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Building Smart Education Systems: VUE Number 26, Winter 2010
NOTE: This article was originally published in Adolescent Literacy: VUE 3, Winter/Spring 2004.
Today’s visual age demands a broadened view of literacy that encompasses understanding and using new technologies. After-school programs can provide venues where young people can develop this form of literacy and express their newly created identities.
“How much is a life worth?” asked Asia Washington, a fifteen-yearold resident of Oakland, California, in her digital movie about current threats to life – wars, terrorism, drugs, violence, a lack of belief in self – and about the universal need for love, acceptance, and understanding.1 Articulate and confident, a budding filmmaker, and a participant in an evening multimedia and literacy program called DUSTY (Digital Underground Storytelling for Youth), Asia began her movie by querying the worth of a life, and ended it with the answer: “Priceless.” With this choice of words, she smartly appropriated the language of a recent credit card commercial to serve her own ends.We, in turn, borrow from Asia and ask, What is the value of after-school programs? What is their worth, especially as spaces in which we might foster powerful literacy practices among young people?
In this essay we draw on Asia’s digital movie, along with our experiences in conceptualizing, participating in, and documenting after-school programs, to discuss new kinds of literacy.2 We advocate recognizing new communications strategies arising from multimodal and multimedia composing, including the juxtaposition of visuals with print, audio, and music, as well as the appropriation of words, compositional techniques, and images from popular culture, as illustrated by Asia’s movie. We believe that such communicative channels are pervasive, potentially effective, and, most important, satisfying aspects of literacy,especially for youth (Buckingham 2000). And we believe that many outof- school programs are well suited to foster these new forms of literacy.
1 We thank Asia Washington and her mother, Sonja Stewart, for sharing their insights about multimedia composing and about Asia’s creative work with VUE’s larger audience. We would like to acknowledge the pivotal role of Michael James, director of the DUSTY programs, in making DUSTY a safe, creative, and innovative learning space for children, youth, and adults. Alberto (Beto) Palomar was the instructor for Asia’s Digital Visual (DV) poetry class; his skill and care as an instructor are well known and much appreciated. Korina Jocson was instrumental in beginning and sustaining DV poetry and is a fine poet and multimedia composer in her own right, as well as a literacy researcher.We thank each of these individuals, as well as the larger DUSTY staff and community. DUSTY development, operation, and research have been supported by a range of institutions and grants, all gratefully acknowledged. These include the Graduate School of Education at the University of California, Berkeley; the University of California’s UC [University-Community] Links project; the U.S. Department of Education; the Community Technology Foundation of California; the Oakland Fund for Children and Youth; the Robert Bowne Foundation; the Allen Temple Baptist Church; and the Prescott-Joseph Center for Community Enhancement.
2 In keeping with our interest in exploring and promoting new forms of communication such as multimedia,multimodal composing, we have made available a CD of Asia’s movie, “How Much Is a Life Worth,” and audio tapes of interviews with Asia and her mother on line at www.annenberginstitute.org/VUE/spring04/video.html
We begin with an overview of the historical origins of after-school programs in the United States and a sketch of the current after-school landscape. We include a discussion of some of the debates that have arisen around literacy within and outside of school and some of the theories that we have found helpful in thinking about literacy, outof- school spaces, and the design of after-school programs for Asia and other children and youth. We then return to Asia’s digital movie and the question of worth.
A History of After-School Programs in the United States
After-school programs have existed in the U.S. since at least the late 1800s. They came about when the need for child labor decreased, and, at the same time, societal expectations that schooling should be compulsory grew. These shifts created a new temporal zone: the out-of-school hours. Youths must have found this freedom to play in the streets, escape crowded housing, and mix with a range of people greatly appealing; but adults came to regard unsupervised after-school time as worrisome – drawing children into potentially unsafe activities or making them vulnerable to new dangers such as street traffic (Halpern 2002).
Eventually, in response to these concerns and to those of educators and reformers who wanted to “improve” working-class children, outdoor or playground programs were developed, and those programs expanded to include indoor activities (Gagen 2000). The historical research of Robert Halpern (2002) provides an example of the sorts of activities and programs available at a boys’ club that first opened in Manhattan in 1876. Staffed by middleclass volunteers, the club included a fife, drum, and bugle corps; singing classes; wrestling; natural history studies; bookkeeping; writing instruction; and a reading room.
The long-term perspective on the after-school movement in the United States reveals several tensions that remain unresolved. First, after-school programs (particularly those serving low-income children) have always been underfunded and overly dependent upon volunteers. Yet they are regularly asked to assume more and more responsibilities, to take up the slack for overworked families, and to assist students whose schools struggle to help them.
Second, as the Manhattan example suggests, after-school programs have typically had a range of emphases – academic, athletic, artistic, social – and have used their flexibility in programming to distinguish their offerings from those of schools. But they face continued and increasing pressures to
serve as academic, test-heavy extensions of the school day (California Dept. of Education 2002; U.S. Dept. of Education 2000). Finally, there have long been conflicts between their regulatory functions and their commitment to youth development.On the one hand, for example, they are expected to ensure safety and socialization through the control of children’s and youths’ time and movement. On the other, program officials see their mission as enabling youths to grow toward adulthood by giving them the freedom to take ownership of their activities and products and placing their interests and desires in the foreground.
Interest in after-school programs has grown many-fold in the last decade. Driven by the much-publicized worry over “latchkey” kids forced to stay home alone in the afternoons while their parents work, along with concerns over youths’ safety in those hours, more and more public and community agencies have created after-school programs to provide safe and productive activities for adolescents (Fight Crime: Invest in Kids 2000). These programs have also been aimed at improving students’ academic achievement and reducing the fiscal and societal costs associated with poor school performance (University of California 2002), although there is some debate over how effective afterschool programs are in improving academic knowledge and skills.
For whatever reasons, some three million to four million low-income and moderate-income children currently attend after-school programs (Halpern 2002), including large-scale efforts such as the 21st Century Community Learning Centers (U.S. Dept. of Education 2000) and New York City’s After School Corporation (After School Corporation 1999), as well as thousands of independent local efforts. And the need for these programs is expected to continue growing, regardless of whether funding is available (University of California 2002).
