This reminds me of one of Jasper Johns’ strategies for making art. He said that he put his own paintings together with the knowledge that his would be one in a “side-by-side set of loosely united matters for attention” — other paintings in a museum. The question becomes not one of how do I get my voice, my story, my opinion out there, but how do I insert my voice in a way that gets attention and fits somewhere on one of the walls in the museum. https://www.jstor.org/stable/1343616?read-now=1&refreqid=excelsior%3A13a7317eb355a78b13215ebc382f1813&seq=5#page_scan_tab_contents

It’s a good goal to have all three of these. I wonder what happens when we add a youth’s interests into the mix. I can almost see an XY grid where personal experience and evidence are at the ends of one of the axes and public interest and a youth’s own interests are on the other axis. It might be a good way to consult with youth around their chosen topics, inquiries or questions. It does seem important to introduce all of these elements from early in the process. So looking at the examples in this collection with an eye on how they move between evidence and personal narrative seems like a good place to start the conversation with students.

One of our founding principles at Youth Voices is that over time youth begin to shift their attention from writing for the teacher to writing for other youth from around the country whose writing and media they see and comment on, back and forth. But this takes time, and it needs to be nurtured with real times when youth see and talk to each other on video exchanges. NowComment is designed to have youth “talk back” to authors, video producers, and photographers and other imagemakers. So the audience is pretty direct there. Another example is a teacher in Oakland who has her students choose an audience for their work. It could be someone in power, a bystander, an ally of their cause, or someone they are opposing. All of these ways of making an audience real for youth are important, yet it has to be recognized that it’s never totally authentic when we are asking youth to do this in a school, for a grade. There is always that secondary audience too.

Not that it’s all that difficult, but it takes time to tease out the right issue. Do we want the young man who sleeps in class because he is up gaming all night to do something about gaming? Should the young woman who was out for two weeks because her family was evicted to study eviction? Or is this too close, especially because she is more interested to look at teen depression and why youth can’t get more support in schools for this. And the young man whose father immigrated from Guatemala and his mother is from El Salvador, should he be looking at immigration in some way? What if he doesn’t want to learn more about this in his life right now? The point of all of this is that it’s takes time to find the right area of inquiry for youth, and we have to listen hard to help youth to know that we really do want them to find something that is important for them and that they can tell stories about. THEN — what if we ask them to work with others on a media project? How do these groups form? There is a lot of important, careful teaching involved.

An ongoing project that some of us in the Youth Voices and NowComment community of teachers are doing is to have youth create collections or “text sets” of the resources they are using in their research, and to annotate it in NowComment. The main point of this it to make the selection process open for all (teachers and peers) to critique, add to, ask about. And this is a more natural (like we all do it) positive way to find reliable sources.

Maybe adding “personally” to it?