me the ways that they have grown throughout this project.
After the students had their event, I also had the good fortune to attend Right to Play’s training
for the Youth Leadership Program. At the training, I got to meet and network with 60 people involved in the program, including community mentors from some of the 38 communities that are implementing this program on their reserves across Ontario. Most of the communities implementing this program have a full time community mentor who runs this program with a variety of youth groups both inside and outside of the classroom. As Fort Hope currently does not have a community mentor, I signed a partnership agreement with the organization to implement their program in my classroom. The training was designed to bring community mentors together to share successes, challenges, and to forge networks between community programs, while at the same time training mentors on the newest module of the program. It was an excellent training, complete with a lot of hands on learning, practicing facilitation skills and getting to know some very interesting people. The training has inspired me to continue to find ways to engage with this program throughout the rest of the year in my classroom. As the newest module is designed to engage youth in discussions surrounding issues in their community and how to plan events that can address these issues in either short or long term ways, I am hoping to tie this into a social science unit on Local History & Current Events with a focus on social action. More on that as the next few months unfold!
That brings me to the end of my update for now – otherwise, life continues at a dizzying speed. The combination of planning and assessment by weekend, teaching by day, running after school clubs such as the Girl Power Group, and having a personal life, its easy to see how the end of February has crept on me so quickly! Looking forward to the approaching ice fishing season and the beginning of spring – pictures to come in the following months!
All the best,
Courtney
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