Clearly the students in Parkland learned citizen lessons.  Many of them say they learned these lessons in school.  The civil rights leaders of the 50s and 60s learned these lessons in churches and communities.  The Dreamers’ citizen lessons have emerged through lived experience and solidarity with each other. What does it mean to create educational spaces that educate for civic and collective outcomes?  One guide I am revisiting was a set of 10 civic capabilities that I worked on with my former colleagues at CIRCLE.   The genesis came from Amartya Sen and later Martha Nussbaum.  I still think striving to build and create space for these capabilities in young people, us all really, is essential.  All youth should have these essential civic capabilities:

1. Voice: Being able to form, express, and reflect on diverse views on social issues.
2. Hope and aspiration: Being able to conceive of a better society.
3. Practical reason: “Being able to form a conception of the good and to engage in critical reflection about the planning of one’s life. (This entails protection for the liberty of conscience and religious observance.)” (From Nussbaum 2011, p. 34.)
4. Civic relationships: Being able to form relationships marked by a degree of respect, loyalty, and trust.
5. Affiliation: Being able to join or organize new groups around collective interests, including both groups that reflect particular interests and perspectives as well as groups that bring together a diversity of people.
6. Collective decision-making: Being able to participate effectively and responsibly in inclusive group processes that lead to decisions.
7. Work:  Being able to create, form, and construct concrete objects of public value (physical objects or ideas, policies, etc.).
8. Action: Being able to act individually and collectively in the public sphere.
9. Value: Being able to see added value in the world around you from your own work, voice, or membership.
10. Locus of control:  Being able to have fundamental choice, agency, freedom, and mobility regarding decisions that govern one’s life, and being able to access education and work on an equal basis with others in order to exercise practical reason and enter into

I’m currently engaged in a new Collaborative Exploration offered up the the Critical and Creative Thinking Community out of UMass Boston entitled “Young People Designing Their Own Lives.”  The case challenges explorers to think about how we might go about helping young people tackle their life design challenges by presenting the concept for a script or book that would guide young folks as they chart their course.

Interestingly, this coincided with a conference session at the National Humanities Conference this past weekend.   Folks from the PA Humanities Council talked about their Teen Reading Lounge program. The program has teens read books, discuss them, and then do hands on activities related to the books. The presenter linked the program and the exploration of literature to these key life questions teens are confronting:

• Who am I?
• What is my place in the world?
• What do I believe?

Definitely, important prompts to start a life journey.  As I’ve been contemplating this case, I have also been thinking about creative books and activities from my youth.  One of the things I loved most when I was young were Colorfoms.  I loved having scenes where I could place characters and props.  I could rearrange and reconfigure infinitely.  I was free to orient, overlap, and edit.  At the same time, I had a container or structure that bounded my exploration.

About a year ago, a few of my favorite pre-teens were interested in creating their own “tv show.”  I gave them some simple guidelines:

1. they each needed to have a character and know what their character was about and how that character related to the other characters
2. they needed to have at least 3 settings
3. they needed a challenge, task, or mission that they were trying to accomplish
4. they could each bring or include one friend in the process

The girls scripted out a basic story line.  They knew what each scene was and what they were trying to do.  I told them to come to the tv studio ready to act.  They should bring any costumes or props that they needed.  I then let them design and arrange the various studio sets and furniture how they wanted.  I showed them how the green screne worked so they could see the possibilities for creative backgrounds.  From these basic elements they created and orchestrated a pretty silly, but cohesive story that was generated out of their own creative mind.  It was sort of like Colorform media.

So, as I’m exploring and thinking on this month’s collaborative exploration, I’m contemplating how to go about crafting a basic environment with enough raw materials that might jumpstart the life design mindset of teens.  What would this look like?  What format — book, script, media production, game?  What elements need to be in the mix and what will allow them to productively craft this?  What supports or guidance are needed?  It is exciting to think about.

So today, in one of my RSS feeds I came across this article that talked about “The Great Millenial Meltdown” —  – http://freebeacon.com/the-great-millennial-meltdown/.   I was interested in reading this article because the data in the polled analyzed at CIRCLE did show that 18-29 year olds are most concerned about the economy and jobs as an issue.  However, as I read the post the article, which referenced a poll that was released in December of 2011 stated a number of things about youth economic status that were in contradiction to the CIRCLE analyzed poll.  They also stated some things about the effects of social media on voting behavior of youth that were also in contradiction.

Before I left the The Washington Free Beacon website I wanted to get a bit more information about it as a source.  What I could gather from other articles posted, is that the publication had lots of articles very critical of President Obama and very critical of government.  My assumption was that the ideological bent of this publications was conservative and probably libertarian.  This helped me put the Millenial Meltdown piece in a bit more context.

So, next I wanted to find out more about this poll to see how they did the sampling and what the questions were.  I was hoping that this information would explain the discrepancies between the poll I had been involved with and the poll referenced in this article.  There was a helpful link in the article that said “polled 600 young Americans” which led me here –
http://www.prweb.com/releases/2011/12/prweb9057216.htm.

Rather than being led directly to the poll or the poll data, this was a press release about the poll.  From this press release the data about economic effects on young Americans were confirmed as well as the social media use.  From this press release it appeared that the poll was commissioned by Generation Opportunity and conducted by the polling company, inc./WomanTrend (April 16 – 22, 2011, +/- 4% margin of error).  So from this it is clear that the information is now more than a year and three months old.  So clearly youth attitudes could have shifted since that poll and the CIRCLE analyzed poll.

So from here I wanted to find out more about Generation Opportunity.  They clearly were interested in engaging 18 to 29 year olds and had an interest in using social media. I went to the main page of the website  – http://generationopportunity.org/.  There were some datapoints about the April 2011 poll on the main page, but still no link to the data or the details of the poll.  I then tried to find out who was involved in Generation Opportunity (http://generationopportunity.org/who-we-are/).  I could find no actual staffers listed, only supporters.  This is never a good sign.  Makes me think the organization is hiding something.

I then went to Google to see if I could fid out more about Generation Opportunity and then found this – http://www.futuremajority.com/node/13847.  This  page does an excellent job of deconstructing Generation Opportunity and providing context and real details   They also reference facts from Pew that are more in alignment with the CIRCLE analyzed poll.   I then went to the “About”  page on Future Majority (http://www.futuremajority.com/about) it is clear that this organization is interested in progressive youth organizing and are very transparent about it.  So now I had the context of this post.

I then thought I’d research the polling company that did the Generation Opportunity poll and it would appear that Inc./WomanTrend (http://www.pollingcompany.com/viewPage.asp?pid=16) is headed up by KellyAnne Conway who is referenced in the Future Majority post as one of the key folks in setting up Generation Opportunity.  I have been unable to unearth the methodology of the April 2011 poll or any of the toplines.  So after about 10 minutes worth of work, I don’t have much faith in the data it shares but do have more of a context for it as being put out to support a conservative point of view.

I was also confident that the poll I was involved in was closer to a truth.