Promising Practices

       I got really excited for the Promises Practices event and I was looking forward to learning about all different elements to youth development. I went with a goal in mind and that goal was to find ways to not only serve those children that I will be teaching in the future, but also how I could better serve the kids I work with now and I was hoping to find some different activities I could maybe do with them.

      The keynote speaker, Dana Fusco, looked at how public schools while all trying to serve and educate the public are not all equal. She spoke about how certain communities are able to have schools that better serve students than others. This relates directly to the article by Finn that we had read that looked at how working class public schools are not equal to white collar schools. Also, Fusco spoke on an issue that hits close to home, and that is the closing and cutting of budgets of after school programs in areas that truly need it. She showed some videos that showed students protesting about the cuts to their programs. This keynote speech was very enjoyable and opened up my wonder for the day.

     The first session I went to was a session that discussed different ways to prepare children for college programs and classes that would engage them in a different way than their high school and middle school classes did. At this session, there was a panel of different people who represented different programs that are available for underprivileged Rhode Island students. The people on these panels, some of them success stories that went back to work for them, discussed the many different things they did to engage the students that they had in their programs. Some of the names of these programs were Upward Bound and Summerbridge. They spoke about some of the things one of the programs did this past summer where they wrote letters to Bank of American about the foreclosures and even went there to see someone in charge. This session gave me a lot of ideas that I could use with the teens that I work with to better help them prepare for college, something that the cards are against them to even have the opportunity to go. This session could have been compared to Kozol’s work on how things are often not addressed which these programs seem to be helping kids prepare for their college classes where they are going to connect what they learn to their lives. Here are sites for the two programs mentioned Summerbridge and Upward Bound

       The second session I attended was a lot smaller and possibly more interesting. This second session was presented by the Save the Bay organization which looks to educate people on the environment in Rhode Island and the preservation of the water ways. This session was something I was really looking forward to because at my work we are constantly looking for different ways to introduce environmental protection to the kids, especially since our building is located right on the Blackstone River which empties into the Narragansett Bay. During this session we did an activity where we examined a water shed and saw how this could drag pollutants into the bay which is very detrimental to the environment. After the session, I stuck around to speak to the two instructors about different ways I can engage the kids I work with about being better informed about the environment. They told me about these different places that we can get tours from that are free, which is great when you work for a non profit organization. A couple of these ideas were a trip to the Johnston landfill and learn about what happens to our waste, or to the water treatment plant to learn about the different ways waste water is cleaned before going back into the bay. I have already put the wheels in motion for trips to these places during the spring break that the schools in my city have. Here is a link to the Save The Bay site Save the Bay. And here is a video about water sheds.

          At the close of the event we were given a presentation by the A.L.L.I.E.D. group which spoke of the ways that people often get shut out or treated differently and how this can often be a deterrent to learning, this even came along with some examples of people leaving classes when feeling like they are all alone. This tied very closely to the GLSEN website that we had examined in our class.

          Overall, this entire conference was quite enjoyable and informational and I hope to go to more like it in the future because of how valuable all the information and activities I learned were.