Cracking the code: How the youngest generation is “Standing Up”

by Emily Weinstein and Paromita De

A pervasive narrative portrays contemporary youth as more plugged-in to their social networks than into social issues. Stand Up!: 75 Young Activists Who Rock the World And How You Can, Too! makes a case for the converse through its collection of stories about young people dedicated to making a difference. The new volume, edited by John Schlimm, shines a light on the dedication and determination of these youth and endeavors to motivate other young people to pursue activism. The book’s message – that “you can [do it], too” – is a sentiment we subscribe to as researchers who care deeply about youth engagement. Yet, in the process of highlighting inspiring stories of young activists, the book also raises important questions about who is civically engaged, and how they are getting involved. These questions, and lessons drawn from the volume, are crucial if we intend to widen the breadth of young people who are engaged.

The book’s vignettes portray activists who range in both age and interests. Featured youth include a brother and sister who started working to protect endangered species at ages 3 and 5, a 9 year-old who collects donated toys to be given to children who have lost their belongings in fires, a 14 year-old who raises awareness on water issues, and a college graduate who advocates nutritious eating habits for elementary school students by cultivating a student-tended garden. What unites these students is their passion – for each, an idea or issue is so captivating that it moves them to action. Similar to trends mentioned in Barendsen’s paper on Social Entrepreneurs, many of the young activists trace their passion to life-changing experiences, such as suffering from an illness or being exposed to other’s hardships.

Another common thread across many of the featured stories was the importance of “supporters” – often parents or other adults around them who could not only encourage their passion, but also serve as resources to these young activists. These adults played instrumental roles in helping youth actualize their civic goals: a mother who made an important connection with a non-profit group to incorporate her teenage son’s initiative to provide donations to veterans; a father who contacted a local news station to publicize his blind, 7-year-old son’s mission to bring Braille labels to grocery stores; another father who organized a group of climbers to accompany his 8 year-old young son and he for their climb up Mount Kilimanjaro to fundraise for a cure for Duchenne; parents who helped their 6 year-old son found an organization that works to make hospital experiences better for sick children by arranging visits from National Hockey League players and providing toys and games.

It appears that this combination of passion and support is a profound recipe for engagement and “civic success.”  But given this apparent nexus, we wonder how we can support youth who may be concerned about an issue but do not have similar resources? It is certainly admirable of parents to encourage social consciousness and participatory citizenship among their children, but not all youth are situated in families or communities where adults have the time and resources to help young people turn their civic tendencies into established projects. Is having supporting adults around youth to inspire them to think about causes a necessary condition for these youth to be civically engaged? If so, how can we extend key supports to help all youth to engage in and create solutions for society?  Further, many of the young activists discuss the influence of supporting adults on their interest in civic engagement in the first place. They note how a parent or another adult first discussed an issue with them, which in turn evoked a sense of compassion and a related interest in activism. As for youth whose parents may not be civically engaged themselves, how can we provide them with requisite awareness and resources to see themselves as change agents?

The vignettes reiterate the importance of ensuring that young people’s emerging passions are met with critical supports to help them translate ideas into activism. Perhaps unsurprisingly, we’re left with the conclusion that caring adults who serve as role models and mentors have a uniquely positive influence on youth’s goals and their paths to reach them. Linking more youth with caring, engaged adults or with instrumental supports to help them turn their interests into action is a worthwhile endeavor for civic engagement initiatives. Programs like Mikva Challenge are already supporting youth in these ways, and organizations like DoSomething.org are exploring the possibility of delivering supports for youth engagement through digital technologies.

In a different vein, the vignettes also raise a question for us about narratives of “civic success,” particularly related to one element that is the cornerstone to success stories in any domain: failure. Although several stories mention moments or instances that cause students to backtrack their efforts or feel temporarily discouraged (such as a middle school student, who grew up to be a special education teacher, being teased by his classmates for being labeled as ‘emotionally disturbed’), the vast majority of stories tend to focus more prominently on the interest, achievements and outcomes related to these young people’s initiatives. On one hand, the focus on positive elements of each story contributes to the message that activism is accessible to all (it’s hard to imagine feeling like ‘you can do it too’ after reading a collection of stories about people who couldn’t). But, if we “sugarcoat” stories about failure or create an impression that success, achievement and recognition are hallmarks of civic engagement, we risk providing an incomplete picture of what civic engagement entails.  Even if youth are motivated to become engaged, they may not persevere when they begin encountering challenges—and they almost certainly will, since social issues tend to exist in the first place because they are difficult to solve. If we want to prepare young people for sustained civic engagement, we need to be upfront about the rewards and the challenges they may encounter, in order to set the critical groundwork for both an orientation toward achieving “civic success” and a “civic resilience” that allows activists to see initiatives through in spite of obstacles.

Stand Up! provides an impressive array of stories that can open young people’s minds to the possibility of activism. The vignettes reinforce the message that youth can take issues that matter to them and become leaders in creating change. At the same time, the collection surfaces questions about the factors that facilitate youth “rock[ing] the world.” Schlimm is unquestionably successful in crafting a different narrative about 21st century youth than often pervades the popular press – and we’re thrilled to see stories that shift the focus from the art of the selfie to the power of selfless activism.

Some Thoughts about Good Collaboration

by Lynn Barendsen

I have recently returned from a thought-provoking meeting, and write here to share some reflections.  For almost two decades, our Good Project team has been investigating Good Work, and more recently we have expanded our research to include investigations into Good Play, Good Citizenship, and Good Life.  In particular, I have been tasked with considering the legacy of the Good Project:  our impact in and beyond the classroom and our influence within the broader conversation among educational organizations, social movements, and changemakers.

In San Francisco, I attended the quarterly meeting of Eric Liu’s Civic Collaboratory.  Our thanks to Eric Liu for inviting us to attend the Collaboratory (Howard Gardner and I have both attended, on separate occasions) – the opportunity to participate gives us the opportunity to connect (and potentially work) with many who share our interests.  Similarly we hope to contribute substantively to the work and ideas put forward by the Collaboratory group. Our involvement with this network has given me new insight into what it takes to collaborate well.

First, a bit about the Collaboratory.  Part of Citizen University (formerly known as the Guiding Lights Network), the Civic Collaboratory is the brainchild of Eric Liu, writer, “civic entrepreneur” and former speechwriter for the Clinton White House.  The collaboratories are invitation-only working meetings, gathering leaders of civic and democratic organizations, activists, writers and researchers from the worlds of education, business, law, science, art, politics and technology.  The shared goal of this non-partisan group is to invigorate citizenship and democracy in the US.

Clearly this is a “can do” group. During each meeting, a few members of the Collaboratory present a major initiative or question to the entire group.  The rest of the members are expected to provide not only feedback but also genuine, real commitments of time, energy and resources.  This format, dubbed the “Rotating Credit Club,” is taken seriously:  in addition to commitments made during the session, members of the Collaboratory are also encouraged to work together in between sessions.

An example: Jacqueline Smith, Advisor to the President for Social Embeddedness at Arizona State University, is tasked with helping to design ASU’s Public Service Academy. Jacqueline and colleagues are thinking about the kinds of leaders we might need in the future, hope to graduate “collaborative leaders of character,” and “redefine what public service is in our country.”  To accomplish these goals, the Public Service Academy is creating a Social Impact Training Corps (SITC), a civilian version of the Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC). ASU, the largest public university in the country, has 73,000 students across four campuses in the Phoenix metropolitan area; this is a project with big potential impact.  Jacqueline asked the Collaboratory for immediate feedback (e.g. would you hire a SITC graduate) and for longer-term help (how can we spread this idea).   One participant from Change.org said he’d happily hire a graduate because they had already been vetted.  A fellow from a major foundation suggested Jacqueline consider how to pull returning veterans into the model and contact the Tillman Foundation.

I am still learning the ins and outs of this network, but there are a few critical elements that make me optimistic that the Collaboratory will be an example of “good” collaboration.  Each of these elements, present here in practice, have been identified as crucial in our research on Good Collaboration:

-The delineation of responsibilities is clear.  Interestingly, it is up to the individual who is doing the asking to follow up with all connections made.

-The collaborative process is clearly laid out and consistent from one meeting to the next.

-Goals are articulated at the outset, revisited at the end of each meeting, and explained in between quarterly gatherings.

-Attendees, or collaborators, are all present because they want to be.  Participation has not been imposed upon anyone.

Attention to these nuts-and-bolts make me hopeful that actual change may be achieved by this group, for example, opportunities for local impact (community gardens, senior centers) are increased by broadening the reach of new organizations like Citizenvestor, new technologies like google plus “hangouts” can be utilized to improve the civic and cultural dialogues that are going on around us constantly.  I have personally connected with three participants since the meeting, in each case discerning potential projects that could encourage good collaborative work in new venues.

Over the years, my colleagues and I have written quite a bit about what it takes to do Good Work, acknowledging that carrying out high quality, ethically responsible work is anything but easy.  We began to study collaboration because we were curious to determine why it is that some collaborations go well while so many fail. We believe that collaborative skills are increasingly important in an age when interconnectedness is the norm.  At the same time, one needs to be very wary of pseudo connectedness and pseudo collaboration – like, for example, the teenager with 1000 “friends” who has no one to turn to when in need.

The connection between Good Work and collaboration is more direct than I previously realized.  In Gardens of Democracy, Liu and co-author Nick Hanauer rework several common beliefs about that basic democratic notion, “self-interest.”   For example, “It’s survival of the fittest – only the strong survive” becomes “It’s survival of the smartest – only the cooperative survive” and “rugged individualism wins” becomes “teamwork wins”.  We exist in a world that is constantly connected, where workers across sectors are always “on” and are regularly asked to communicate between multiple cultural understandings.  Perhaps, Good Work in the 21st century faces too many challenges to be achieved in isolation; perhaps, Good Work in the 21st century is necessarily collaborative.

Caution – Construction Site: Using the GoodWork Toolkit in the Classroom

by Shernaz Minwalla

As the Academic Research Program Director at University Liggett School in Grosse Pointe Woods, Michigan, I use the GoodWork Toolkit while teaching students about the research process to have them understand the importance of reflecting on their values and to see how these values impact different aspects of their research. These aspects include but are not limited to their choice of topics, the way they conduct research, the way they cite sources, and the way they interact with their peers and mentors. Good Work was first introduced to me by Wendy Fischman, a researcher for Project Zero, when ULS was first designing the Academic Research Program, specifically to create lesson plans that would involve the students in an exploration of their values and the challenges to doing excellent, engaging, and ethical work. Wendy and fellow researcher, Lynn Barendsen, were able to visit with research class members and note the breadth and depth of the projects chosen. Projects  entailed topics such as the effects of music on OCD symptoms, futurism, the Detroit Public School System, and ecologically-friendly paint for artists. Wendy and Lynn shared their knowledge of Good Work with Liggett’s pre-k through twelve faculty, which led to other uses of the Good Work Toolkit, such as with the Fine and Performing Arts Players Board, advisory, and even faculty meetings. At the GoodWork Conference in March 2013, Phil Moss, Chairperson for the Arts Department, and I engaged participants in activities we use in our courses. More importantly, we met with many wonderful people embracing the need to incorporate the Good Work philosophy in our practices. When asked to teach a mini-course on Good Work at the Project Zero Summer Institute, I just assumed that everyone attending the conference was familiar with the Good Project ideas.  Because this was not the case, it gave Wendy and I an opportunity to explain the philosophy and history for the design of Good Work and its uses.

Although their toolkits didn’t contain hammers and screwdrivers, teachers at the Project Zero Summer Institute 2013 used markers, poster paper, sticky notes and materials from the GoodWork Toolkit to construct an environment conducive to learning about Good Work. To establish their preliminary thoughts about excellent work, participants wrote three words, two questions, and one metaphor or simile that came to mind, applying the 3-2-1 routine from Making Thinking Visible. Because teachers are active people, they stretched their legs and minds to engage in activities and discussions to answer the question,” what is excellent work?” Posters with characteristics of good journalists, artists, business people, educators, and students hung on the wall. Partners explained why various objects around the room were good examples of excellent work,  ranging from a coffee mug to intricately designed scarves.

After a flurry of activity, participants slowed the learning down and took some time to reflect on their own work goals and their definition of success. Sharing initiatives and challenges with a new friend or two provided an opportunity to note similarities and possibly come up with new ideas. Participants were then given some quiet time to read one of many vignettes from the toolkit,” Silence isn’t always golden.” Follow-up group discussions were rich with examples of how the story relates to the many roadblocks our students face today to doing good work. Teachers also noted that, “it’s easier for students to talk about somebody else’s situation rather than their own, so the vignettes are great because they are interviews of real people dealing with real dilemmas.”

Spread out over the floor or on a window sill, participants used the Value Sort to rank their values, an activity that many claim “hurts their brain.” The activity allows students to see what values drive their work at home, at school, on the athletic fields, or on stage. Participants in the session were able to review the session through the Compass Points routine from Making Thinking Visible. We shared our excitements, questions, and suggestions for implementing Good Work in the classroom. Some stated that they will conduct GoodWork Toolkit activities during advisory time, while others suggested faculty meetings and theater groups. At the end of the session, teachers left with an intangible toolkit of their own – activities, routines, and most importantly, new friends.

How Moments of Good Transformed My High School

by Molly Freed

It was a rare sunny day in a stretch of bleary days in Seattle, so most of the Chief Sealth International (CSI) High School students had shed their jackets and were sporting their World Water Week (WWW) festival t-shirts. In the far corner, my team of highly skilled freshmen and sophomores helped some participants don sheets to affix their five gallon water jugs to their backs. Others had already grabbed a jug and started running. I knew this would stop soon when the blisters on their hands started smarting, and the realization of what “40 pounds” really meant had hit them. Some of our Student Body officers had already begun handing out raffle tickets to those students who were taking the exercise seriously, demonstrating good work ethic, or helping others. They would run out of tickets in ten minutes. I watched some of our East African students demonstrate the way that they had carried water when they lived in Ethiopia, and how they kicked it once their arms got tired. I watched our security guard, Jimbo, make his 31st lap of the day, and Mr. Ezeonwu enjoy the points and gleeful shouts that accompanied his first lap balancing the water on his head. In that moment, I knew that I had actually succeeded in providing our community with a small and heavily diluted glimpse of what it is like for millions of children around the world who must carry water to their families every day.

Because of this moment and hundreds like it that were experienced during WWW, and despite all the stress and sweat and coffee, my team decided to put on WWW again. And again. And though I wasn’t there to facilitate after my own graduation, other students (nearly 80 of them!) stepped up to lead what is still a behavior-altering festival three years later.

Let’s be honest, doing good work is not always the number one concern of a high school student. Especially not at CSI High School in Seattle, where I was among the 75 percent that graduated in 2011. Most of us were either focused on graduating on time, juggling part time jobs, or trying to shine on our college applications. In crunch time, my friends were using library computers to finish applications, and choosing between after-school activities and babysitting their siblings. Sacrifices in excellence, engagement, or even ethics occasionally had to be made.

I was lucky. I was surrounded by a network of some of the most inspirational, hard-working, and diverse high school students in the city, and yet I had been raised with massive amounts of support and opportunity that many of my fellow students had not. This combination (thanks Mom and Dad!) granted me the unique ability to apply to the Bezos Scholars Program (BSP) in 2010, a leadership development program that fully funds the journey of 12 rising seniors and their educators from across the country to meet at the Aspen Ideas Festival. Once there, we participated in discussions around the most pressing issues of our time. We also had small group meetings with change-makers from around the world who were doing good work to address these issues.

The most essential part of the Program, however, was the leadership training that equipped me to bring the experience back to Seattle and the halls of Chief Sealth. I was tasked with creating a Local Ideas Festival (LIF) in my own community, and engaging them on an issue of my choosing. My BSP Educator Noah Zeichner and I chose to focus on water (but honestly it was kind of a non-decision, since it encompassed poverty, hunger, education and health – issues we were both passionate about).We put this passion into action by launching WWW, which we hoped would mobilize our school and community by connecting critical needs in our own backyard to water issues around the globe.

As we started planning our festival in August, we set lofty goals. Reality set in around December, when we realized that the to-do list on Mr. Zeichner’s whiteboard covered an entire wall, I was studying for finals and applying to colleges, and Mr. Zeichner was essentially working three jobs with a newborn daughter at home. We relied on the passion of our faculty, the unrelenting energy of our student team, and the faith and support provided by community stakeholders to get us through winter.

As spring and the week of our festival arrived, so too did grant money, nationally renowned speakers, and current Governor Jay Inslee. We ate homemade Mexican food provided by the moms of some of our team, and we (under)sold shirts and water bottles to attendees and students. We painted posters after school, choreographed and chickened out of doing a flash mob, and raised about $3,000 for Water 1st International.

On the final day of WWW, as students cycled through their choice of 17 different locally and globally themed water workshops, I took the time to actually absorb what was happening. I was running the Walk for Water, and I had just finished hyping up the kids and their teachers by pitting them against the other study halls and challenging them to carry more water than 7 year old girls in developing nations must carry every day. I saw variations of this scene repeated throughout the day, in every session I attended, among a demographic that’s usually painted as the most apathetic in our society.

Upon reflection, I don’t think these students participated or stepped up to lead because they were passionate about water – I don’t even think I did it because I was passionate about water. It was a huge factor, obviously, and I’m pretty confident it’s an issue I will work with for the rest of my life. Yet the components of my festival experience that I remember most vividly could have revolved around any world issue. The parts that I remember were truly moments of good work – little moments where high school students, faculty, or community members found themselves in a position to make a difference, and took it. A girl giving up her allowance to help build a well. A teacher breaking from her curriculum of 20 years to do a unit on our local watershed. A parent telling his children stories of his own experience with water scarcity.

So no, doing good work isn’t easy in high school. The structures are rigid, and the models of success are often narrow. Mr. Zeichner and I knew that operating inside of this paradigm wouldn’t impact our students. We knew that in order to inspire we had to produce examples of good that students could relate to across a huge spectrum of interests and passions. In the same way that I had been ignited by my experience at the Aspen Ideas Festival, we wanted to create a ripple effect that would radiate out from WWW.

Most high school students have way too many things to think about, especially in communities of lower socio-economic class. Surrounding them with an environment of positive examples, igniting their interests and capturing their attention made them want to do good. That’s what we did with WWW, and that’s what we think will be successful for other school-wide festivals that want to make an impact.

Molly Freed is a 2010 Bezos Scholar and rising junior at Scripps College in Claremont, CA. 

The Bezos Scholars Program @ the Aspen Institute is a year-long leadership development program for public high school juniors and educators to put their education into action. It begins with a scholarship to the Aspen Ideas Festival and continues through the following school year when Bezos Scholar teams return home to launch sustainable, Local Ideas Festivals that transform their schools and communities. Learn more: www.bezosfamilyfoundation.org/Scholars, www.facebook.com/BSPAspen, twitter.com/BezosScholars 

Backchannel Etiquette is a Matter of Good Work

by Amma Marfo

“#NACA13 the awkward moment when bubba sparks [sic] was here the entire weekend and people just now noticed it”

“I’m at a wake…no wait im [sic] at block booking. Can we use 5 hour energy instead of paddles?#NACA13”

“Go home#NACA13, you’re drunk”

The snippets above are excerpts from a backchannel, or a collection of messages arranged topically, of thousands of Tweets sent during the 2013 National Association for Campus Activities Conference in Nashville, TN. NACA is a professional organization for student activities; its conferences target higher education professionals and professional vendors, and is heavily attended by college-aged students. A concern voiced in the latter half of the conference was the disturbingly frequent use of the backchannel as a means to demean performers, conduct inappropriate or irrelevant discussions, and belittle individual attendees. My colleague Christopher Conzen of Suffolk County Community College (NY) and I tasked ourselves with the composition of an article for the governing body’s magazine, designed to drive home a simple point: conscientious behavior on a backchannel, particularly for the backchannel of a conference, is a matter of GoodWork. The piece will appear in the Campus Activities Programming magazine this fall.  In this essay, I report how the GoodWork tenets of Mission and the Mirror Test (Personal and Professional versions) create a means for students to be more aware of the effects of their backchannel messages on themselves and others and to act more conscientiously when authoring backchannel messages.

Let me first unpack explain the term “backchannel”. At conferences, a backchannel can be collected from social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, or even Instagram, and used by those at the conference to keep in touch with attendees and follow up on questions from presentations. The backchannel can also serve as a record of conference proceedings, for those unable to attend but wishing to follow along from home. With all that said, the integrity of a backchannel is necessarily tied to its proper use. Improper or impolite use of a backchannel may mean that the information shared loses credibility, as do those who share it.

I found that the GoodWork Project provides a framework that has proved useful for helping students (and to a certain extent, professionals) attending the conference to understand the many lenses through which their 140 character messages might be viewed. By recommending impressions of the Mission and Mirror Test tenets to emphasize the importance of excellence, ethics, and engagement, we simplified a conversation that otherwise is fraught with “what if’s, “what abuts, and a multitude of qualifying questions. Here’s how we found these tenets to be applicable to promoting more responsible engagement with the backchannel.

(1) Mission

As professional members and occasional volunteers for the National Association for Campus Activities, Chris and I are aware of the mission of the organization. However, it was quickly apparent over the course of the conference that student delegates, as well as less involved professionals, might not be. The mission is as follows:

The National Association for Campus Activities™ (NACA) advances campus activities in higher education through a business and learning partnership, creating educational and business opportunities for its school and professional members.

The operative term, when considering backchannel etiquette, is “creating educational and business opportunities”. Messages rife with crudeness and designed to demean individuals contribute little to that goal. As such, we encourage advisors to caution students that statements of this nature not only compromise the spirit of the organization, but are a clear sign of disengagement from the learning opportunity at hand.  Additionally, viewers may soon question the credibility of the message’s author. To keep mission in mind, we posited, is to ensure that any messages sent identifying the organization are consistent with its key goals.

(2) Mirror Test, Personal Version

For many students, NACA is one of few opportunities to meet fellow students around the country that program for their campuses. Connections are made and networking occurs. Students ask their new connections to “friend” or “follow” them and these brief messages form the basis of new relationships. In what manner do these messages serve to mirror? That is to say, are the messages they send reflecting their true personalities? Or are Tweets, Instagram pictures, and Facebook posts with the conference tag creating “funhouse” versions of these students, versions that are not consistent with whom they believe themselves to be?

More and more, we are seeing that our students (and again, some professionals are still learning too!) aren’t fully aware of how they appear to others via their social media presence. I’ve tried to use the GoodWork tenets to help student affairs professionals guide students toward a more authentic expression of their daily lives. So many colleagues and friends I’ve spoken with about social media have become disillusioned with the negativity it seems to breed. Messages that darkened the feed of the NACA conference seemed to be fueled by an underlying current of negativity. This perceived pessimism can affect how competent, engaged, or ethical people appear. Instead I urge contemplation and redirection of frustration to balance perspectives shared online. But above all, we encourage those who work with students to invite the questions “When they read your tweets or Facebook posts about the event, what kind of person will they see in those messages? And does that image match the person you are the other 360 days of the year, when you’re not at an NACA event?”

(3) Mirror Test, Professional Version

Working in campus activities, or in any leadership role on a college campus, can inform one’s professional endeavors, both in skills learned and career paths taken. And although it has become cliché to call students’ attention to the “electronic trail” they’re leaving for potential employers to follow, we reminded students that posts can be seen by anyone viewing the conference tag. What’s more, those who wish to work in student affairs could be unexpectedly highlighting these posts, ensuring potential supervisors see them. Additionally, we widened that scope to include fellow students who could be selecting them for student leadership positions. In the absence of an understanding of NACA and what the organization does, posts could be seen as cruel, unprofessional, and off-putting, thus hindering their chances for selection.

So with these points all addressed, how should those who are stewards of GoodWork try to instill those principles in students?

●        Act when you see something questionable. Be it reaching out online, or using social media platforms as conduits to facilitate a face to face conversation, feel empowered to “call out” bad behavior and start a conversation about it.

●        Respond to concerns or complaints voiced. Often messages of frustration or even seeming indifference are a veiled request to be heard. Once you act, be open to helping the disgruntled party solve a problem. Your response could engender good will and help change his or her mindset about the organization.

●        Model how you want those around you to behave. There is a Chinese proverb, “Hearing something five hundred times is not as good as seeing it once.” To garner proper behavior from students and colleagues, you must show them what you believe excellent, ethical, and engaged dialogue looks like. Set an authentic standard. Chances are, they will follow suit.

Have you seen problems with backchannel use in your students or colleagues? How was it resolved? What methods worked for you?