Activism Log #6

Activism:

My activism this week included attending a Big Sister meeting and a Facilitator meeting. My group members and myself are getting ready to bring our project to a close for this semester, so we are working on this semester's scrapbook and editing the videos so we can put them up on Youtube. The Twitter is up to date with only one week left worth of tweets from our Littles. We have not gotten enough submissions for our 'zine this semester, so we will be creating just one 'zine overall from both the Fall 2011 and Spring 2012 terms, unless the Littles bring a lot of submissions to the final Alumnae event this Saturday, Nov. 19th. I am still working on our UCF Day lesson and researching different possibilities for improving it and making it more accessible to all of the girls, and not just those girls in our group that are bullied.

Reflection:

This week's reading of "Girl Talk" made me strongly consider the effects of socioeconomic status upon girls' ideas of leadership. As they surveyed 150 girls from "high need" areas with open-ended questions about leadership that allowed them to use their own language in their answers, it showed that informal leadership was a type of leadership that they definitely valued, even if they didn't have the same language as we do to express it (Shinew and Jones 55). Other surveys that did not have accessible language that the girls could understand completely were difficult for the girls to identify with in their own lives. In coming up with a more accessible bullying lesson for the girls in which we hope to incorporate more of their own voices in response to our open-ended questions, we hope that the girls can take what they are learning and recognize its existence already in their lives. "[The surveyed girls'] emphasis on informal leadership roles and more feminine definitions of what it means to be a good leader implies that much of the formal curriculum and language used to cultivate leadership among these groups fails to resonate with their lived experiences" (Shinew 65).

Reciprocity:

This week's reading and research has taken me back to my own girlhood and has led me to consider all of the ways in which my first-world, white, upper middle-class, educated, Catholic upbringing (among many many other facets of my life) affected how I approached leadership then and how I approach leadership now. I consider how in middle school if I didn't win the elections for Class Mayor I wasn't a good leader, when in fact I was a great leader because of my informal leadership acts like loving my little brother or helping the librarian in the school library. I am coming to recognize now what the expectations of leaders were, and that these often transactional expectations that may have limited the type of leader I always saw myself as even just up to a year or so ago. I can appreciate how I have arrived in the place I am, today, and I can understand both the strengths, weaknesses, and endless conundrums that make up the conditions that shaped the leader I am and the leadership qualities I value.

Works Cited

Shinew, Dawn M. and Deborah T. Jones "Girl Talk: Adolescent Girls' Perceptions of Leadership." Geographies of Girlhood: Identities In-Between. Mahway: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2005: 55-65. Print.

Activism Log #5

Activism:

This week, I updated the Twitter account with the girls' tweets. I printed up and passed out reminders for the girls to turn in more submissions to the 'zine. I facilitated at the Little meeting and helped conduct a lesson on body image. We introduced a new activity called "You're A Masterpiece" and it stimulated a great deal of excitement with the girls, which was, in turn, very exciting for the rest of us. The photos for the scrapbook pages have been developed, so sometime soon my groupmates and I will be coming together to work on the scrapbook, our Service Learning reflection paper, and the 'zine and videos.

Reflection:

In my previous activism log I talked about how I learned that compromise can be a very effective course when working with girls and asking them to acquire and maintain their own spaces with their own agencies. This week, however, seeing a successful bi-monthly publication of a magazine by girls and for girls opened my ideas to an even more expansive sense of what girls can do with their agency. On the non-numbered page directly before page one in this particular issue of New Moon Girls, it reads "New Moon Girls is the original girl-centered media" (Gruver). Finding new ways for the girls to have complete control over certain aspects of their participation in the program became a realistic consideration the way talking about it in a classroom couldn't let it. It also validated our own endeavors for the girls in our Service Learning Project. Employing a shared-power system that is less shared with adults and more empowered by the girls was a level and caliber of work I saw this week that I aspire to reach someday in my future activism.

Reciprocity:

Having read New Moon Girls--a magazine for girls and by girls--I thought it tied in directly with what my group has been working on specifically for our Service Learning project. We are having the girls create a 'zine, and asking the girls to contribute to the Twitter account and the Youtube videos completely of their own volition, inspiration, and execution. The Nov/Dec 2011 issue of this magazine was an excellent example to look at when considering showings of success in girls creating and maintaining their own spaces through public and massive mediums.

Works Cited

Gruver, Nancy, ed. New Moon Girls. Nov. 2011. Web.

Activism Log #4

Activism:

This week, we have received our first few submissions for the 'zine from several YWLP Littles. I began compiling the scrapbook pages that the Littles created on UCF Day. My groupmates and myself attended a Big Sister meeting on Wednesday and last night attended a fundraiser night at Applebee's where 10% of each check would go to YWLP. My groupmates and I have also gotten together to discuss changes to next semester's continuation of our service-learning project with several large changes and multiple minor tweaks. Next week we will be handing out reminders to the Littles that we want their submissions for the 'zine because we only have a handful of submissions as of yet.

Reflection:

What I have most gained from our Service-Learning project so far is a greater understanding for what it is to compromise and I have become greatly interested in implementing a shared power system with girls, either in this particular chapter of YWLP or in another girls' leadership organization that I will become a part of wherever I end up. "While this shift is by no means absolute, it does create openings for marginalized groups to participate more fully in leadership processes" (MacNeil 36). This can most specifically be applied to our approach with working with the girls to hopefully have more say in lesson plans and letting them help us decide what to include in our program.

Reciprocity:

As I said in my Reflection section, I have learned a great deal about compromise. Though youths are often mistaken for immature or unhelpful children, the fact is they are the ones that hold the key to unleashing and developing their own development most efficiently. My adulthood does not grant me infallibility, and so compromising my plans and hopes with the girls who also have ideas and dreams to combine a greater lesson plan and a more successful farther-reaching program seems like a positive direction to go in.

Works Cited

MacNeil, Carole A. "Bridging Generations: Applying "Adult" Leadership Theories to Youth Leadership Development." New Directions for Youth Development 2006.109 (2006): 27-43. Academic Search Premier. Web. 4 Nov. 2011.