YouthMADE is providing AMES with an opportunity to mobilize ‘best practices’, innovate and respond to feedback that we’ve compiled about our materials from educators, students and activists since we first began developing Educational Resource packages 8 years ago. The YouthMADE methodology, which seeks to engage hearts, heads, hands and voices and encourage the “3 C’s”: Creativity, Compassion and Critical thinking is in direct response to the accumulated knowledge of doing this type of work since 2002:
Viewing anti-racism through a heart shaped lens:
Many anti-racism programs engage people intellectually (‘racism is bad because…’), but do not do so emotionally, or if they do, tend to generate the non-productive emotion of anxiety and guilt. This curriculum is unique in having a heart-based focus. This means breaking down dichotomies between ‘the guilty’ and ‘the righteous’, fostering empathy for both self and ‘others’ and accepting that anger and defensiveness may arise in oneself and others over the course of doing this work, but the focus here is on giving students the tools to observe and move through these limiting emotional responses.
Injecting Critical analysis:
On the ‘other’ end of the spectrum, many projects that celebrate multiculturalism and diversity often gloss over issues of power, privilege and injustice and fail to address the ways in which racism intersects with other forms of oppression. This project helps to foster critical thinking skills so that students can more effectively explore the complex and subtle ways in which discriminatory practices get perpetuated.
The Inclusion of Artistic Practice:
Students get skeptical the moment they feel like they are being preached at. While the workshops we have run thus far have been effective in creating dialogue, it was felt that the students could not be fully engaged and impacted without being creatively and thus emotionally involved in this highly-charged subject matter. As such, each thematic module and workshop will feature an arts-based approach to generating discussion about this issue.
At its core Youth-MADE, like all of AMES programs, seeks to build bridges and enhance understanding between diverse communities-particularly those linked with BC schools.
The thrust of this project is to increase awareness of the various ways in which racism manifests and can be challenged. By adopting a heart-based anti-oppression framework, this project takes a holistic approach to these issues endeavouring to engage people at a deeper level (in terms of both self-reflection and empathy-building exercises) while giving people the analytical tools to ‘raise the bar’ where dialogue around these issues is concerned.
In many ways this begins with simply creating the conditions in which diverse groups of people are encouraged (and feel safe) to tell stories and to listen deeply; doing so has an profound capacity to ‘disarm defensiveness’, enable more broad-based participation and help people to access their compassion and faith in humanity.
We had the opportunity to see the positive ripple effect that can occur when spaces are created where authentic youth-voices can be heard during the ‘Community Dialogue’ that AMES hosted in Port Alberni in June of last year. People from all walks of the community (many of whom had been political adversaries) gathered. Many of them came only because they were ‘called upon’ by the young people in their community—to listen and ultimately to rise above their own prejudices. In the words of one of the student attendees “ this community dialogue represented a step towards cohesion and improving communication between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people in this community…I think its a building block towards the future in that aspect”. It would be unrealistic to expect the tension between these communities to be resolved in one dialogue, but it helped to create the conditions for on-going dialogue and bridge-building between the communities.
Similarly, the Vancouver dialogue inspired rich discussions about the spaces that need to be cleared and the context that needs to be created so that perspectives like those represented in YouthMADE are able to be more adequately addressed in the curriculum, as well as better understanding of the inter-sectoral cooperation that will need to take place in order to support this ongoing process.
Broader community engagement and the facilitation of inter-cultural understanding is a significant aspect of YouthMADE. Because racism is everyone’s issue, many of the activities in the resource packages will be designed to reach out to and involve parents, grandparent and other community members, thus further extending and enriching the potential for dialogue and (inter)action on these issues.
