Today, many standardized tests require more than multiple choice; students are asked to provide written answers to open-ended questions. Integrate these 10 test-taking strategies into your regular curriculum, and get students prepared to take on the tests and come out on top!

1. Read all directions carefully to make sure you know what you are supposed to do. In language arts tests, for example, some directions will tell you to find the sentence that is written correctly. Others will tell you to pick out the mistakes or errors yourself.

2. Take a quick look at the questions before you read a story or article so you know what to look for in the text. If, for example, all the questions about a story are concerned with the characters and the sequence of events, then you must pay closer attention to those two elements as you read.

3. Look for key words (such as who, what, when, where, why) to help you decide how to answer the question. For example: Why did Randall go back to the railroad station? The key word here is why. It tells you to look for a cause or a reason.
How are zebras different from horses? The key word in this question is different. You will need to concentrate on explaining how the creatures differ.

4. Use the parts of the question to help plan your answer. For example: Choose the person from the story whom you admire most. Write a paragraph telling why you admire that person. Use details from the story to support your answer. To answer this problem, think about its three parts. First, choose the person you admire. Next, jot down reasons why you admire the person. Then, go back to the story to find details to support your ideas.

5. Look back at the text (or other material) to find the information you need. For some reason, many students seem to think that once they have read a selection they cannot go back to it. This is not true. Feel free to go back to the text (or picture, chart, table, etc.) to find the answer to each question.

6. Think first, then write. Especially with essay questions, planning your response is helpful. Jot down notes before you write your response. Use prewriting strategies (such as brainstorming, note taking, and outlining) to organize the information you need and help decide how to present it. This approach will save valuable time by improving your focus–clarifying your thoughts before you record them on paper.

7. Write clearly and legibly. You will not receive any credit for an answer if the person scoring the test cannot read it. Also, be direct and concise. Using more words than necessary will not earn more points.

8. Pay attention to how the test will be scored. Many short-answer items, for example, are scored 1 (correct) or 0 (incorrect) for content only. For these, write the correct answer and move on. For questions that are scored on a scale (such as 0-2, 0-4, or 0-5), you can earn more points for answers that are more complete and are written with correct grammar, punctuation, capitalization, and spelling.

9. Manage your time. Many tests must be completed within strict time limits. To score as well as you can, you need to answer as many questions as possible. Before you begin working, think about how much time you have for each question. Keep track of the time as you work, and stick to the schedule. If you come to a question that seems too difficult, skip that question and come back to it later.

10. Check your work. When you have finished answering all the questions, go back and check to make sure each answer is written clearly and correctly. Don’t hesitate to make changes if you have time to do so, but make sure your corrections are clear and easy to read.
By: Michael Priestley, Instructor

As every job applicant knows (or finds out in a hurry), entry into the business of the arts is subject to the same catch-22 as any other job search: Every job wants an experienced applicant and you can’t get experience without a job. Fortunately, there is a way out of this predicament. Many artistic institutions offer entry-level or intern positions to aspiring professionals who are willing to invest time, patience and energy into the creation of public art in return for low wages and a promising resume.

Two of North America’s largest and most prestigious artistic temples, the Banff Centre for the Arts north of Calgary, Alberta, and the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, DC, offer a huge variety of semi-paid opportunities for students and early-career theater artists.

The Great North
The Banff Centre for the Arts, perched amid the dramatic crags of the Canadian Rockies, runs an arts work-study program for students in theater production, design and stage management, as well as in other areas such as music, aboriginal art and creative electronics. Positions vary from season to season, but generally they’re in such fields as production management, stage management, arts administration, technical direction, audio, stage carpentry, props, wardrobe and design.

These positions are not for beginners. The Banff Centre requires applicants to have prior training and experience at one of two levels, Work Study I and II participants should have completed at least two years of relevant academic training, with related professional experience. Work Study III participants, who are given a greater degree of responsibility, generally have completed a four-year degree or have, in the words of the eligibility requirements on the Banff website, “considerable experience in a related area of professional performing arts.” In other words, Banff is seeking applicants who have not only learned the basics but put them to use in a professional environment. If you have been through a couple of years of training in school and have worked in a summer theater, you are eligible to apply. Banff is looking for artists and artisans who have made a serious commitment to their discipline and are willing to make the transition to a new professional level.

Work study at Banff is a hands-on experience that puts students in close proximity with professional designers and directors and the tools of the trade. The theater is non-union, leaving staff the option of putting students directly to work in the shops and on the stages. The internships promise one-on-one training with professional production staff from the participant’s chosen field.

On The Beltway
On the other end of the spectrum, the Kennedy Center offers its internships to students who have more of an interest in arts management or arts education. Because its theater complex is a union shop, it has more restrictions on what interns can touch and where they can go. The training is no less on-the-job. but the job site is more likely to be a production office than a scene shop. Internships may be available in advertising, development, education (local and national programs), the National Symphony Orchestra, press relations, programming and production, web design/technology, facilities, general counsel’s office and finance. Like Banff. the Kennedy Center is looking for committed students, with demonstrated interest and skills, although not necessarily in the exact field of their internship.

Compare and Contrast
So what’s the difference between the programs? While the focus of each differs, the pragmatic details of both have to do with money and credit. The Kennedy Center won’t make you rich–interns receive a stipend of $225 per week and they won’t house you (but they will assist you in finding low-cost housing). They can, however, offer college credit that may help students knock a semester off their class work. (Check with your educational institution first to see if it can accept credit from the Kennedy Center.) Banff won’t make you rich either, but they pay from $300 to $425 a week, based on prior experience, serve subsidized meals in their staff dining room ($3 per meal plus tax) and subsidize on-campus housing, charging just $45.50 per week (all amounts in Canadian dollars). The Banff Centre does not offer degree programs, but might offer college credit; check with your college first.

The Kennedy Center augments its internship programs with weekly classes taught by executives from the Kennedy Center as well as other major arts institutions around DC. You might not think of the District of Columbia as a big theater town but you’d be wrong, according to Kennedy Center senior press representative Rae Bazzarre. She points out that DC is the third largest theater town in America, behind Chicago and New York. Therefore, working at the Kennedy Center puts interns in the heart of a thriving theater scene. The Banff Centre stands alone in a spectacular location, but it is an extremely popular destination for creative people of every stripe, including designers, directors and performing artists. Its isolated location creates a crucible of intense artistic creativity, completely enclosed by a dramatic natural environment. The Kennedy Center operates more as a node for artistic contact amid a thriving metropolis of venues. Both programs offer students tremendous access to shows, workshops and classes onsite, allowing students access to a steady parade of first-class artists.

Neither facility lacks performance spaces or programming. The Kennedy Center hosts hundreds of performances in nine venues, including the Concert Hall, Eisenhower Theater, Family Theater, Opera House and Jazz Club. They are the home venue for the National Symphony Orchestra, a fact that led Sigma Alpha Iota, the International Music Fraternity for Women, to sponsor internships in music production and education.

The Banff Centre has half a dozen venues of its own, including the Eric Harvie Theatre, the Margaret Greenham Theatre and The Club, an intimate music-oriented venue. Banff is awash in festivals, including the Mountain Film Festival, Mountain Book Festival, Music and Sound Concert Series, Jazz Concerts, Wordfest: Banff-Calgary Writers Festival and the granddaddy of them all, the Banff Summer Arts Festival, which brings tens of thousands of visitors up to the Rockies for over a month of concerts, performances, art walks, exhibitions, film screenings, readings and new media events.

Whatever their differences, however, these two institutions share one thing in common: they aren’t easy to get into. The Kennedy Center chooses its 20 or so interns from a pool of up to 400 applicants. To handle its vast pool of applicants, the Banff Center holds interview sessions in eight cities across Canada and, for applicants in design, properties, scenic painting, and wigs and make-up, a portfolio is required. With their size, visibility and prestige, both the Kennedy Center and the Banff Centre can attract the cream of the crop, so if you aspire to work for these industry giants, the message is clear: know your stuff.

For more information about the Kennedy Center Arts Management Internships, visit www.kennedy-center.org/education/vilarinstitute/internships/. For information about the Banff Centre for the Arts Work Study program, log onto www.banffcentre.ca/careers/careers/ and click on “Work Study.”

By: Campbell, Drew, Stage Directions, Oct2006

At the beginning of each school year we try to think of ways to get to know our students. Events that each learner believes are important in and out of the classroom are meaningful. Moving to a new house, the arrival of a sibling, getting new furnishings for one’s bedroom, visiting a grandparent or anticipating the arrival of a pet, new bicycle or a special birthday celebration are among those circumstances that spur enthusiastic discussions. Powerful memories can also drive kids to use wonderful language for sharing ideas. It’s well-known that each of us writes more easily and skillfully when the content is about things we’ve experienced. So, it makes sense to lead children to write and talk about things, ideas and events in which they’ve already been involved.

Add to your collection
Kids and adults alike love collecting things like stones, bottle caps, ribbons, stamps, even magazine photos of favorite people. In order to keep these collections orderly, they need some sort of container. A container also gives the collector the feeling of power that ownership, especially with physical objects, provides. Personal connections to the contents also facilitates discussions about what’s inside. These events are shared through stories about personal involvements.

My treasure box
It’s usually best to begin with one child in an informal situation that permits time to talk. This is particularly important with those who might feel reticent about speaking in front of a group.

Begin what appears to be a spontaneous discussion about one of your collections — be sure to have your collection of “stuff in your possession. For example, I collect buttons and have jars and tin containers filled with them. Each represents an event when I wore the garment to which the button belonged. Discussing objects and the events that they are connected to is an activity that facilitates storytelling. Once the talk about things and events begins, ask your students to find a container in which to collect small objects that remind them of something they can use to tell as a story. Be sure to provide a daily time and ask for volunteers to share a treasure from their “Treasure Box,” This will guide the children to understand that an object can represent an entire story.

Telling stories
Continue this activity for at least a month. Then move from objects to words. You can create a series of 3″ x 5″ index cards with one word written on each. Every word must represent an event theme, idea or an object that facilitates storytelling. Toss these into a shoe box. You might even try having several of these word boxes containing words associated with the current science, social studies or math unit located around your classroom. Here’s how to begin:

Pair your students.
Ask each child to select a card, without looking, from the box.

3. Each of the children looks at his or her word and tells a story to his or her partner.
4. After telling the story, each child writes it down. They can draw or write about it or use a combination of both,
5. Each child then uses the selected word as the story’s title and explain why the story and its name are appropriately matched.
A part of each other
There are many skills being developed during this activity. Students have to collaborate and listen to their classmates. The concept of random selection resembles risk-taking experiences. Taking risks in school is safe and prepares children to take risks that can be more challenging when outside of the classroom. Telling a spontaneous story assists in the development of working one-on-one with people. Sensitivity to the other’s likes and dislikes, wonders and fears will help your students get to know one another.

Oral and written skills are difficult and challenging to develop. The more one writes and talks about events, the easier it becomes to then talk and write succinctiy. Finally, knowing that one word can represent entire events, stones and situations can assist those in the classroom to store information and then label it appropriately.

Telling stories can be difficult, but using objects to spur ideas will guide learners from one idea to the next and in telling their stories. These shared stories are the “ice breakers” that can permit children to become part of each other’s lives.

By: Glazer, Susan Mandel, Teaching PreK-8, 08914508, Aug/Sep2006

SEATTLE (AP) — Sex offenders who want to go to college in Washington have been required to share their criminal past with campus officials since 1998, but recent high profile news stories and increasing enrollments have some colleges reassessing their notification policy.

Instructors at Spokane Community College expressed concern last spring about the growing number of sex offenders registered for classes on that campus. The three campuses of Community Colleges of Spokane have 20 registered sex offenders enrolled out of a total student population of 16,000, said Anne Tucker, spokeswoman for the Spokane college district.

The instructors felt the campus procedure for notifying faculty and students when a sex offender enrolled needed to be reviewed and updated, so a task force started working during winter quarter on some new rules that are now before the district chancellor for fmal approval.

College officials in other parts of the state mentioned the new Spokane policy as one of the most aggressive in Washington, because it requires the college to collect police reports and treatment history on the most serious sex offenders and allows conditional admission for some students. Tucker described the policy as providing more clarity for both faculty and sex offenders. She said one change is the way the college will now cross check its enrollment against county sex offender lists instead of waiting for the students to identify themselves. Other colleges have used this same approach for years, school officials said.

Centralia College has a close working relationship with the local sheriffs office, which notifies the college whenever a sex offender registers in Lewis County, said Michael Grubiak, vice president of student services. Notification on campus depends on the type of crime and the college’s notification policy hasn’t changed since state law on this issue was approved by the Legislature in 1998.

Shoreline Community College north of Seattle created a new policy a few years ago, which requires teacher notification, the posting of fliers and notification on the college Web site, said college spokeswoman Judy Yu. About one or two sex offenders are among the college’s 5,000 students at any time. Teachers can share whatever they want with their students. “We can’t stop them, but I don’t think it’s encouraged,” Yu said. Olympic College in Bremerton is another school reassessing its sex offender notification policy this year. The result, which is expected to be approved by the college board in August, is much more specific than the old pohcy but not more strict, said Rick MacLennan, vice president of student services.

MacLennan said a Level 3 sex offender — described as someone who poses a potential risk to the community and is a threat to reoffend if provided the opportunity — attended the college two summers ago. Although the instructor was notified and there was a campuswide notification, some people felt more should have been done to let students know they were taking classes with a Level 3 sex offender, he said, adding that the student didn’t cause any problems on campus.

One change in the new policy requires all students enrolled in classes with Level 3 sex offenders to be notified. MacLennan said the policy leaves some room for treating people as individuals, depending on the activity that got them arrested.

By: Blankinship, Donna Gordon. Community College Week, 7/31/2006

The study by the National Center for Education Statistics, released this month, represents the first time the U.S. Department of Education has applied techniques for controlling student-background variables to NAEP test data in a comparison of private and public schools, said Grover J. “Russ” Whitehurst, the director of the department’s Institute of Education Sciences.

He noted that an NCES study released in December made across-the-board comparisons of the NAEP scores of students at private and public schools. That study, “Student Achievement in Private Schools: Results From NAEP 2000-2005,” found that students in grades 4, 8, and 12 at private schools had higher average scores in reading, mathematics, science, and writing than their public school counterparts.

But the scores of public and private school students look much different when researchers control for student and school characteristics, according to the new NCES study, “Comparing Private Schools and Public Schools Using Hierarchical Linear Modeling,” which looked at NAEP scores in reading and math for 4th and 8th graders. It found that public school students in those grades and subjects perform as well as or better than students at private schools, with the exception of 8th grade reading, where private school children do better than their public school peers.

The results are similar to those found by Christopher Lubienski and Sarah Theule Lubienski, researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, in a study released in January. They looked only at NAEP math scores and controlled for factors such as soaoeconomics and race. (See Education ‘Week, Feb. 1.)

Methodology Questioned
But Paul Peterson, a professor of government at Harvard University, doesn’t believe that either study has produced credible results. His criticism is that both the Lubienskis and the NCES relied on reporting by school administrators to control for student and school characteristics.

The problem, he said in an interview last week, is that administrators at public and private schools classify students very differently. “Public schools must by law classify people according to whether they are English-language learners, need an individualized education program, are eligible for a free lunch, and whether they are disadvantaged under Title I” of the No Child Left Behind Act, he said. “Private school managers have no legal obligation to do any of that, and many object to that,” he said, so the students may not in fact be labeled the same way, thus skewing any comparison.

Mr. Peterson said the Lubienski study spurred him to conduct a study of his own in which he compares the performance of private and public school students on NAEP while adjusting for certain student characteristics, such as socioeconomic status. But instead of relying primarily on data reported by school administrators, he uses statistics reported by students.

Mr. Peterson said he doesn’t yet have results to report, but plans to release them in September.

Meanwhile, the new NCES study has attracted wide interest and comment.

Articles published by The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal after its July 14 release quoted representatives of teachers’ unions who cited its findings and assessment of public schools to buttress their argument that public dollars shouldn’t be used to pay for private school vouchers. Then on July 18, Times columnist John Tierney accused union leaders of being “unrivaled masters of spin” in what he contended was their treatment of the report as “a public-school triumph.”

Mr. Whitehurst said that from the federal government’s perspective, the NCES report “was viewed as a technical analysis rather than something that would generate as much attention as it has.”

He added that the report would be useful for researchers, but would have little value for parents.

“Parents are not making a choice between the average public and private school,” he said. “They are making a choice about the school their children are attending and the other possible schools their children might attend.”

By: Zehr, Mary Ann, Education Week, 07/26/2006

June 28, 2006

Good morning, Mr. Chairman and members of the Committee. First, I would like to commend you for taking the time to discuss such an important aspect of education. It is wonderful that you recognize what Socrates, Kohlberg, Lickona and so many others have taught us throughout the years; that is, the importance of developing moral character in our youth.

Thank you for the honor of testifying on such an important topic. My name is Sharon D. Aldredge, and I have been an educator for fifteen years. I have spent the last two years of my career as principal of Woodley Hills ES in Fairfax County Public Schools, Virginia.

I could share information on the positive results of character education initiatives in states such as South Carolina and California; however, I would like to offer a personal story. I can attest that the implementation of a strong character education initiative will affect every aspect of a school. By establishing a positive culture and climate, there will be an increase in test scores, grades and attendance rates. More importantly, children will learn skills that will enable them to be successful not only in school but in life. Students will become civically responsible members of their school communities as well as society.

In 1998, Woodley Hills was considered an unsuccessful school. Only 40 to 50 percent of our students were passing the Virginia Standards of Learning tests and suspensions were occurring once or twice a week. Woodley Hills was ranked as one of the bottom twenty schools in the division.

After much discussion and debate, the administration, parents, staff and community members began a character education initiative, and there have been several noticeable changes in the school since the late 1990s. In 2001, Woodley Hills was named a “National School of Character“ by the Character Education Partnership organization. Eighty to ninety percent of our students have passed the Virginia Standards of Learning tests. Discipline problems are almost nonexistent in the school, with only three to five suspensions a year. Our children are happy to come to school, and they understand why we are teaching character education. Two students shared the following statements when asked if character education is important.

“Character education at this school is very important because character education is what keeps this school in order. It teaches us the importance of being respectful, responsible, trusting, caring, acting like a family member, and how to become a hardworking person when we`re older. Character education also teaches us how to be kind to others, so that`s why our school has character education“

“I would say character education has made a very big difference here because a lot of kids in this school pay attention to their lessons and they respect themselves, others and property. A lot of kids in this school are well-behaved because we were taught what is right to do and what is wrong to do.“

The success of the school has not been because of changes in our demographics. In fact, we receive funding from Title I, and we are classified as a school-wide program. Approximately 57 percent of our 543 students receive free or reduced meals, and 2/3 of our student body are minority students. Thirty-three percent of our students are identified as Limited English Proficient, 16% receive special education services and 20% Gifted and Talented. Our students come from very diverse backgrounds and speak over 30 different languages; however, we view each other as family members, and we believe we are responsible for one another`s success.

It is important to note that there was a strong academic program with materials and resources available to teachers and students prior to 1998. The one factor that changed was the implementation of a character education initiative that involved every member of the school community. The students, office staff, custodians, parents, teachers, cafeteria employees and administrators developed a shared vision and became responsible for modeling and integrating character education into every aspect of the school environment.

As adults, we model the behaviors we expect to see from our children. In the morning, administrators and staff members greet the children as they enter the building with a smile, hug, and a warm hello. The children are welcomed into their classrooms and are asked to complete jobs to build a sense of responsibility and family. During the day, the teachers integrate character building into lessons that are focused on the FCPS Program of Studies and the VA SOLs. When reading literature children are asked to determine if the character has made a “good choice“, or to determine how others in a story might be affected by the decisions that were made. Teachers also use journals or writing activities to encourage children to express the importance of respect, responsibilities and many other character traits. Cooperative learning activities are utilized to teach the children how our actions affect those around us and the importance of responsibility, trust and hard work. These attributes are taught during all content area; however, they are explicitly emphasized during science and social studies instruction.

At Woodley Hills, we have also found that we must let our children know they are important and that we want to hear their opinions, so every teacher conducts class meetings. During these meetings, children have an opportunity to share their concerns and opinions, thus teaching the children how to advocate for themselves and speak up when they notice both positive contributions by their peers as well as areas where improvement is needed. The children are given the support they need to solve their own problems. Some of our fifth and sixth grade students are called upon to utilize such skills by serving as peer mediators, Student Council representatives, as well as safety patrols. We spend a great deal of time teaching our students how to handle such civic responsibilities.

Character education is also taught in art, music, and physical education. In the respective subject areas, the children learn about famous artists, musicians, and athletes who have demonstrated exemplary character. In music, the children sing songs and learn skits focused on specific character traits. In physical education classes, children not only learn about good sportsmanship and honoring rules, they also learn how they must respect their bodies. One of our physical education teachers requires the students to keep a notebook in which they write down their health goals and how they demonstrate the character traits at home or school. The children often share how they have helped a family member, completed a chore, or how they avoided a potentially negative situation in the neighborhood or with a friend or family member.

Although there is a wonderful sense of family and mutual respect in the school, there are problems on occasion. However, I can proudly state that 97% of our students never receive an office referral due to behavior. If a child does demonstrate a behavior problem, we take time to process through the issue with the student. It is important that the child learn from his or her mistake and more importantly learn how to avoid the same behavior again. If a child disrupts the learning of other students, he or she will often perform a service for the school or their class to make amends for their behavior.

At Woodley Hills, character education is truly part of our school culture. We do not view the development of moral reasoning and character as a program or an isolated topic to teach. The staff is committed to integrating character education into every facet of the school day. Due to the implementation of character education and sound teaching, Woodley Hills has transformed into a school that the students, parents and staff can be proud to call home.

In closing, I would like to share one final quote. When our fifth grade students were asked why character education is important to Woodley Hills, one young man simply answered, “Our school is a better, safer place because of character education.“ I must say that I could not have answered the question better myself.

Thank you for your time and attention to this most worthy topic.

Source: FDCH Congressional Testimony, Jun 28, 2006

I teach in an urban public school in Portland, Oregon. Most of Boise-Eliot’s students are African American (nearly 80 per cent) and come from working-class and working poor families. The rest are from immigrant or low-income white families. My school is proudly multiracial, multilingual, and academically rigorous.

When I designed my child labor unit, I had a few key goals in mind. I wanted students to gain an understanding that goods are produced by labor. I wanted them to see that children perform that labor in many parts of the world, including the United States. I wanted them to develop personal connections with real children trapped in child labor. I wanted them to learn about effective strategies for resistance. And I wanted them to create polished work around the issue of child labor. I found the child labor chapter in Rethinking Globalization: Teaching for justice in an Unjust World to be a valuable guide in helping to align teaching goals and classroom activities

Seeing labor
To help my students start to think about the origins of the goods we purchase in U.S. stores, we began with a “label hunt”. Students worked in pairs to identify the countries of origin for their shoes and their shirts. I made a list of the countries where our clothes were manufactured and together we tallied the number of articles made in each country. Most of the clothing was manufactured throughout South-East Asia; the shoes primarily came from China. Then I gave them world maps and asked them to highlight all the countries from our list.

“I have a bunch of highlighting down here by India,” noted Irina.[*]

“Yeah, me too. How do you say this place Bon … Bang …”

“Bangladesh,” I answered.

“Dang, that’s far,” said Deja.

“I bet it took her shirt like a week to get here.”

Through this exercise, students were beginning to understand that labor often takes place far from where the products of that labor are consumed. Later I would regret beginning with a focus on international rather than U.S. labor, but at the time I was elated at their enthusiasm.

Seeing Child labor
The next day I asked them what they thought child labor was. They responded with a litany of household chores they were responsible for doing. Kalvin has to watch his baby sister sometimes and always has to take out the trash. Frank and Ben have to work safety patrol before and after school. Elizima has to stay home from school to help her mom when the babies are sick. After I learned what they thought child labor was, we began to read about and discuss child labor: what it looks like, who is involved, who benefits, who is hurt.

Over the course of the next weeks, we spent time reading background articles that discussed various aspects of child labor. (See Useful Resources on Child Labor.) As the students read and discussed the articles, the conversation grew richer.

We analyzed the U.N. Declaration on the Rights of the Child and discussed why parts of this international document are ignored in different contexts. Students created their own versions of the declaration and shared these with classmates by making posters that we hung from the window blinds.

Making personal connections
An important shift in my students’ thinking came when we read “Everywhere on Earth”, by Eduardo Galeano. See http://www.rethinkingschools.org/archive/18%5f04/eartl84.shtml This stirring piece illustrates various jobs children around the world are forced to do.

The classroom, normally filled with murmured questions and blurted observations, was very quiet as we read this piece. I asked students to tell me what they felt as we were reading. “Sad” was the most common response, along with “That’s whack,” and quite a bit of tongue clicking and lip smacking. I asked my students to call out some of the jobs Galeano mentions. I listed the jobs on chart paper, and then we compared the list to the household chores my students had listed earlier. When I asked for an analysis of the jobs child laborers do versus the chores my students do, hands went flying.

“I wouldn’t want to pick fruit all day, especially with those pesticides on it.” Maria began.

“Yeah and what if you had to work in a diamond mine? That’s messed up. I’d take me some diamonds and run away”, Leon added. The students were beginning to understand that child labor is not helping around the house but aching work performed all over the world by children even younger than they are.

The tea party
To deepen my students’ connections to real child laborers, I used two amazing books: We Need to Go to School: Voices from the Rugmark Schools and Stolen Dreams: Images of Child Labor. The books are filled with photographs, descriptions, and personal narratives from actual child laborers. I used these materials to develop a “tea party”. I copied or transcribed short biographical sections from the books, passed the biographies out randomly to the class, and asked the students to read them as many times as they could. As they read, I shared the pictures of the children they were reading about. They read and reread the biographies and spent a long time looking at the photos to memorize information about the child laborers. Finally they spent an afternoon in character as these laborers. Students walked around the room talking to each other and sharing details from their characters’ lives. The knowledge I was asking my students to work with was painful and hard to comprehend. Being able to talk together and literally move away it it felt too overwhelming helped sustain the learning over a longer time than if I had simply had them at their seats reading biographies of child laborers.

Debating child labor
My students had already been developing strong reading and research strategies by reading articles and responding in research journals and discussion groups. I knew I wanted them to write persuasive essays by the end of the unit, but I hadn’t planned how to do that yet. Fortunately, Karen Cosper, our English Language Learning teacher (who spends 45 minutes a day in my classroom) came up with the idea of having debates. She had held debates before in another class and promised they would strengthen students’ knowledge. We planned to use debates to solidify the students’ understanding and meet state benchmarks for formal speaking. These same debates would then act as springboards for organizing persuasive essays.

“What should we do about child labor?” I asked the class a few days later. Most of my class wanted to make it impossible for child labor to occur. But I reminded them that some child laborers we had read about didn’t want it to end. They just wanted it to be safe and to earn a living wage. After some small-group and whole-group time devoted to the question of what should be done, we eventually agreed upon two main options for dealing with child labor: to make it stop right away or to make rules so it would be more fair. Karen hung two pieces of chart paper — one labeled “Abolish” and the other “Regulate” — and we divided the class into groups of three or tour to generate ideas to support both positions.

They had their research folders out, and the teams searched for reasons why to abolish or regulate child labor. Karen and I passed out two colors of Post-It notes, which the students used to post their support of one of the positions on the chart papers. As a class we negotiated whether ideas belonged on one list or could be used to support either position. “Children get hurt or die”, belonged on both lists. But the fact that children are needed to help support their families belonged on “Regulate”.

By having the students in small groups discussing and reviewing the articles in their research folders, we were able to get a broad base of supporting details for the two positions. Students developed evidence from both the factual information in articles about international child labor and stories of real children living in child labor.

After the students shared their posted ideas, Karen and I recorded their Post-it note ideas onto the chart paper with bold black marker to make them easier to read. These chart papers hung at the front of the room and became both the support for our debates and a source of further information for students who still struggled to find their positions.

At first we did organized debates as part of our research time. Two students stood in front of the class and each took a position. (They didn’t have to agree with the position.) They followed a formula for initiating the debate. Each student stood in front of the chart paper that listed the reasons to abolish or regulate and began by stating, “I believe child labor should be régula ted/aboli shed because —–”. Then they stated what they believed to be the strongest reasons for their positions. The two debaters went back and forth, giving reasons to support their positions and responding to their opponents’ positions. Students pulled ideas from the chart paper. Karen and I modeled the debating process, overacting and turning to look at the chart paper for our ideas. At the end of our debate, we smiled and shook hands. Karen told the class that everyone would debate sometime in the next week then asked who was willing to start. Hands flew up.

At first, the debates lasted only two or three minutes and the students relied heavily on the ideas posted on the chart paper. But after a few days, they started improvising and the debates grew to three or four minutes. After each debate, Karen asked members of the audience what new ideas they had heard and encouraged everyone to return to their research folders and journals to get their own new ideas. Students hunted for great facts or vignettes to make their points. Mai studied the gnarled hands of an eight-year-old carpet factory laborer while Ken read and reread the article about child activist Iqbal Masih. Sarah circulated around the room asking for more evidence when she got stuck. Soon what had been “Kids get hurt when they work” became “Kids get hurt, like Benta, whose hands burn from the pesticides. Her hands should be protected”.

Students who supported abolition began by saying, “No one makes the factory owners follow the law”. By the end of the debates, someone said, “There are rules already, but they don’t get followed and look at what happened to Iqbal Masih when he tried to make it change. He got murdered”.

Students changed their positions as the debating continued. Some days, a student would debate very effectively for a position and a few kids would shift to that position. I did not want to force students to occupy either position; the debates were supposed to stir up ideas and solidify them through talking and listening. After about a week, most students stopped changing positions and had added ideas of their own to the initial ones we had listed on chart paper. We were almost ready to write persuasive essays.

During the final stage of the debates, I required each student to stake out and maintain one position. I gave them a day to decide finally where they stood and why. Again, I offered them time to discuss in small groups or with partners using the resources we had available. These final debates were the formal speeches students needed to give to meet the state benchmark. Students were prepared to present a fairly lengthy formal speech with a clear thesis, vivid details, and a strong conclusion.

Persuasive essays
To help my students turn their oral arguments into persuasive essays, I passed out graphic organizers-pages with a large box at the top for a main idea and several smaller boxes below for details. I asked each student to record his or her position and several strong reasons for holding that position. I modeled completing the graphic organizers for both positions with an overhead transparency of the graphic organizer. I demonstrated the process, not because the form itself was difficult to complete, but because I wanted to show them how to pick four or five reasons that could best support their positions. Students took two class sessions to complete their graphic organizers. This large chunk of time allowed students to really think about which evidence they would choose to support their positions. It also allowed me a chance to give small group support to students who were overwhelmed by the vast amount of information we had collected. Some graphic organizers were the beginnings of eloquent essays with passion and voice already emerging. Others were simple lists of reasons to regulate or abolish. The important thing was that each student now had a map, crude or elegant, to guide the essay writing.

The persuasive essays would be the academically rigorous product I had hoped would come of the valuable process of this work. The debates supported the writing in a few ways: Students had already identified their strongest reason for holding their positions; they had already practiced responding to opposing views (counterpoint); and they had already practiced supporting their positions with evidence during the debates.

I used a variation on Linda Christensen’s introduction examples (startling fact, quote, scene, questions) to teach ways to introduce persuasive essays. I found examples from books and wrote a few myself to give students ideas of different types of introductions. I pointed out how each example had a position on child labor somewhere in the introductory paragraph.

Each student tried writing each type of introduction over two days of writing time. After trying each type, students chose one introduction they thought strongest for their essay. Some students used knowledge from the tea party to practice writing “character description” introductions. Roberto wrote:

I know somebody who needs your help. Her name is Akash. She works in a carpet factory. The work is hard. The pay is little. She wants to go to school; mostly she wants time to play. Because of Akash and the other 125,000,000 child laborers child labor should be abolished so Akash can go to school and have time to play.

Hannah used a “startling fact” introduction:

Did you know child labor doesn’t only happen in the Third World? It happens in the United States, too. 120,000,000 children aged between four and fourteen work around the whole world.

Using descriptions he had read of various types of work child laborers do, Karl wrote a “scene” introduction:

Smoke rises from the dimly lit factories. The floor is musty; the air is dirty. The walls are filthy … and nobody is ever happy in there. Kids ranging from age four to fifteen from all over the world work endless hours in these conditions for little money each day. Sad hmmmmmm? Well what you just read about is child labor and every word of it is true.

Trevor used questions in his introduction:

Why do some kids work? Why can’t they go to school? Child labor should be abolished so kids can go to school.

The introductions varied in sophistication, but the variety of categories made this less glaring than if every child had written an identical introduction. Experimenting with different kinds of introductions also made it possible for my students to focus on the aspects of child labor that mattered most to them.

Once we had introductions, we returned to our graphic organizers. I used the overhead to show how to take an idea listed on the organizer and wrap explanatory sentences around it to make a paragraph. Students spent three days writing the body paragraphs of their essays. Each day we began and ended writing time with students sharing paragraphs they were confident about or ones they were stuck on and wanted their classmates to help them with. A few students needed one-on-one support to focus all the information into clear paragraphs. Others relied heavily on the chart papers still hanging at the front of the room for their details. But they all wrote.

Getting active
I posted the essays on the bulletin board outside our classroom door and thought educating our school community could be the activist component of the unit. But I soon learned the bulletin board was nowhere near good enough for my kids. They wanted to do something more direct. Mel wanted to send all our school supplies to schools that educate former child laborers. Sandy wanted to bring former child laborers to the United States as adoptees. Gary wanted to go to the factories and get the kids. I needed to remind students of our earlier conversations about the larger context. I talked about shifting power and not just helping individual kids. They needed my help to decide how we could be effectively activist instead of impotently outraged. We decided to raise not just awareness but also money.

After an Internet search of various groups working to end child labor, I chose to affiliate with the Rugmark Group. The Rugmark Group liberates children from carpet factories and certifies factories as “child-labor free”. Rugmark runs schools that educate former and current child laborers. I thought my students would be able to identify with the Rugmark schools.

We decided to continue our community outreach by creating a display booth for the Boise-Eliot Multicultural Fair, an event that happens once a year. And we agreed to raise money for Rugmark by making magnets to sell.

For the display, we left the persuasive essays up and added student poems for two voices (one voice a student at Boise-Eliot the other a child laborer). For the magnet project, the students spent hours at home and school precisely coloring in motifs common in rugs woven by child laborers, which we then laminated and affixed to magnets.

The students practiced and roleplayed educating adults and kids who approached our display about child labor. I gave small groups scenarios they might encounter the night of the fair. What if a little kid keeps touching the magnets and messing up the display? What if an adult claims that you are doing child labor by selling magnets?

By the night of the fair we had created about 100 magnets. We set up a schedule of 15-minute shifts that teams of three kids would work. The bulletin board was covered with essays, photos, and poems about child labor.

The students arrived eager to sell some magnets, most wearing their “church clothes”. I practically had to kick kids out of the booth at the end of their 15-minute shift so that everyone got a chance to work. I hovered near the booth, monitoring but not interfering.

While the students’ conversations couldn’t be scored or sent into the school district’s research and evaluation department, they offered me the evidence I needed to feel confident about my students’ learning. Juan and Ned tried hard to sell the magnets for more than a dollar. “They cost a dollar but if you give more we’ll send that, too.”

Jameala and Aida got serious with their customers: “Did you know some kids have to work 14 hours a day for only $1?” Some kids were nervous and hardly spoke, but most could articulate that we were raising money for a school for children who used to be child laborers.

People were surprised to see what we were doing. A few seemed put off, but most asked the kids lots of questions, read some of their essays, and bought magnets. The last three kids were still selling magnets as the last families left the evening event.

The next morning when we counted our $125 to send to the Rugmark Foundation, every face in my classroom was bright. We shared joy in knowing that we had seen injustice and we had worked to stop it.

Looking back
I would change many things about this unit. I would begin by analyzing child labor in the United States so that my students understand that child labor isn’t something that just happens far away. I would try to make the activism closer to home, like supporting the school serving the agricultural workers I see every summer right outside of town. Or we might try to influence our school district in deciding who grows, picks, and packages the school lunches. I would try to put my students in touch with students at one of the schools serving students coming out of child labor.

Overall, I was extremely pleased with the academic skills my students developed during this unit. They honed geography skills when we did the label hunt; math applications when we sold magnets; reading and research strategies throughout the unit; speaking and writing skills during the debates and essays. They experienced collaborative learning and negotiated with each other through some meaningful disagreements. I was even able to turn in scores to the research and evaluation department of Portland Public Schools for their debates and essays.

I am certain that the quality of my students’ work and their commitment to struggling through difficult material was born not just out of a dedication to learning, but from the meaningful, provocative content of child labor.

*All students’ names have been changed.

Useful resowrces on child labor
Harvest, by George Ancona (Marshall Cavendish Corp., 2001). A color photography book detailing the experience of migrant farm workers, including children in the United States.

Rethinking Globalization: Teaching for Justice in on Unjust World, edited by Bill Bigelow and Bob Peterson (Rethinking Schools, 2001). An excellent collection of resources, articles, and teaching ideas for all levels.

Stolen Dreams: Portraits of Working Children, by David Parker, with Lee Engfer and Robert Conrow (Lerner Publications, 1997). I used this for the tea party because of the terrific blackand-white photographs and brief captioned descriptions of working children.

We Need to Co to School: Voices of Rugmark Children, compiled by Tanya Roberts-Davies (Groundwood Books, 2001). First-person narratives of former child laborers who attend Rugmark-funded schools. Includes artwork and schoolwork done by the students.

By: Johnson, Katharine, Primary & Middle Years Educator, Oct2005

Dreams deferred and hopes dashed make for heart-wrenching personal narratives, as we see weekly in the Chronicle of Higher Education. No other trade publication reveals such pathos in the industry it watches. Stories abound of tenure cases capriciously and unfairly decided, budgets shredded owing to fiscal austerity, departments rent by raging canon wars, and burdens borne unequally by faculty members. Few topics, however, elicit as much anxiety as the crisis in the academic job market.

Week after week, graduate students, adjunct instructors, and recently hired tenure-track professors recount harrowing stories of applicants who go in search of tenure-track jobs only to find themselves locked into a series of low-wage temporary positions. I have been moved many times by the witness of the talented men and women who spill their guts to the paper of record for higher education. Yet the time for witness is past; it is now time to act. The tenacity of the job crisis means that it is time to rethink the nature of graduate training in America.

Dimensions of the Crisis
The numerical mismatch between seekers and jobs in academe is now well known, and it cannot be explained through anecdotes about behavior. For most applicants to any given tenure-track position, rejection has little to do with biography; it is rarely the result of inadequacy, poor preparation, personal defects, or wearing a bow tie to your interview (which I was warned against doing by well-meaning advisers).

Rather, the job crisis is a structural problem, produced by the introduction of scarcity through real, identifiable, and thus reversible policy decisions. The contour and durability of the crisis are shaped by state legislative priorities, tanking endowments, declining endowment payout rates, and blockbuster investments in campus plant that divert funds from classroom instruction. Within these parameters, university and college administrators seek to balance budgets on the backs of a growing casual labor pool. With high levels of PhD production and a shrinking number of tenure lines in American universities, academe has settled in for a long period of struggle over the terms of intellectual labor. It will take sustained pressure from multiple stakeholders to redress employment grievances in today’s university.

Still, just and equitable employment policies will mitigate only half of the problem. The number of positions available in higher education might rise slightly, but the number of applicants will remain high. A fundamental problem will remain: departments continue to run doctoral programs on an outdated guild model in which professors and matriculants tacitly agree that the only worthy outcome for the apprentice is to land a journeyman position in academia, eventually becoming a tenured master. No amount of restructuring can address this problem. It is time we reevaluate our system of doctoral training to exorcise the guild model once and for all.

I am not suggesting that we replace the guild model with a bland careerism that reduces graduate education to an exercise in job training. Graduate programs must not aim to produce workers alone; they must also help shape students into balanced, well-adjusted colleagues capable of living good lives. A sense of passionate vocation once called all of us to be historians or anthropologists or theologians. It is around this sense of vocation that we should reorient graduate education. After all, there are many places to practice our disciplines–many potential vocations–and the academy is not necessarily the best. We need to root out the assumptions embedded within the guild system that make the tenure-track academic job the central trajectory of doctoral training.

Purpose of the PhD
Dismantling the guild system requires that we unravel the underlying correspondence between the PhD and the professoriate. Obviously, the doctorate is the gateway degree to a career in academia, but it is also a gateway to other possibilities.( n1) Why, then, do we structure doctoral training so closely around the increasingly ephemeral reward of a tenure-track position in a university or college? On balance, little in the way of ordinary PhD training prepares graduate students to become professors. The PhD qualifies us to do original research, but it does not necessarily prepare us to teach. It qualifies us to undertake large and complex projects, but not necessarily to become university faculty members. It qualifies us to develop conceptual frameworks and to contribute original work to our disciplines, but not necessarily to be good mentors, collaborators, and colleagues. It is a necessary but insufficient condition for the reproduction of the professoriate.

If we want to dismantle the guild system, we are going to have to recast the purpose of the PhD, broadening its scope as a degree. Doing so will require graduate educators to embed doctoral training within a much broader range of professional possibilities. To do this, we need to rethink our role along two lines: first, as intellectual mentors and colleagues to our students and, second, as professional mentors willing to do the work needed to introduce our students to multiple possibilities and to help them succeed in whatever fields they pursue. These tasks may take many of us outside the mentoring roles to which we are accustomed, but the futures of our students make it worth the effort.

Active Mentoring
The core purpose of graduate education is to train graduate students to master disciplines, conceptual frameworks, and research skills. Graduate seminars help in this training, but a vital graduate curriculum also includes constant, active mentoring of graduate students. Unfortunately, we have mistaken master-apprentice relationships for mentoring. Molding a graduate student in our own image through a period of indentured servitude does not constitute mentoring. Although our primary task is to model intellectual rigor and commitment, mentorship also includes the work that we do to nurture aspirations, accentuate native talents, impart skills, build confidence, and direct energies without crushing a set of goals that may be different from our own.

Within the past few years, many administrators and graduate educators have mobilized to incorporate training, programming, and support for the pursuit of so-called alternative careers into graduate education. This well-intentioned approach only reinforces the sanctity of the tenure-track job. After years of training students to behave and think like professors, the idea that we can shove them into “alternative careers” looks like shutting the barn door after the stampede. We need to rethink graduate training not by tacking on a few alternatives at the end of the curriculum, but by changing the basis of graduate student formation.

New Way to Educate
Rethinking graduate education will require a substantial commitment of time and resources and trial and error. In the November-December 2002 issue of Change: The Magazine of Higher Learning, Jody Nyquist, former director of the “Re-Envisioning the PhD” project of the Pew Charitable Trusts, warns that doctoral training must remain a pursuit tailored to individual interests, needs, and passions. Nevertheless, she concludes that responsible doctoral training should convey a small but powerful set of core competencies: disciplinary knowledge; vocational knowledge; ethical conduct and professional responsibility; communicative ability; pedagogic skills, broadly construed; and an understanding of the value of diversity.( n2)

Departments and programs, particularly in the often-understaffed humanities, cannot accomplish these goals on their own. Students, faculty, directors of graduate studies, chairs, deans of colleges and graduate schools, vice presidents of research, and offices of university presidents must work together to strengthen and broaden the PhD. Schools must pool resources to create teaching centers, career and vocation offices, professional development workshops, ethics panels, multidisciplinary conferences, retreats, internships, externships, and other opportunities. Doctoral education is, after all, a self-organizing system–no one is in charge, but many have a stake in the outcome.

Departments, however, have a central role in one crucial arena: the culture of graduate education. The most limiting aspect of doctoral training, the guild model, is embedded in departmental culture–from the organization of the curriculum and exam structure to the ways in which faculty conduct seminars and approach mentoring relationships. The guild model cannot be undone through institutional fiat; it must be challenged at the level of the department, where we have the most leverage to make changes.

Graduate educators should orient incoming students extensively, describing each stage in the program, relating the components of mastery at each stage, and discussing the criteria for overall success. Faculty members also should explain to graduate students the procedures used to make important decisions about admissions, funding, curriculum, advising, and the allocation of resources. Graduate programs should establish a coordinated, uniform dispersal of information, bolstered by clear feedback channels and opportunities for dialogue on process.

Graduate educators should demystify the academy as well, introducing graduate students to the system of university governance and explaining to them how the institution handles issues of finance, policy, and development–in other words, they should teach graduate students how their workplace functions. Faculty members should also lay bare their own work lives, including distribution of efforts among research, teaching, and service; the meaning of research, teaching, and service; and structures of internal and external reward. Departments could offer an extensive orientation session, a weekend retreat, a series of in-service workshops, or a course or cluster of courses on these important professional concerns.

The debates in higher education over the nature and purpose of graduate education should be part of the curriculum. Exposing graduate students to opinions, ideas, and positions on doctoral education socializes them into the profession and their discipline. We should train graduate students to recognize the many and varied stakeholders in higher education, not to produce cynics, but rather to make the mechanics of the institutions transparent. Shielding graduate students from this information disempowers them and cheats us out of valuable future allies. It also puts our students at a disadvantage as they move out into the world, take jobs, and forge professional lives.

We should also be ready to scrutinize the received traditions of graduate education. For example, it is time to rethink the tired system of qualifying exams–the seemingly unbreakable heritage of guild hazing that we put our graduate students through merely because we had to go through it. Qualification exercises should evaluate students in the skills and knowledge sets most closely associated with their discipline and the profession.

Unfortunately, nearly all exam processes place students in unnatural arrangements, demanding that they model skills (short-term bursts of test taking, for example) that they will never need in professional life. Instead, exams could be in the form of writing projects that are essential to student development, such as an extensive literature review or an original evidentiary argument suitable for publication in a refereed journal. Rather than sit for six hours regurgitating answers to preselected test questions, students could be involved in generating theoretical, methodological, and evidentiary problems that they pursue over the course of a semester or year.

Different Models
Most important, however, faculty should expose graduate students to as many models as possible of satisfying vocations and professional lives. This exposure begins in the university itself. In the best of worlds, a student’s adviser will serve as a model of the ethical scholar and an engaged citizen of the academy and the profession. Most students, however, will need to see many versions of the academic life, from other professors to administrators, librarians, center directors, and clinical faculty.

Moreover, exposure to professional models must go well beyond the academy. Graduate students benefit tremendously from contact with museum curators, archivists, consultants, journalists, editors, publishers, agency directors, high school teachers, community college administrators, cultural resources specialists, and other professionals. This contact can come in the form of classroom visits, special workshops, lecture series, or courses. Whether students are bound for the tenure track or for paths beyond the academy, they will grow substantially from interaction with people who have taken their graduate degrees in a variety of directions.

The formation of graduate students must, however, remain an intellectual endeavor first and foremost; it cannot be equated with job training. The PhD is a research degree, a marker of significant intellectual accomplishment, and a mode of knowledge production. Yet it does us little good as graduate educators to pretend that the PhD is divorced from the realities of professions, institutions, and stakeholders. We should embrace vocation as a core value of our enterprise and nurture the passions, aspirations, and hard-nosed skills of students. This goal can be accomplished without displacing the intellectual ground of graduate education and can in fact become part of it.

As a graduate teacher in a Jesuit university, I embrace the mission to educate “the whole person.” The guild model is incompatible with this mission. Treating graduate students as whole persons means seeing them as much more than just future tenure-track faculty. Graduate students who are disempowered, anxious, nervous, and sick with worry often reflect divided, disarticulated, poorly conceived and run programs that treat students as itinerant, one-dimensional characters.

Our efforts to clarify purposes and processes should provide a fuller context for the development of each student’s aspirations, grounding the student more thoroughly in the business of his or her own education. Ultimately, when students enter job markets, this broader training will serve them well. Although we cannot guarantee any student a job, we can organize graduate training to better prepare students for the challenges that they will face. Most important, we can restructure the system of graduate education around a richer set of possibilities, with a fuller integration of both disciplinary knowledge and vocational agility.

For much of the twentieth century, the guild model provided a comforting buffer against the dramatic transformations of higher education. But PhD programs in the humanities can no longer function as apprenticeships and remain ethical. The professions have grown far too complex for our hidebound models of training. We must retain what works well in the PhD–the rigorous development of knowledge and research–and jettison what no longer works.

By: Heathcott, Joseph, Academe, 2005

Gainous isn’t against promoting healthy habits. But as the veteran principal of Montgomery Blair High School, the county’s largest and most economically diverse, he says replacing the vending contents will deprive his 3,300 students in other ways. The school is located in Silver Spring, one of Maryland’s sprawling suburbs, and many of its students aren’t so well off. Some students at Blair tend to come from families that can’t afford what their neighbors have. Many don’t have money for extras like schools trips, or even for the fees required to take the Advanced Placement or SAT exams.

Gainous has relied on profits from vending contracts, earning as much as $200,000 per year, to underwrite a broad spectrum of student needs and interests. Since the vending machine contents changed to fruit juices, bottled water, popcorn and lower-calorie versions of cheese puffs and potato chips, students haven’t been buying as much. During the past school year, Montgomery Blair received just $55,000 in vending profits.

“I worry,” Gainous says. “This is a county of haves and have-nots.”

Tough Tradeoffs
High school principals all over the country are becoming soldiers in the assault on non-nutritious snack foods sold at school. National studies of childhood nutrition continue to document sugary sodas as a major cause of obesity as teenagers consume 500 to 1,000 calories a day in sugar-sweetened beverages.

School boards and many state legislators have chosen a prime target–school-based vending machines, typically stocked with colas, bags of chips and cheesy snacks. A survey by the Education Commission of the States lists 15 states, including Maryland, that have organized task forces or committees on the state level that are studying nutrition issues.

No state has yet banned soda sales outright, though nine have enacted some restrictions on the sale of vending-machine sodas and snacks. Since 2003, California has required public hearings before school districts can renew their vending contracts. In West Virginia, a law adopted earlier this year bans the sale of sodas to younger children and requires that half the beverages in high school vending machines be juices, waters and other healthier drinks. In Kentucky, vending machines in all schools must be turned off until 30 minutes after lunch.

The question of a statewide ban has surfaced in several states, but lawmakers seem unwilling to take such a sweeping step. Connecticut Governor M. Jodi Rell vetoed a proposed statewide school junk-food ban this summer, saying parents and school boards should decide how best to address health issues during the school day.

The Connecticut Association of Boards of Education campaigned against the proposal, citing the potential loss of revenue from soda contracts and the state education department expense that would be required to police it. “They’re having a hard enough time getting all the resources they need for No Child Left Behind,” said spokesman Nick Caruso. “These are all distractions from the real mission.”

Declining Sales
Where local decisions have cut back on vending options, many principals have supported the changes, saying schools should set a good example. But they also feel conflicted. Beverage distributors, especially those affiliated with Coke and Pepsi, offer schools lucrative contracts that include signing bonuses, a share in machine profits and perks such as athletic scoreboards. Portland, Ore., school officials cite earnings of more than $250,000 per year from high school vending commissions. San Diego Unified schools signed a $1 million deal with Coca-Cola in 2003 to sell only its products in high school machines. Larger school districts, like Los Angeles, have earned millions.

School districts generally report that they receive between 40 and 50 percent of the price of each bottle or can of carbonated drinks purchased. High schools in Everett, Wash., were getting 50 percent. But the profit from healthier noncarbonated beverages, such as milk and water, has dropped that profit to about 15 percent, says Superintendent Carol Whitehead.

A survey of food sales in California schools by the University of California at Berkeley concluded that while cafeterias seem to adapt to changes in food offerings and manage to maintain revenue levels, vending sales nearly always suffer when contents are changed.

Fran Rothstein, president of Montgomery Blair’s parent organization, says it’s a painful debate. “Parents want their children to be educated and they realize the money from the machines helps educate their kids,” she says, adding, “That’s a disgusting situation to be in.”

Precarious Support
At Montgomery Blair, the fallout has been especially acute. While most schools tend to use their vending proceeds to support extracurricular activities and athletics, marching band uniforms and entertainment at school dances, Gainous has been using his school’s funds for a range of needs as diverse as student registration fees for the SAT and Advanced Placement exams and two-way radios for the school’s administrators.

“We were buying textbooks, school supplies, calculators, furniture, weight equipment for phys-ed and paying for security aides,” the principal says. The soda money paid for a hydraulic lift so custodians would have access to mechanical areas in the school’s especially high ceilings. It was an item the school board wouldn’t fund.

Blair’s allocation from the district for security cameras wasn’t sufficient for the sprawling, three-level building, so Gainous had to spend another $30,000 for that unmet need. “And on and on and on,” he says.

So far, students aren’t lining up to feed their dollar bills into the restocked snack machines. Blair’s student newspaper, Silver Chips, reported that feelings about the revised food and drink offerings are mixed. Some students resent being treated like babies. “You can’t make people change their diet just by changing the snacks in the vending machines,” said one student. “I think it’s punishing everybody instead of helping them eat better.”

The school’s conflict reached embarrassing levels last year as Montgomery Blair became a media target in the sugar wars, held up as a complaining school that cared more about money than student health. “We had press in here from England and China and Switzerland and all over the United States because we’re rotting out the kids’ teeth to make a profit,” Gainous says. “I ended up on every kind of panel that existed. The University of Maryland had a national panel of health reporters, and here I am in the middle.”

Gainous tried to use these public appearances as opportunities to share the story of his school’s unfunded needs, and he has won some sympathy. One retired teacher donated $2,000 to offset test registration fees for students from lower-income families. Parents do their part to fill these needs. They held a silent auction in April, raising $15,000. “But it doesn’t go far,” says Rothstein, the PTA president.

Welcome Change
Montgomery Blair’s predicament is exactly what Brenda Elliott, principal of Stratford High School in Nashville, Tenn., fears. With state law imposing stringent nutrition standards on schools by fall 2006, her county school board is moving toward banning foods that don’t address the obesity concerns.

Elliott welcomes the changes for health purposes. “The time is right,” she said. But she’s keenly aware of the cost. She uses $18,000 in vending machine profits annually to pay for equipment, paper and textbooks. The basic needs are acute, she says, because the district’s textbook allocation dropped this past year from $70 to $40 per child.

“That’s not how we should fund schools. But the reality is that is that’s how we fund schools,” she says.

Elliott received a taste of what could be coming as the school year moved toward a close and the school district’s vendor stopped filling the machines. She still had purchases to make. “We thought we might have to start selling potato chips in the hallway so we could make it through the end of the year,” she says.

Still, Elliott isn’t going to protest the changes in vending contents. She wants to find a way to get healthier foods in students’ hands and to make more money. She hopes community organizations and companies will recognize the needs and come to the rescue. She already has talked to Vanderbilt University about becoming part of a study on childhood health.

“We want to look to our community, maybe some health-conscious agencies or parents to help us,” she says.

Appleton’s Answer
A comprehensive effort that focuses on eating, physical activity and other habits is the only real way to address student health. In many school cafeterias, students still have daily access to french fries, pizza and smoothies–the same fare they’d find at McDonald’s.

Superintendent Paul Mc-Kendrick in Lynchburg, Va., said youngsters need to learn about healthy lifestyles and eating sugary snacks in moderation. The Lynchburg school board has changed some of its cafeteria items, but it has kept sodas in the vending machines, alongside healthier options.

“We have a lot of options–water, juices, diet sodas,” Mc-Kendrick says. “There are chips and so forth. But [the machines] aren’t just filled with sugary or fatty foods. Just because they’re selecting a honey bun or cinnamon roll doesn’t mean they’re unhealthy. You have to look at what that child is eating in other places. It’s a huge issue. More than one factor contributes to a child being obese.”

School leaders in Appleton, Wis., were among the first in the country to look at the problem holistically, and the results are something the school district still brags about. Most recently, Appleton educators appeared in the documentary film “Supersize Me” about the ill effects of a fast-food diet.

The school district spent two years working with Natural Ovens, a local food company, to develop a breakfast and lunch program at Central Alternative High School, which serves students with behavioral problems, and one of its elementary schools. Vending machines were removed, and the company helped the school build a kitchen and staff it with two cooks.

“They focused on fresh fruits and vegetables,” as well as whole grains, said Appleton’s Assistant Superintendent Lee Allinger.

Within weeks staff noticed a change among students in both schools.

“The ability to focus in the classroom was more apparent,” Allinger says. “There were fewer issues with discipline, and attendance improved at the at-risk high school. There were fewer health complaints like headaches and stomach aches. There was also a reduced feeling of hunger at mid-morning and mid-afternoon, less moodiness and more calm.

“And one of the biggest things was that we began to see the kids were taking the practices and carrying them over outside of school.”

One beverage distributor tried to persuade the school district to keep its soda machines. “Coke came and met with the superintendent and myself,” Allinger says. “Their angle was that soda isn’t responsible for obesity; it’s only a factor. So I said, ‘So you’d want your child to drink Coke at 9 in the morning?’ She didn’t have much to say about that.”

Phased-In Approach
In St. Joseph, Mo., vending machine changes were part of a larger wellness plan devised with Heartland Health, a consortium of hospitals, doctors and other health groups. The district’s campaign includes free dental care, immunizations and well-child exams and a program to reduce teen-age pregnancy. A new emphasis addresses body-mass index of children in an attempt to reduce obesity.

“At age 11, a normal range is 21 to 24 percent body fat,” says Donna Wilson, Heartland’s youth health coordinator. “The average percent for 2003-04 was 24.3. Then it was 26.8 percent. We have not fully addressed the problem.”

Last summer, vending machines were converted to carry only diet sodas, 100 percent fruit juice and bottled water. During the 2005-2006 school year, the diet sodas will go. And vending items meet stringent criteria. Each snack offering may derive no more than 30 percent of its calories from fat and must contain fewer than 480 milligrams of sodium and 30 or fewer grams of carbohydrates.

Dan Colgan, the St. Joseph superintendent, concedes it was not an easy decision. The vending contracts had provided St. Joseph schools with approximately $500,000 a year to help fund after-school activities, and the district needed the money. During the lead-up to a public vote on his district’s proposed $4.5 million operating budget in April 2004, Colgan decided to downplay any mention of the vending revenues. The ballot proposal included a $500,000 plan to change school food content, but it said nothing about the loss of revenues. When school nutrition was discussed, Colgan said he was a careful not to draw a line from vending machine profits to the operating budget unless someone specifically asked.

St. Joseph’s voters approved the additional funds, and the loss in vending revenues hasn’t been quite so painful, the superintendent says. The schools lost $35,000 in vending profits during the past school year and overall vending sales have dropped, according to Rick Hartigan, the district’s chief operating officer.

“We do have a revenue source now that supports the activity program in a way that offsets the loss of revenue with the bottling companies,” Hartigan says.

Acceptance of the new snack food offerings has proven to be another hurdle. At first, students threatened to boycott the new machines. Then some students tried to sabotage the plan by selling sodas themselves out of their car trunks.

Compromises were struck. Administrators allowed students to keep some of the soda machines for a limited period, and teens were consulted on the types of snacks to be included in the school’s vending machines, says Martha Meyer, the nutrition services director in St. Joseph.

“We’re making assaults on all fronts,” she adds. “I feel much more comfortable and accountable to the program now.”

The Everett, Wash., school board is putting dollars behind its pledge to promote good student health. The board told high school and middle school principals it would replace any money lost to reduced vending machine sales, this year transferring $97,000 from the general fund to student activity organizations at nine schools. Next year, the board will cover half the loss and then leave schools on their own.

The phase-in of nutritious snacks will give site administrators time to adapt. “We asked them to think about ways they could reduce so if they had a decline in revenue they could break even,” Everett Superintendent Carol Whitehead says.

Jim Dean, the principal of the 1,800-student Cascade High School, which received $29,000 from the board this year, told his staff to plan as though it didn’t have the soda funds. Out-of-town trips by the marching band were cut back. “Some of the track meets in eastern Washington we didn’t do this year,” he says. “Instead, we took ones closer to us here.”

He supports the vending changes. “It’s been enlightening for us how much we were giving kids that was not healthy for them–even how big our own portion sizes had gotten,” he adds.

Students at Dean’s school were given a say in the snack food changes. One group met with the district’s director of food services and several other administrators. “They asked very good questions, such as how did we get to this decision, and why did we decide to do it this way? The folks were able to tell them exactly why and what evidence they used,” Dean says.

No one really expects the school to recoup all the revenue it was earning before the snacks were upgraded. Student organizations are working with their advisers on fund raising.

“It’s one of those things where you become addicted to that income,” says Dean. “You should think of it as soft income, not hard income. But yet you do.”

A Pepsi Exclusive
Some school districts are working to change the negotiating climate to secure more lucrative contracts with vending distributors for noncarbonated drinks. The Los Angeles Unified School District recently signed what is probably the biggest contract so far for sales of non-sodas–$26 million from Pepsi. The deal for Pepsi’s exclusive distribution rights includes a $1.8 million signing bonus. Much of the revenues will benefit the district’s 49 high schools.

Over the summer, Pepsi stocked its school-based vending machines with nine products, including Gatorade Ice, juices, and plain, sparkling and flavored waters. That’s welcome news for principals, who have seen revenues from vending decrease by 26 percent since 2004, the year the district banned soda sales and required healthier vending snacks. At Carson High School, soda revenues dropped from $29,000 to $14,000 during the past year.

Gary Hemphill, managing director of Beverage Marketing, a national company, said beverage makers are poised to work with schools on their student health initiatives. Establishing brand loyalty is easier today because companies offer many products beyond sodas.

The American Beverage Association says demand for healthier products is being met, contending half of the contents of a typical school vending machine are non-carbonated beverages, said spokeswoman Kathleen Dezio.

Marlene Canter, a Los Angeles school board member who helped lead the campaign to change student eating habits, says it’s also possible to change the students’ attitudes. Teens at two high schools are learning from local business leaders about marketing their own healthier choices. They recently held taste tests with focus groups to select the products.

Representatives of a soy milk company visited one of the schools in L.A. “They gave away free samples,” Canter says. “Kids had never tasted it before. They liked it.”

Canter is optimistic about the future. “It’s never easy when you make changes. This shows you can do both.”

By: Sternberg, Ruth E., School Administrator, 10.2005

Over the past four decades afterschool and youth programs have become popular venues for addressing gaps in the achievement and academic access and attainment of first generation low income college bound youth and to fill urban youth’s leisure time with “constructive” activities (Carnegie Council on Adolescent Development, 1997; Griffin, 1993; Halpern, 2002). Claims vary as to the effectiveness of these efforts in raising standardized test scores, increasing high school graduation and college matriculation rates, and reducing school drop-out rates and crime (Eccles & Templeton, 2002; Myers & Schirm, 1999). More recently, studies have examined the mechanics behind the successes of such programs, moving beyond the lenses of summative statistics, prevention and remedial work. It is clear that programs youth seek out voluntarily are the ones with youth rather than curriculum at the center (Heath & McLaughlin, 1993; McLaughlin, 2000; McLaughlin, Irby, & Langman, 1994). Such programs also do not subscribe to prevention or remediation but, instead, offer youth a place of hope, a safe place to express themselves and to explore new ideas that make it possible for them to be in charge again of their own futures.

Many of these afterschool and community programs also offer hands-on and meaningful science activities. Yet such activities are often integrated with others, driven by the overall goal of youth development (Delgado, 2002; Heath & McLaughlin, 1993; Heckman & Sanger, 2001). Take, for instance, an afterschool program in California where the theme “community unity” entailed activities such as the planting and maintaining of a community garden and the starting of a recycling program, among other nonscience-related activities, such as arts performances at the hospital (Bergstrom & O’Brien, 2001). Similarly, inner city youth gardening programs tend to focus on youth development and entrepreneurship rather than science per se. Within such programs, science is typically a tool for action and, hence, youth rarely think of themselves as doing science (Lawson & McNally, 1995; Rahm, 2002). Note, however, that science is typically broadly defined and often aligned with the critical science definition laid outby Barton and Osborne (2001), which acknowledges its social, cultural and political nature along with its inherent power structures.

Overall, the role of informal settings in making science appealing to youth has become widely recognized (Jones, 1997). Such contexts can also make science accessible by offering opportunities to do science in comfortable ways, in particular, for youth who struggle with the social incongruity of the educational system (Lee, Fradd & Sutman, 1995). As noted by Jones (1997), there are multidimensional opportunities for learning, leaving participants room to investigate topics of interest to them. When looking at research of science community programs such as science discovery programs, summer camps, and science career programs, their effectiveness has been documented in terms beyond improvements in academic standing to include contextual measures, such as changes in scientific knowledge, interest, attitudes, and confidence in science, as well as career trajectories, while being less clear about the processes leading to such outcomes (Atwater, Colson, & Simpson, 1999; Fadigan & Hammrich, 2004; Hofstein, Maoz, & Rishpon, 1990; Nicholson, Weiss, & Campbell, 1994).

Recent research on science outreach programs in universities has demonstrated their positive impact in terms of students’ understanding of the nature of science and scientific inquiry, as well as their role in sparking a student’s interest in science and opening the participants’ eyes to the many career possibilities in science (Atwater et al., 1999; Bell, Blair, Crawford, & Lederman, 2003; Bouillion & Gomez, 2001; Knox, Moynihan & Markowitz, 2003; Richmond & Kurth, 1999). Some researchers have also looked inside such programs and examined the kind of science that gets done, as well as the challenges such programs face in terms of “undoing” narrow notions of science that impede students’ full participation in scientific investigations at the elbows of scientists (Barab & Hay, 2001; Bleicher, 1996; Richtie & Rigano, 1996).

Finally, a number of afterschool and community science programs emerged that targeted specific groups of inner city youth and examined the question of what a science education for all really means (Barton, 1998). For instance, the development of an afterschool science club in a homeless shelter by Barton and colleagues (1998,2003; Fusco, 2001) was initiated to develop community science projects together with youth. It led to much insight into ways low income inner city youth construct science. In essence, youth relied much on their own intuitive understandings of the world and their creativity, along with some expert knowledge to resolve issues they deemed pertinent, such as restoring a polluted lot next to the shelter with the goal of improving life in their community (Barton, 2003). Another example is an afterschool science program targeting poor inner city African-American girls, offering them a culturally meaningful “third space” in which to do science (Eisenhart & Edwards, 2004).

As this brief review makes apparent, there is a vast array of afterschool and community science programs, some of which are specifically designed for science literacy development and increasing the number of science graduates from underrepresented groups (Atwater et al., 1999).

It is clear also that as a group, low income urban youth still have fewer opportunities than do their affluent peers to participate in quality science clubs and afterschool and summer science programs (Larson & Verma, 1999; McLaughlin et al., 1994; Offord, Lipman, & Duku, 1998). Yet, as noted by Barton (2003), researchers need to move away from the discourse based on a deficit model that focuses on what low income urban youth lack in terms of achievement, resources, and educational opportunities toward a critical examination of their science practices at the margins. What does it mean for them to succeed in science in afterschool and community programs? What resources do they have and bring to such contexts (human and social capital), and what role do these resources play in the doing of science and the kinds of learning opportunities that emerge in youth-centered settings?

For these reasons, we also look inside existing afterschool and community science programs in this paper, examing

1. What motivated youth to seek out the programs?
2. How do youth themselves describe the doing and talking of science in these programs?
3. Given such descriptions, how do youth perceive the role of these programs in their lives?

Motives for Participation in Informal Science Learning

According to some researchers, informal science learning not only differs from formal science learning because of its physical location, but because of its social context and “the underlying motivation of the learner” to seek out such an educational context. That recognition led Falk (2001) to propose a change in terminology from informal science learning to free-choice science education. Accordingly, such learning is driven primarily by “unique intrinsic needs and interests of the learner” and, hence, is quite different from compulsory education or “learning that is driven by a predetermined set of requirements dictated by externally imposed authority” (p. 7). Yet, does such an interest also drive low income inner city youth to science programs in the nonschool hours? When looking at the literature on community programs, such programs are often sought out for other reasons, such as a search for safety or simply a place to be and interact with adults, get some food, and get help with homework (Halpern, 2002; Heath & McLaughlin, 1993; McLaughlin, 2000). Parents, themselves may obligate participation given concerns about their children’s safety when alone at home after school.

In this paper, we explore motives for participation from an activity theory perspective, as initially described by Leont’ev (1978) and further extended by Engeström and colleagues (Engeström, 1999). We begin with the assumption that activity (e.g., participation in an afterschool science program) is tied to a motive (e.g., to be with friends). In turn, such motives influence how participation is experienced (actions), what kinds of opportunities are sought out within a program (goals), and in turn, the role such programs come to play in the lives of the participants. Put differently, we try to understand participation as embedded within a system of interrelationships.

Methodology

Data described in this paper were collected in the context of a larger 3-year research project driven by two objectives: (a) To document the role of afterschool and community science programs in the lives of poor youth, and (b) to identify discourse features of science in the making in such settings. The study itself is best described as a “multisited ethnography” (Marcus, 1998), in that low income youths’ doing and talking science outside of school within and across multiple sites is examined. That is, we trace its meaning by moving “upward’ and “outward” in attempts to understand how it is “manifested and produced in networks of larger social systems” – in this case in the world of afterschool and community programs designed for poor urban youth (Eisenhart, 2001, p. 22). At the same time, each system or setting is studied in great detail in itself through participant observation and ethnographic interviewing, following a conventional ethnographic approach.

The following four criteria guided site selection: First, programs had to be youth centered and to offer hands-on, authentic science activities. Second, programs had to be voluntarily sought out and in no way remedial or academically oriented. Third, programs had to serve low income and ethnically diverse inner city youth at the elementary or secondary level. Fourth, only long-term programs were sought out, making possible the study of change over time. In this paper, data are reported from two settings only.

Settings and Participants

Site 1. Les Scientifines is an afterschool science program in Canada serving urban girls, ranging in age from 9 to 12 years, from two local elementary schools with a high population of students from low income families. By exposing girls to the physical sciences primarily, it aims to equip them with the scientific literacy they may not get elsewhere, while also exposing them to a variety of financially interesting career paths potentially new to them, that if pursued, could help them break out of the vicious cycle of poverty (Chamberland, Théorêt, Garon, & Roy, 1995). We draw from a 1-year ethnographic case study of 19 girls who completed a science fair project within this program, working on it one afternoon a week, starting in September 2003 and finishing with an open house science fair in May 2004.

Site 2. COSMOS is an Upward Bound Mathematics and Science (UBMS) program funded by the U.S. Department of Education under the TRIO initiative of 1965. The program consists of a 6-week residential summer program centering on hands-on science research projects, while also including monthly contact and advising during the academic year. About 40 students (ethnically diverse, gender balanced), meeting the criteria of either being first generation college bound or low-income (or both) participate in the program (at or below 150% of the poverty level as defined by the U.S. Department of Education), beginning as freshmen/sophomores (ranging in age from 13 to 15 years) and typically staying with it for 3 consecutive years through graduation (age 16-18). In this paper we draw from qualitative data collected in 2001 of the summer mentorship component offered to third year participants.

Procedures

We relied on video data, ethnographic fieldnotes, and journal notes of the program activities, along with semistructured interviews of youth and instructors to construct the stories for the article (VanMaanen, 1988). Such stories make it possible to illuminate the experiences lived by these youth and, thereby, make apparent the meaning the programs and science activities had for youth (Barton, 2001 a, 2003; Witherell & Noddings, 1991). Two stories are presented from Scientifines and one from COSMOS followed by brief discussions each.

Results

Access to Science: Rosine

Rosine, a fifth grader from a family of three children who had immigrated from Central Africa, participated in the program for a third year. Initially, she was ambivalent about the program and especially its focus on science. But her friends convinced her to give it a try:

At first, I wasn’t interested in science at all. I hated it. Then my friends were telling me “Maybe you should come to the Scientifines. Why don’t you come? Maybe you’ll have fun.” And then I was telling myself, “I’m sick of those Scientifines. I don’t want to join them.” And then at home I thought about it, and I sort of said to myself, “It’s better if I go to the Scientifines, maybe it’s good.” So when I came, I saw that everything was normal, ’cause I thought we came here only to do our homework and eat a snack. And then we started doing the activities, and I said,” Hey, what’s this ?” And then when we started looking at science, and the biology stuff, the chemistry, the physics, I started to find it interesting, and I decided to come back again. That’s why now I’m interested in science. (Interview, May 2004)

Rosine, like most other girls, highly valued the many kinds of hands-on science activities the program offered. When asked about what made the program special to her she first said it was the computers, but after further thought she noted, “It’s the fact that I’m taught things well,” and, “They explain to us what science is [and] to be curious.” Rosine’s passion for science also made her science fair project a success, even though the beginning was somewhat difficult since she had to switch teams. The team ended up doing a project on rockets, explaining their parts and how they work (rocket-propulsion) while also constructing a model rocket. They simulated a rocket launch by adding a vinegar and baking soda mixture to film canisters, which then often took off, to their dismay, into the faces of their spectators. As one instructor noted, “She was really hooked to her topic, all through the end” and also “explained well what went on with the hydrogen” and what “made the rocket take off.”

Rosine felt good about the project and how the science fair went, referring to it as “interesting, amazing, and magnificent.” Yet, she would have still liked to learn more about her topic and “to get the difficult words.” It was not just the interest and the scientific information Rosine’s team managed to understand and present, but the way they proceeded over the year to gather that information that made them stand out:

And the Rocket team, [they had] words that I didn’t understand at first. They were very scientific… “They were also very logical.” Rosine went to get things and [then] she got the dictionary, so there was a way of working that they learned through the science fair project. I think that beyond all the apparent stuff, such as the presentations and the booths and the knowledge, what they learned is a way to work, a way to work and proceed that they will be able to use later on in life. (Interview of Jane, Instructor, 2004)

Rosine’s parents also supported her interest in science. In fact, Rosine’s father came to the open door day and filmed the presentation. It was his first time inside the program building, and he was amazed at the resources and scientific artifacts all around, noting, “Now I know why she always wants to come here!” When asked if she had anybody in her family doing science, Rosine referred to a cousin who makes plates. When asked about her own career plans, science came up numerous times. She wanted to become “a scientist in a white coat” and do chemistry where “you mix things and you have to be very skilled.” The program likely broadened the career options she could envision for herself, as is also evident in the kind of job she imagined for the future: “I’d like anything where I can do science, that’s what I’d like to do…” Not surprisingly, Rosine returned to the program the following year, working on a project on cars, explaining how the machinery works.

Rosine’s case illustrates a transition from somebody “hating science” to somebody who comes to see science as “interesting” after completion of a science fair project in an afterschool program she initially rejected. As is apparent, doing science is what appealed to Rosine. It was about doing “activities,” about exploring areas of science she valued (biology), and coming to own a science project. Even though Rosine did not even choose her topic for the science fair project but simply joined a group who had started already, that did not matter to her. Instead, she saw it as an opportunity to learn more about what science is and to be curious. The science fair project also made it possible for Rosine to apply ways of working and doing she had acquired elsewhere and could further refine here through the science fair project.

Through participation overtime, Rosine even came to see science as a possibility for the future in terms of a career. She valued it since it entailed thinking. “You have to know what you’re doing,” and “You have to think.” Given these opportunities, Rosine came to develop a new relationship with science that made it something interesting and desirable to her and not simply a distinct and abstract area of study unrelated to her life and her perceived future self. Accordingly, her trajectory makes evident the role the program played in making authentic science accessible and science literacy development a possibility for her.

Science and Valued Future Self. Kamila

Kamila, a fifth grader, participated in the program for the first time along with her two younger sisters, all born in Canada, although her parents immigrated from West Africa. She used to just hang out at home or play basketball and heard about the program through her friends. The first time the first author (Jrene) noticed Kamila was during homework time. She was unable to sit still on her chair and distracted her friends, to the dismay of the instructors. Eventually, she was moved to another room and isolated from the others. Jrène sat next to her and offered to help. She pulled out some math homework entitled “revisions,” saying she could not do that kind of math. She was asked to round numbers to the hundreds or thousands. Jrène encouraged her and they did one problem at a time. She managed well but needed an incredible amount of encouragement. Jrène wondered about her level of self-confidence.

A month later, Kamila gave a very different impression. She was fascinated by all the different brain functions she learned about as she researched the topic in books and through the Internet together with her teammate, Hannah, who was vigorously taking notes. At one point, however, they both got frustrated, since they did not understand what they were writing down. Instead of simply giving up, they asked the instructors, and with their help at times, looked up terms in the dictionary. It paid off, as is apparent in one instructor’s summary:

They had a lot of vocabulary, but they had to understand what a neuron is–is it the same as grey matter, white matter, the brain, its parts, etc.?–and at the end they were able, with only a drawing of the brain, to say which part was which, and to explain what it does and the synapses, what a synapse does and… it’s incredible. That’s something I learned at the age of 18! (Interview of Keila, instructor, June 2004)

Even though the team did not get one of the three prizes given out at the science fair for the best projects, the instructors highly valued the hard work Kamila and Hannah had accomplished: “I thought they were the ones who had the best vocabulary, who maybe didn’t have the greatest structure to explain it and all, but who knew what they were talking about.”

Kamila also got much out of the experience. She was very “happy” with the product of their team “because I put in a lot of effort and ended up finding what I was looking for.” She also liked to learn a lot of things about what “we want.” When Jrène returned in the fall of 2004, Kamila was working on a project on molds, examining their nutritional value and thereby linking her topic back to her interest in health and medicine. She said, “Remember, I want to be a doctor one day, so I better learn as much as possible about the body and health now. It will help me later!” (informal conversation, October 2004).

Kamila also has some role-models. Her mother is a chemist and her father worked as a mechanical engineer before passing away three years ago, while her uncle and her aunt are family doctors in Guinea, her home country.

In the fall and beginning of the program year, Kamila stood out as one of the problem girls who often had to be separated from the others, especially during homework time. Yet, once Kamila got started on her science project, another kind of person became apparent, somebody who was interested in science. In fact, Kamila sought out the program and the opportunity to participate in the science fair project to explore in greater depth an area of science that she valued and that she saw as a means toward becoming a doctor, a future possible self that she strived for. Only one other girl referred to the instrumental value of the program for her future.

Despite such interest in the topic, the actual doing of science posed certain challenges. Kamila insisted on finding as much information on her topic as possible, yet struggled with her teammate to appropriate the science terminology and make it their own. In fact, Kamila’s team spent much more time researching their topic than others, yet struggled with the integration and organization of their material. The work ethic that came to characterize Rosine’s work was something that Kamila was still developing, making the organization of the data such a challenge for her team. Yet, the motivation for “knowing” made her put much effort into her work and made the project a success in the end, to the surprise of many instructors. Definitions of scientific terms decorated the walls of their science fair booth. They also explained the functions of the brain in great detail, going beyond simply labeling its parts.

Science as a Tool for Action in Society: Edric

Edric joined COSMOS during the summer before his junior year. His experience in the program was atypical given his late entry, having forgone the 2 years of integrated mathematics and science strands and college preparatory work. At the time of the interview in 2004, Edric was a science major at a local university pursuing a career in human health and medicine. He expressed the need to get through the program at the university as quickly as possible to “start earning money… You’ve got to pay bills and stuff like that.” He was thinking of a job as “a technician in a lab or pharmaceutical.” He was very proud to be the first in his family, who imigrated from Mexico, to pursue a college education. He claimed to have been interested in science for some time, but the mentorship experience in the biochemistry lab further strengthened that interest:

Well, [I like] everything. You know, I’m working with a new drug that, that might make it out into the market one day. That would be cool. If it comes out one day, you know, I worked on that drug. Bragging rights. That’d be cool. (Interview, 2001)

Edric learned firsthand how science knowledge serves as a tool for action in society. In this case he became an insider to a scientific team working on the improvement of a drug for pain relief, which in turn, can help society better treat problems associated with such medication. Although the authenticity of the project mattered greatly to Edric and made this a valuable educational opportunity for him, the authenticity was challenged during the 6-week program. In fact, early on, the team reached obstacles as they tried to mix the compound. These obstacles led to a struggle for Edric, who was used to quick experiments as typically done in science classrooms:

There was something wrong with the drug and it wouldn’t work. And we struggled for like a week. So I lost a week there. That’s been the most challenging. Sticking through it. ‘Cause I flat out wanted to quit. I just wanted, you know, I’m like, “I’m going to walk if this doesn’t work” … but, but we got it to work. (Interview, 2001)

That things do not always work immediately is no news to scientists. Yet, for Edgar, that made the opportunity to work on a “real” scientific project less desirable and valuable at times. In this case, the dissolving of the chemical became a lab project in that all students and scientists took an active part in resolving the issue. Even a chemist was consulted and different titration machines were used. Maybe not surprisingly, Edric described the mentorship program as both a physical and emotional challenge, given the fact of having to get up early while also having to manage “setbacks.” Yet, Edric was able to see beyond the immediate frustrations. Knowing that he was involved in a “real” project about finding new drugs kept him going. It made the tedious work meaningful to him. Still today, Edric refers to COSMOS as a “once in a lifetime opportunity, and I would not take it for granted!” (Interview 2004).

A long interest in science made Edric seek out the opportunities COSMOS offered. In fact, his motives for participation were similar to the ones described by Kamila. He came to the program with an interest and wanted to take up the opportunity to learn more about science with the aim of being better prepared to pursue a science education in college. Beyond such a motive, the program also gave him an opportunity to experience science in new ways. He was not doing science for the sake of doing it, but instead, learned about using science as a tool to address a problem in society, namely the negative side-effects of pain relief drugs currently in use. Accordingly, he was becoming an insider to a scientific research group, which meant he was also exposed to the many challenges of “real” research, such as the problem of mixing chemicals in ways to produce a smooth cocktail and working toward something for which one does not have an answer upfront. Edric’s doing of science called for much perseverance, patience, and an openness to much tedious and repetitious work. Yet, he managed to live through the challenges and finish his research project and, in turn, contribute to the ongoing research.

Summary

The three stories underline many dimensions of informal science learning, two of which are highlighted briefly. First, such programs and settings offer access to the world of science and become a testing ground for the doing of meaningful and relevant science, in some cases leading to an interest in science for the future (case of Rosine). For others the programs may reinforce an interest they had developed prior to coming to the programs (Kamila and Edric). As discussed by Atwater et al. (1999), even if participants do not pursue the study of science per se after participation in such an outreach program, they are well equipped to excel in other areas, since such programs support the development of personal skills and work ethics essential for survival in college.

Clearly such programs offer their participants new ways to relate to science, either by letting them explore issues they deem of interest (case of Rosine) or by letting them simply find out about the “real” world of science (Kamila and Edric). In fact, such opportunities help youth better understand the pertinence of science to their daily lives. In sum, the two programs explored here, while different in focus and intention, offered participants access to a world of science they knew little about and that they had neither a way to relate to nor integrate with their daily experiences as poor youth. In particular, the open-ended structure of the programs supported multiple diverse forms of participation over time and the doing of an authentic science. It made possible a link for youth between their world and who they were and were becoming, resulting in an “I will” attitude and much hope for the future.

Discussion

In this paper, we wanted to make visible the diverse motives for participation in afterschool and community science programs, along with the diverse roles such programs play in the lives of poor urban youth. Too often, afterschool and community science programs are evaluated in terms of changes in achievement scores, perseverance in school, future career choice, and success within them (Atwater et al., 1999; Nicholson et al., 1994). Yet, as shown, what matters most is not the science literacy developed per se but the opportunity to have a place to learn, to question, to be with others who share such values and, together, develop a sense of hope for the future within which science becomes a tool for action. Similarly, motives for participation ranged widely from centering on science for some to learning for life for others. Since the two programs described in this article engaged “in a practice of science for the purposes of youth development” in the words of McLaren (Barton, 2001b, p. 855), a wide variety of motives for participation could also be accommodated. In essence, the two programs offered youth a “toolkit” for their future.

Yet, how did the two programs achieve such broadly defined goals, and how did science figure into that? Most important, the two programs exposed youth to new ways of relating to science, ways that fit with their lives and concerns as poverty urban youth and their own unique and rich experiences with science in their everyday world. The science the youth embraced was unique, real, complex, and factually valid, but somewhat different in practice from the science of scientists and also the “cookbook” science most of them experienced in school. In essence, the programs gave youth the latitude to learn and practice solid science in terms they were familiar with and in ways outside the mainstream dominant culture permeating the traditional settings. Within the two programs studied, youth were also respected and made to feel that they belong, making the programs safe places to develop the confidence needed to participate and succeed in science (Fadigan & Hammrich, 2004; Jones, 1997; Seiler, 2001).

To summarize, the two programs may be best perceived as sanctuaries for science learning for urban youth from diverse cultural and socioeconomic backgrounds, given the programs’ flexibility and responsiveness to their needs, diverse identity projects, and kinds of sciences they can relate to and value (Barton, 1998, 2003; Hammond, 2001; Jones, 1997; Lee et al., 1995; Rahm, 2002; Rahm & Downey, 2002; Seiler, 2001; Sosniak, 1995). For instance, despite Kamila’s discipline problems when doing “school” (i.e., homework), the program was able to see beyond her identity as a troublemaker and gave her a chance to show who she could be and become when invested in something she perceived as valuable and worth investing in. Similarly, Rosine and Edgar made evident through their work and sustained involvement in challenging projects that they were interested in learning more about science and about themselves as successful youth.

This discussion of the value of such programs in the lives of poor urban youth prompts a word of caution about program evaluation in such contexts. Knowing that students entering such programs with more science advantages-a history of participation in informal science programs, family and teacher support, as well as high levels of confidence in themselves as learners–are most likely to develop the confidence needed to make it in the challenging world of science (Stakes & Mares, 2001) immediately puts programs in the urban context “at risk.” They serve primarily poverty and minority youth-youth who often lack such experiences and support. Yet, as shown, what makes Scientifines effective is the manner in which it opens the girls’ horizons to the world of science, while for COSMOS, it is the realization that the pursuit of a college education (whether in science or not) is an attainable goal that can lead to financial stability and an intellectually challenging and worthwhile future. For these reasons, program success also needs to be examined globally and foremost in terms of the ways such programs are able to offer youth a sense of hope for the future that makes the pursuit of an education and the active engagement as citizens a possibility for them.

Conclusion

Although much of the attention of science programs has been driven by the well-published and established gaps in achievement between the dominant culture and different segments of the population in North America and elsewhere, the gaps are generally based on economic and ethnic lines. The importance of increasing content knowledge cannot be understated, but our study illustrates a role that culture-in this case urban youth culture-plays in this calculus.

Education and science, like all human endeavors, are cultural endeavors. The current educational systems and science practices are largely the purview of the dominant culture, which developed from the renaissance and age of enlightenment. The distance in practices between urban low income youth culture and dominant education and science culture is far greater than the distances experienced by their middle and upper income white counterparts. Although researchers have emphasized these issues for decades, the need to build a science practice with youth that is based on respect, and a science they can relate to and that fits with their own worldviews and culture, is particularly crucial for urban afterschool and youth programs – settings that lend themselves well to this, given their structure and culture. Only then will they become sanctuaries for science literacy and youth development in the eyes of their participants.

Author Note: The authors wish to thank all the girls (big and small) of the program Scientifines for their participation in the research project. The research on that program was supported in part by grants from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the Fonds de recherche sur la société et la culture de Québec. The authors also wish to thank the staff and students of the University of Northern Colorado Upward Bound Mathematics and Science program “COSMOS” for their participation as well as their assistance in locating and tracking the students. Thanks to Dr. Edward Bilsky and his lab for serving as a mentor, and special thanks to Dalton Miller-Jones, Elizabeth Swanson, and Shandy Hauk for their helpful comments and stimulating discussions.

This work was supported in part by grants from the U.S. Department of Education (P047M 990093-00) and the U.S. National Science Foundation (ESI-0119786).

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