What Is After-School Worth? Developing Literacy and Identity Out of School

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Asia represents herself in “How Much is a Life Worth” as a mature social critic but also as a compassionate person with a sense of humor. As the poem’s narrator, she comes across as someone engaged with big ideas who is unafraid to name the world’s ugliness but who nonetheless holds onto a sense of idealism and a belief in the power of human beings’ ability to love.What an impressive identity to enact and strive for! Interestingly, Asia had to fend off attempts from her writing group and her mother to persuade her to choose a different topic. Here is how she described that pressure and her decision:

Everyone said, “I think you should stick to the other poem. . . . The “how-much-is-a-life-worth” poem – it’s too complicated, too deep!” They were thinking “It’s too deep for a teenager – a fifteen-year-old. What’s she going to do with this deep poem?”

Asia suspected that everyone, including her mother, wanted her to choose a topic that was “kiddier,” but she stuck to her guns and, in the end, all were impressed and proud.

The importance of the power to choose – to be supported in writing about topics of interest and to be allowed and encouraged to use literacy activities to represent, analyze, and understand one’s own world – cannot be exaggerated for adolescents. Asia took great pleasure and care in illustrating her poem with just the right images; in fact, she reported that three-quarters of her work on the poem consisted of searching the Internet for photographs, drawings, and illustrations.

These images had personal relevance for Asia and were thereby loaded with an authorial significance that might not be immediately apparent to viewers. About a photograph of three young African American men standing by a corner liquor store, she remarked that it reminded her “of a store right around the street from my Grandma’s house . . . where, you know, in the ’hood, people just stand outside all day at the liquor store. They don’t have a job or anything, [they] just stand outside the liquor store.” The importance of authorial agency for Asia was strikingly illustrated by her decision not to major in journalism, even though she loved to write; as she notes below, her journalism class at school did not allow her to write about things that interested and concerned her:

And then she’s [her teacher] talking about you gotta do all this writing, and it was writing that wasn’t that interesting to me. She said, “Write about the new principal.” Who cares about the new principal? I mean, not to be mean or anything, I’m interviewing people around the school: “What do you think about Miss Canton, the new principal?” “Who’s Miss Canton?” “Who cares?” “Who’s Miss Canton?” “That’s the new principal!” She’s talking about, write three or four pages, for homework, about Miss Canton. I said, “I don’t care about Miss Canton.” I thought I was going to be writing about things that interest me. So I decided I want to be a writer, a director, of film.

Of course, many productive activities in school and in life require doing things that do not seem to be of immediate relevance or interest. Nonetheless, it is important to note the power of connecting, wherever possible, our assignments as well as our creative work to adolescents’ lives and interests.

A final notable aspect of Asia’s digital poem is its creation at DUSTY. In composing and sharing her poem,
Asia traversed school, home, and community. The idea for the poem originated in an art class at school, where, in the wake of 9/11 and the most recent Iraq war, Asia created a collage. This artwork became the second image of Asia’s digital poem. In writing her poem she consciously drew on literary techniques that she had learned in school, including the use of alliteration and the repetition of words and ideas.

She also relied on her knowledge of and concerns about her own community – where the number of homicides has topped 100 for two years running – as she developed her themes and selected her images. At DUSTY she acquired expertise in multimedia composing, and she found a social space that allowed her to bring her own interests center stage. Sharing her poem included taking it back to school, as well as sharing it among friends and family.

After-School Programs: An Alternative Space for Literacy

For Asia, moving across social and geographic spaces appeared to be a seamless and natural activity – a kind of movement that we believe is characteristic of one way young people use after-school programs. The programs can provide material resources, social relationships, and social practices – including particular uses of multimedia technologies – that complement and extend, sometimes in dramatic ways, the kinds of educational and literate experiences available in school and other contexts.

For other youth, after-school programs play a different and in some ways more crucial role, serving as their primary public space for the development of certain kinds of expertise, for acquiring a sense of self as valued and capable, and for exercising their claim on attention, care, safety, and their right to heard. As one young male participant For other youth, after-school programs play a different and in some ways more crucial role, serving as their primary public space for the development of certain kinds of expertise, for acquiring a sense of self as valued and capable, and for exercising their claim on attention, care, safety, and their right to be heard. As one young male participant explained, “[DUSTY] just took me off the street. . . . And it gave me a chance to use my creativity and tell my story.”

We think of literacy in this way: a familiarity with the full range of current communicative tools, modes (oral and written), and media, plus an awareness of and a sensitivity to the power and importance of representation of self and others. This literacy, we argue, can be fostered most easily in spaces that support readers and writers in their critical, aesthetic, loving, and empowered communication.

We have tried in this essay to illustrate how after-school programs can be key institutions for providing young people with opportunities to become literate, confident, and influential communicators. After-school programs can be constructed as safe but vibrant social and physical spaces that allow youth much-needed out-of-school opportunities. They can offer equal access to material and symbolic resources and relationships; chances to engage in productive activity through the creation and performance of valued popular cultural products – music, videos, poetry, and art – and places to develop identities as powerful actors able to describe nd impact an unsettling, yet changing and changeable, world. A tall order, yes – but one that keeps time with an important theme in the history of afterschool programs in this country and one that pushes toward a vision of afterschool programs as alternative public spheres. This is the vision that drives DUSTY and its DV Poetry program.

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References

After School Corporation. 1999. After-School Programs: An Analysis of Need, Current Research, and Public Opinion. New York: After School Corporation.

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