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Fighting "Summer Learning Loss": One City's Story |
| This summer in Indianapolis, a two-week storytelling camp led by Y-Press teen journalists turned "summer learning loss" on its head. Youth journalist Jordan Denari offers a close up look at how she and her fellow counselors coached a group of 9- and 10-year-olds to tell the stories of their community through digital photography, audio recordings and interviews, and poetry writing. The campers left "City Stories" armed with the fundamentals of 21st-century journalism. The counselors learned about teaching, inspiration, and multiple perspectives. | |
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Fresh Takes on a Flat World: The Stories Photos Tell |
| For three years, WKCD has partnered with Adobe Youth Voices, working with students on four continents to capture the world around them through digital photography and narratives. We've co-produced more than 50 audio slideshows, three photo essay books, and an international photo competition. Now we've added a mini-curriculum. In a series of short lessons, students use photos culled from our 15,000+ image bank to improve observational skills, expand cultural understanding, hone critical thinking, and practice writing. | |
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Is Homework Deliberate Practice? |
| This summer, WKCD’s Kathleen Cushman launched a blog in connection with her new book, Fires in the Mind: What Kids Can Tell Us About Motivation and Mastery. Here and in the months to come, we will offer quick takes from that conversation. This installment takes up the subject of homework. "Ideally, homework should be 'deliberate practice,' targeting individual areas of need and pushing each student to a new place just within reach," blogs Cushman." But students tell me it rarely works that way." Join the conversation on how we might elevate homework to a new level of deliberate practice. | |
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Urban Teenagers Grow 25,000 Pounds of Organic Produce to Relieve Hunger |
| There's an oasis a mile off of Highway 183 in east Austin, Texas, where industrial sites and waste dumps bump up against apartment complexes and humble homesteads. A handpainted sign points up a dirt road: Urban Roots. This land in a hidden curve of the Colorado River is a cultivated organic farm where youth work the soil from 8 am to 3 pm, learn the principles of sustainable agriculture, grow fruit, vegetables, and flowers, and share their produce with people in poverty. The interns earn a stipend of $40 a day for working seven hours a day, but money isn't their first motivation. | |
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Guns, Germs, and School: Young New Yorkers Probe the Problems of Their Age |
| At a recent meeting of social science researchers, a youth dressed up as "Dr. Researchy" took the stage. Clutching a sheaf of papers, he mumbled his supposed academic findings about “this problematic situation” of urban adolescents. From across the audience, one could hear young people’s voices calling out in protest. One by one, the young members of New York City's "Polling for Justice" research team brought their political theater to the stage—and their own conclusions from a study that was collaborative, youth-led, outspoken, and authentic. | |
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Afterschool Matters: Youth Speak Out |
| Under a warm April sun on the West Lawn of the White House, 600 parents, students, educators, and youth advocates from Vermont to Texas took their seats. They had gathered with one goal in mind: to rally against proposed cuts to federal funding that would shrink afterschool options for youth nationwide. Whether they spoke out as legislators or from more ordinary perspectives, all knew the power of afterschool programs to change young lives. It was the teenage speakers, however, that brought the audience to its feet. | |
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Boyle Heights Through the Eyes of its Youth |
| What can high school students in an urban neighborhood on the East Side of Los Angeles learn from young people almost 10,000 miles away, in a rural village in Tanzania? Plenty. A transformative experience began for a group of Roosevelt High School teenagers when Steve Mereu, their teacher at the School of Law and Government, introduced his senior class to a WKCD photo essay book in which East African youth documented their everyday lives.Mereu and his students were joining an extraordinary grass-roots movement of teachers and students across the globe to show their communities—from Philadelphia to the smallest village in Japan—from the perspective of young people. |
