By Reggie Mays Jr., program coordinator, and Dwight Vidale, character education coordinator
Our young men were on camera and behind the scenes for the production of their newscast.
This summer’s Character Education program was entitled “Windows and Mirrors” because it focused our young men’s attention in two directions — out at the world they live in and in at who they are and want to become.
We wanted our young men to become both more more aware of the world around them and more introspective, and we also wanted the curriculum to help fight the “summer slide,” in which skills gained during the school year are lost over the summer. To accomplish all of these goals, we came up with a Character Education curriculum that included reading and critical thinking as well as a project based learning (PBL) experience. (Research shows that students remember hands-on work more than traditional teaching methods; PBLs stress learning through action.)
For the first half of the summer, we read and discussed the novel “All American Boys,” which focuses on a racially charged incident of police brutality, an all-too-common story in America today and one that young men of color need to be talking and thinking about.
The novel, written by Jason Reynolds and Brendan Kiely, is told from the perspective of the black male victim, Rashad, and the white bystander, Quinn, who are students at the same high school. With our previous study of character strengths and social justice in mind, we read, discussed and wrote about the various issues that arose in the book, including race, friendship, and police and civilian interactions.
For the second half of the summer, we empowered our students to choose a project that would lead to self reflection. After lengthy discussions, our guys decided they wanted to do something that would change the narrative about young men of color in the media. They knew that the portrayal of young men of color in the news does not reflect the people they are or will become, so they decided to create a newscast of their own that would highlight their involvement in our Foundation.
This project helped them look inward at the work they’ve been doing in our Foundation while helping them develop problem solving, decision making, information gathering and synthesizing skills.
After choosing different jobs such as anchorman, cameraman and news assistant, our young men were able to create a newscast that not only captured their experiences in our Foundation but also portrayed young men of color in a way that can be hard to find on the evening news. Their newscast showed young men of color who are well informed, intelligent, creative and involved in positivity. (You can watch it below.)
At the end of the summer, they realized that these two projects were not as different as they first seemed. They couldn’t look through a window at police violence without considering their own place in the world, and they couldn’t look in the mirror for their reporting without considering how young men of color are commonly characterized by the outside world.