Final Project: Inclusion and Media Literacy

Curr 501 Final Project: Inclusion and Media Literacy 

 Throughout my YDev MA program, which has culminated in this Media Literacy course, I focused on topics, literature reviews and research around Youth Development and inclusion, so I knew my topic for this project would be around this theme as well. I thought about how media literacy and digital competency affected my beliefs about how youth learn and in my current work with Special Olympics Rhode Island. My mind instantly went to Pensky and his (terrible) terminology of "Digital Immigrants", when I read this description of a person who is a digital novice prints our their emails and turns to paper, before technology- I though "oh, I know those people, I deal with them every day. I know what I can create this final project on!" Pensky's description of people who were not born with access to the technology we have today, reminded me of some of my co-workers at Special Olympics and some of the teachers, site liaisons, and Unified coach's I work with across the state. For this final project I thought about how my own digital literacy and what I have learned in this class, can be used to support those I work with and how, like Boyd said, help them use technology in a more meaningful way, to help schools create more opportunities for inclusion. 

My Inclusion Journey

My own journey towards understanding how important inclusion is, all began when my little cousin Adam was born with Down's Syndrome. Adam was the first introduction I had to loving and caring for someone who had different abilities than myself, and he did and still does help me see the world through a different perspective everyday. Growing up and becoming his respite caregiver through the Cerebral Palsy Foundation is what I accredit my current care path trajectory to, today. Because of Adam I saw how youth with differing abilities were treated in all facets of their lives; at school, with friends and family and out in public, and it has always motivated me to help to create a better world for him! 

As I entered the field of youth development I worked in mostly non-traditional educational spaces like COZ, after-school and Out of School Time programs. I worked in school districts like Providence and Pawtucket. Here my whiteness manifested in some very harmful ways-I was taught to practice "color-blindness" that I was supposed to treat all kids "equally" and not seen their skin color. I also had this neo-imperialist "White Saviorism Syndrome"  (Thanks to the religion I practiced at the time) that I was the benevolent white Christian girl who would help all the needy children. I thought that I was being as inclusive as possible- but after the murder of George Floyd and in that same moth my acceptance into the Youth Development MA program, things in my life began to shift. 

By joining the YDev program I learned alot about what inclusion actually means when you look at it without the lense of just youth with intellectual or developmental disabilities. I learned that I needed to LISTEN and LEARN and thanks to this peer-lead community built around YDev I was able to come to some significant realizations about myself and my work. I realized that I had white privilege and it could harm the predominantly black and brown youth I worked with, so I made the choice to leave the OST space in hopes that better teachers who these youth could learn from and connect to more, would take on the role, and that I would find a better way to serve and support them. Through this Master's program I also learned a lot about my own ideologies around how youth learn and grow, I learned that I am a mix of "Positive youth development" and "Social Justice youth development" ideologies, and that I want the youth that I work with to find joy and positivity in learning while also being empowered  to see the inequities in the world and have the confidence in their voices in order to change it. 

Thanks to this class I also see myself as a techno-constructivist: "A teacher who integrates technology into the curriculum so it not only compliments intrustruction, it redefinees it." This is how I view how I use technology, I use it to enhance most of my daily life and I also rely on it for the majority of what I do for work, knowing how much more quickly and efficiently I can teach and communicate through the utilization of technology and digital media. This is the basis that I modeled my YDev Capstone project on. I used a method call Inclusion Journey Maps and I asked youth with and without intellectual disabilities to partner together to express what inclusion means to them and how they experience it in school, through different types of media. It was incredible to see non-verbal students have in outlet to show what they understand about inclusion and to witness their teachers reactions when they saw what their students with differing abilities created! I am currently working with a group of students from East Greenwich high school to create a digital archive of these medias to share with schools across the state next year. 

So this brings me to my current work with Special Olympics Rhode Island as the Director of  Unified Champion Schools Youth and School programs. I work with schools across the state to create more inclusive opportunities for youth with and without intellectual disabilities. I believe, that from my experience working in childcare, in the YDev program and now with Special Olympics, that youth learn best when they are in an environment where they feel included and have friends and teachers who care and connect with them. My work always seeks to address this, however I know many students who are isolated in self contained classrooms or life skills classes, who do not feel included in their general school population, who don't have friends from in classes, and who singularly interact with their one-on-one aids on a daily basis. 

My Final Project: WHY, WHAT and HOW

I wanted to use this final project as a way to bring our Unified Champion Schools (UCS) programming to more schools through the use of digital media. One of the problems with this programming is that it relies heavily on volunteers; teachers, school liaisons and coaches, to implement the majority of this program. I know and have heard from many in CURR 501, that teachers are overwork and unsupported and I have heard from many schools I have reached out to, that it is just impossible for them to take anything else on. So my project seeks to address this and make it as simple and easy as possible for our volunteers to implement UCS into their schools. 

I first need to hear from the teachers, school liaisons, and coaches who ran our programming last year. I will created a SURVEY through a Google or Teams Form, to gather feedback from them about what they think worked and what did not work about Unified programming last year. I also want to hear from them about what ideas they have for next year and how they think that Special Olympics can work to support them. I need to hear from the schools about where they think the gaps are when it comes to creating a socially inclusive environment in their schools. I would like to thank some of the teachers I've already had conversations with in CURR 501 about starting up Unified at their schools! 

Once I gather feedback from the survey I will compile a list of UCS resources; guides, playbooks, trainings etc.  linking all these resources in a singular digital template to be emailed out and posted on our Special Olympics website for ease of use, that way teachers are not scrambling to find different tools and resources, everything will be housed in one centralized location.  I also want to consolidate our paperwork and have less forms that teacher and schools administrators need to fill out. I want to create collaborative Google Docs that give teachers easy of use to complete and plan out their Unified activities for the year and also give principals the ability to E-Sign and share back with us, fully eliminating all paper contracts that have to be mailed or scanned back to us. I also will create a community of all of our school liaisons teachers and coaches, where they can communicate and collaborate about their Unified programming. I am thinking about creating a GroupMe for our volunteers or possibly using our Facebook or Instagram pages to introduce this. 

I believe that through the use of technology and media, I can make Unified Champion Schools programming seamless and easy for teachers to run and fully supportive of their current classroom environments so that any school would be able to take it on.  The more new schools that we have participating in our program, then the more youth we are able to reach and help feel inclusion in their school environment. 

*Pecha Cucha Disclaimer: Tanya's PK

I had a VERY difficult time creating this Pecha Cucha. I have not used the Loom or Screencastify platforms before, and despite my knack for being able to pick these things up quickly, the structure of the 20 slides in 20 seconds did not work for me. When I present something like a Final Project, I like to be able to just speak about it without the added pressure of time constraints. I found that having to make sure that each slide was PERFECTLY recorded and then the second I got something wrong or misspoke, having to go back and re-record everything again from the very beginning, extremely frustrating! I hate the sound of my own voice so listening to myself mess up over and over again was demoralizing. Eventually I realized that I had to find a different way to complete this project and think "outside of the box" like we had done for our Digital Escape Rooms, so I decided to use the Soundtrap site that we had used for our Podcasting to create 20 second sound bites to add to each slide, which was much more manageable- but still took a frustratingly long amount of time. Through the creation of this PK I felt like one of the student's Wesch referred to in his class just trying to "get through" this project and asking myself "What's the point?" Disappointedly I was not able to articulately translate my written narrative into this oral and time limited format which does not make me feel proud of this work, but ALL i'd ask is that you would read my blog post before you judge this PK too harshly and if you are thinking about having your own students create a PK just recognize that some of them may face similar struggle with this project that I have. Thank you!  

Self Assessment can be found HERE!

Princess Convention

 How does it feel to think about DISNEY in through the critical lenses posed by Christensen and my slides? How did these frameworks help you think about Encanto?

I really loved getting to watch this movie, I had not seen it before and had heard about it from a few of my students but really had no idea what it was about. I was pleasantly surprised by how the film was unlike most Disney movies with Princess in it, like we talked about in class last night, it did not have the quintessential villain, it highlighted and educated about Colombian culture and just generally told a story that was seemingly "unlike" Disney's normal narratives.

I really love how this meme address the tropes that we have see disney characters siloed into- the savior, the damsel in distress, the manically excited, the weird and overly intellectual. I think what was surprising was how these character we portrayed, for instance, like we talked about in class last night, Luisa was portrayed with many masculine traits, but she also had the strength (with mirabels help) to name the pressure that she felt from all of her responsibilities and admit that she felt too weak to carry them! There were so many instances like this throughout the movie!

I have then gone down the rabbit hole of Encanto memes and had to post a few of my favorites here. Enjoy!

How I learned about my white privilege through the Implicit Association Test

 After reflecting a lot on last friday's conversation- I thought about how much harm and ignorance I had just witnessed and why we were all just exposed to that. While listening to the discussion and frankly, the dismissal of one of our peers opinions and real-life experiences, my instant reaction was to think "why do you not understand that it is white privilege to be educated in, and be able to practice "good parenting" techniques? Also why don't you understand that these systems or "options" as they were referred to as- where put in place for middle class white families, not a working black single-mother? Then after writing our media lit Haikus' about "what is your why" and "how to you believe students learn?" so many of you wrote about giving their students a voice and about the importance of connection and relationships- but I had just watched you be told a story of of someone real-world experiences and you didn't want to here it- they just don't get it. Some of you discounted the experience of a black person because you thought that you knew better- someone who was not even a mother, dared to tell this person how they should have acted instead. When racism happens in front of my face, I tend to argue not just type docilely in the chat- and I do regret that I did not do more- I should have done more. So here is what i'm going to do, i'm going to tell you about how I began my anti-racist journey and what knowledge this has afforded me: 

1. I have white privilege. 

2. This white privilege is harmful and damaging to black and brown youth when I do not recognize it and don't to the work and take the steps to do better. 

3. For me, this meant I needed to take myself out of these spaces to allow room for educators who my students will connect better with and learn better from. 

I worked for 5 years in lower south Providence elementary schools running OST programs and I was accepted into the Youth Development MA program the same month that George Floyd was murder and I first heard about the Black Lives Matter movement. I really had zero exposure to anti-racism and had always been taught "color-blindness" in child care, or to see each child as 'equal' regardless of the color of their skin I also had a white-savorist complex thanks to my father a school teach in Pawtucket (this is wrong, if you didn't know). I started off at ground zero, ignorantly and subliminally racist without even know it, but once I did- I have never looked back. 

The single most important tool that helped me recognize how I was unknowingly racist and what finally made it all click in my head was by taking Harvard University's Implicit Association Test.  <<< I've linked it here, please PLEASE PLEASE, consider taking this test before or after reading my blog post- I am really hoping it will help it all click for some of you as much as it did for me!  

What is it? 

Malcom Gladwell summarizes it best in his book "Blink":

“[O]ur attitudes towards things like race or gender operate on two levels. First of all, we have our conscious attitudes. This is what we choose to believe. These are our stated values, which we use to direct our behavior deliberately . . . But the IAT [Implicit Association Test] measures something else. It measures our second level of attitude, our racial attitude on an unconscious level - the immediate, automatic associations that tumble out before we've even had time to think. We don't deliberately choose our unconscious attitudes. And . . . we may not even be aware of them. The giant computer that is our unconscious silently crunches all the data it can from the experiences we've had, the people we've met, the lessons we've learned, the books we've read, the movies we've seen, and so on, and it forms an opinion.”

So I took this test thinking "i'm a good person, I treat everyone equally and am kind to all- I already know how I am going to do on this test." Needless to say after taking it and thinking over the questions (I don't want to give too much away as not to prepare you for what questions are asked) I realized that everything in my white upper middle-class life: my family and friends, my private school education, the religion I practiced, the sports I played, the hobbies I held, the books I read, the media I consumed, the national leaders I listened to; had conditioned me to think that White people=Good and Black people= Bad- and that no matter how I thought I treated people my subliminal racism could still manifest in hurtful ways. 

It has been a long journey since then and I still have a lot of work to do, every day. I relied heavily on my Youth Development Community and my fellow YDev majors to guide and teach me and was lucky enough to have this space to grow and learn- but I did it all without doing harm to others. This was the most important part of my process- if I wasn't absolutely certain of the opinion I had- I asked questions or kept my mouth shit and LISTENED to what my other, more educated peers had to say, and learned from their example. This is something I still practice everyday. 

Again I would highly encourage anyone who had the slightest interest to take the Implicit Association Test, it may just change your life, but it will 1000% change the lives of the black and brown students you work with. 

Blog #4 Presenting the "Self" I want to be...

 

Crystal Springs, FL 

While I watched Sherry Turkle talk about the ability that texting and always being on our phones gives us to be in full control of presenting the "self" we want to be.... I thought "well yeah, its scary to show people who we really are- what if nobody likes you?" Enter my Instagram issues...but seriously, the persona you put out to the public should be your best image right? And for my that looks like adventurous, highly edited  and aesthetic pictures. While I honestly hate texting, I honestly also can't do small talk, I have real conversations with real friends who know me and beyond that, I lose interest in talking to people who aren't interested in talking to me.

Is it the same with the youth we work with? Are they just disinterested in having conversations and asking questions because there is no significance to it in their lives? I was never a student who asked the teacher a million questions about the logistics of a homework assignment or asking them to clarify the thing they just wrote on the board. I was (and still am) of the mindset that I can figure it out on my own, and if I have questions then I'll go ask another one of my peers in the class before i'd resort to asking the teach. Often I didn't need to because there was alway another student who would ask the teacher the same question I had. 

Wesch address this issue of significance and issue that I well remember having in math classes- "do I really need to learn this? " SO then the question is posed "Are Turkel and Wesch allies or opponents in this new digital age?" I believe the answer to that question will vary based upon who you ask. If we were to ask the youth we work with they would probably respond saying that Turkle doesn't understand how texting their bestie 24/7 allows them to always feel connected and they know they always have someone to talk to and never feel lonely, where as they might say that Wesch is completely right that if they don't feel what they are learning is meaningful, they might just rush through it without any thought. As for myself, I think that the way we build relationships and strengthen our communication skills is fluid and ever evolving. In order to form deeper relationships with our youth, we have to start to adapt to their methods of learning and see things more from their perspectives instead of wistful wishing thing would "go back to the way they used to be".  

Blog #2 Baby George

 

                                                How my OST kiddos love learning! 

"Have I been taking chances? Have I actually been putting myself out on the line and figuring out who I am and what I am going to do? " 

What really struck me, while listening to this TED Talk is when Dr. Michael Wesch admitted that he had gotten too comfortable and actually stopped learning. He admits that he did not teach in "the real world" and that his classroom teach was designed to "dump information into the heads" of his students. This reminds me of so many teachers I've seen and worked with in districts across Rhode Island who just don't get it! They are jaded and grumpy and who do not teach with "care". Everytime I hear a teacher as their student "What is wrong with you?" or blatantly ignore a students who raising their hand in the air, vigorously needing to ask a question as if their life depends on it only to be ignore or to be shouted at "What?!?" It makes me think that that teacher doesn't even enjoy learning, so how could they expect their students to? 

So then he decided to challenge himself and change things up, he decided to start drawing. He started to create animations all about illustrating what he past students learning and what mattered to them, from his classes. One of the stories he shared was a student who said that the class taught him more than to how just to make a living, it taught him how to build a life worth living! (I'm crying!)  Through these stories, Dr. Wesch decides to redesign his course, scaffolding it with plateaus and supports and help from one another to make sure that everyone learns from the class and completes the final project only to find out that the final project was really themselves  * This reminds me SO MUCH of the way YDev is structured and my experience in the MA program <3*

For myself, as a Youth Worker in non-traditional educational spaces, I always knew that systematic classroom teaching was never something I wanted to be a part of because I knew that was not the way I learned, so I did not want to teach my students that way. I think through my career in Out of School Time programs these themes of learning that Dr. Wesch brings up about "real learning" and "loving yourself" enough to get up and try again, has always resonated with me when teaching youth. Its the hands-on experiential learning that should be valued by teachers, and the relationships you build with others to support that learning and the building of you "real life" in the "real" world! 

Blog # 1- Prensky, Boyd and Digital Natives

 

Lake Atitlan, Guatemala 

* Disclaimer: Firstly I would like to begin this blog post by saying that I do not believe in the deficit language of using terms like "native" and "immigrant" to describes one's ability to be digitally literate- as someone who is a "naturalized" citizen to the US and who plagued by discerning looks from customs agents when crossing the border coming home from traveling- the second I see their eyes land on the work "Russia" on my passport I tense- all the while knowing that I do not present as an immigrant to this country. These descriptive terms initially bring up from my a resentment of the fact that they equate "Native" and "literte" to be synonymous- because I know that in all my visits to other countries, i've meet countless children who, although born in that country and speak the dialect, were never taught to read or write in their native language. I understand this language to be harmful and hurtful and a misrepresentation of the youth it is meant to describe.*

In my opinion Boyd was right about Pensky, and Pensky was right about the examples he described of people who are "digital immigrants" and their "accents" (ugh, I hate that metaphor). Boyd rightfully describes Pensky's digital narratives rhetoric as "worse than inaccurate: it is dangerous." Boyd explanation that accessibility to technology , while an important start, it not enough to create fully educated and literate digital natives. 

I've seen Penksy's theory of a digital immigrant illustrated many times in my various workplaces by older, and more senior staffers than I. Much of the leadership that I have worked under throughout my career in non-profits had not been born into a time when they internet was utilized and programs that I was taught in grade school like Excel and Word, they took introductory courses on at the local community college or at in-office professional development trainings. Now in 2022- year past the age of retirement, theses senior "leaders" are leading these orgs into the ground with their ineffective business practices, their inefficient meetings, their unclear emails, their convoluted email practices, their paper planners, their inability to convert  a PDF to a JPEG and yes, oh yes, their CONSTANT PRINTING OF EMAILS!!!! (I am traumatized daily by seeing how many trees my supervisor kills daily to print out email chains to then stack on her desk to collect dust....) I am then struck by how unwilling these digital immigrants are, to become digitally literate- to change the way they do things, or to take a step back and allow staff who are digitally literate post on social media or change that paper document into a Google form. 

While I think that Pensky got the "digital immigrant" descriptors right, then I reflect on what he theorized about the "digital natives". I think about how yes our youth understand "intuitively" how to use an iphone, which buttons to press, which ways to  swipe, however I agree with Boyd in that this is a passive understanding and that this does not necessarily mean that they are active and engaged in understanding with the technology that they are using. I instantly think of my partner- a middle class white male, a "techie" who always has to have the latest iPhone and Apple watch, who constantly watching videos and reviews about the newest tech products, who is a New England Tech grad and understands how to put technology together, from a truck engine to a computer drive, to a gaming device. He is who I think of a a digital native, because besides just being born into the accessibility of their technology, he is also privileged enough to have the money to purchase the latest and greatest, and the luxury of time to learn about it as a hobby and utilized it as a career path.  

I compare my "techie" partner to the youth i've worked with who Pensky would also describe as "digital natives" I think about all the youth who were given Chrome books throughout the pandemic and now have unlimited accesses to all the media and all the influence that goes along with it. As we had briefly  mentioned in class yesterday- these youth now have access to consume everything, without even knowing what it is. That level of discernment is up to we as educators, to teach the youth we work with. It goes beyond just showing them how to use a Canva or post a Youtube video, but rather how to understand what they are seeing, reading or watching, how to read the comments, how to see other peoples opions and not to just listen to the most popular influencer or just to follow someone because they are verified on Twitter. 

Introduction to T

Hey, I'm Tanya....

A 20-something, originally born in Moscow, Russia, adopted to a family in MA when I was 4 and now a Rhode Island transplant. I've worked in non-traditional educational spaces for the past 15 year, starting at COZ in Pawtucket, then as a respite care-giver for the Cerebral Palsy Foundation, then as an educator for an Environmental non-profit in New Bedford, then as a 21st Century Director for the Y in lower-South Prov and currently as a Director for Special Olympics Rhode Island. I am also a recent graduate from the Youth Development Master’s program! My educational journey has taken me all across the map and my current YDev ideology is a mix of “Positive Youth Development” and “Social Justice Youth Development” founded, but progressing from, a constructivist paradigm. I strive to keep my work youth-centered and youth-led.

 

Besides my youth work, I love anything and everything outdoorsy- hiking (NH48, 52WAV) camping, running and gardening. I consume a lot of different types of media, but I would have to say the form I enjoy the most is Instagram- I love taking pictures, creating reels and just capturing fleeting moments of beauty in the natural world. I’m hoping to feature some of my photos throughout these posts!