After reading "All: At Our Best Introduction" ( Gretchen Brion-Meisels, Deepa Sriya Vasudevan, and Jessica Tseming Fei ) and "Why Couldn't That Have Been Me? Reflections on Confronting Adultism in Education Organizing Spaces" (Luk, Schuettge, Catone, + Perez ), the five bullet points that struck out to me was: 1."Authentic youth leadership- young people having power and agency to make decisions affecting their lives and their communities." (Luk, Schuettge, Catone, + Perez). I strongly agree with the idea that young people should have an opinion on decisions that affect their lives and their community. After all they are the ones who have to reap either the benefits or consequences of the decision that gets made! 2."Just because adults step back does not mean that they do not have the responsibility to support young people's leadership. Authentic youth leadership is represented not by a space where youth are left to fight for their own liber...
When I had first started my position at my organization, my coworkers were thrilled to see a woman of color hired! One of my coworkers, who had already been with the organization for over 5 years, had told me that up until a year before I was hired, there was absolutely no diversity within the organization. That in every staff meeting, he would look around the room and be the only minority face at the table (he's Asian ). One day he spoke up at one of the staff meetings and asked the question of how can this organization fully support the youth they serve, the prominent majority being black and brown youth, when only one out of the twenty staff here is of color and actually lives in the city that we serve? After that, the directors really started on ponder on what my co worker had been saying. They hired two Latina staff shortly after and a year later, hired two African American women (myself included). But that was only half the battle. One challenge that I initially faced withi...
One stereotype about young people was discussed in the video, Child Development Core Story Part 2: Save and Return. The video discusses the common judgement that families in low income neighborhoods aren't able to have the proper resources to care and support their children. Without this care and support, children lack brain architecture that gives them an advantage not only in academics but better social skills, emotional regulation and a higher ability to learn than a child lacking positive adult attention. That without this healthy brain architecture , students are more prone to falling behind in school and never catching up. This brings me back to my own childhood as when I was three years old my mother enrolled me into the Head Start program. Head Start was pretty much a free preschool that not only taught me social, emotional and academic skills, but they also helped me with my behavior (I was a bit of a handful). Head Start was honestly the best thing that happened for me...
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