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It's hip to be deep Making writing essential to teens' lives
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PROVIDENCE, RI—We want literacy to be integral, deeply rooted, exciting, and transformative for teenagers. But how do you get young people to read and write as if their lives depend on it?
Literacy is the key factor in determining whether students fail or succeed academically, and our nation's teachers are painfully aware of the crisis point that students now occupy. When kids are alienated from academic subject matter, and poor test scores have sapped their spirit, how might we draw them in to writing as a space to grow and shine, and to communicate?
The answer begins with treating writing as a tool for connecting with issues that directly affect youth. This helps teenagers regard it not as a barrier, but as an entry into a world they can question and shape. They will hunger for reading and writing when it taps into their desire to take hold of their world, explore their identity, and be taken seriously by peers and adults alike.
Add to this the chance to make their writing and voices public—in print, online, on the radio, on stage—and literacy can exert an irresistible pull on young people. Publication is the surest route to inspire young writers, creating a powerful sense of ownership.
In this edition of the WKCD website, we offer profiles of seven programs and teachers that exemplify the dedication, spark, structure, and vision that motivate students—even those with no prior interest in writing—to take up writing for a public audience.
We highlight the work of one of the country's longest-running teen writing programs, New York City's Youth Communication. We introduce the Young Naturalist Awards, which recognize innovative environmental research essays by youth. We show students assuming the role of youth evaluators in metropolitan Detroit, weaving their interviews and other data about racial stereotyping into a lively 57-page report. We speak with a teacher who has spent a decade teaching writing to ESL students.
We begin, however, with WKCD's Abe Louise Young, who as a poet and teacher helps young people bring their voices to bear on issues of identity, community, and justice.
We visit the anthology of youth essays and commentary Abe Louise Young edited for Next Generation Press, released this month under the title Hip Deep. We travel to a high school next to our nation's largest army base, where Abe recently conducted a writing workshop for students with parents deployed in Iraq. And we learn about the Neighborhood Story Project, which supports students from a failing school in New Orleans as they create books about their neighborhoods—neighborhoods Abe knows well from growing up, herself, in New Orleans.
We include, too, an annotated list of organizations, books, and websites devoted to the teaching of writing.
"Writing is a tool where you are not being judged at all. You're just using your own thoughts. You'd never assume it had so much power or so much of an impact on you and others."—Antwaun Garcia, student journalist, Youth Communication
What you will find here