Last week, several of us submitted a chapter for an edited book from Harvard Press on productive pedagogies
in and out of school for youth in urban settings. Here's a snippet:
...in today’s market-driven, high stakes assessment arena, where essential life experiences like the arts and physical activity are casualties to the reign of simplistically assessed skills, creating spaces for young people to be anything other than students is increasingly a figment of imagination. More specifically, newcomer immigrant youth are seen, through lens of educational policy, research and practice, solely as English language learners, ones in need of intensive English-only and remediated instruction to pass the high stakes assessments (Patel Stevens, 2009). The cumulative effect of this educational arena is a bleak one for young people, teachers and rarely considers the long-term effect for professional workplaces.
In this chapter, we report on our efforts to wedge a space in schooling where youth are seen as already skilled, where adults learn about youth other than their studenting skills (Patel, in press), and where young people critically engage with race, capital and status in society. To conduct this work, we re-imaged a common practice of secondary and tertiary institutions: the internship.
The contributors to this chapter include a university-based researcher,
two graduate students, a volunteer mentor, a high school program leader,
a school district administrator, and a young immigrant.
