The Rose

Bette Midler – The Rose

Some say love it is a river
that drowns the tender reed
Some say love it is a razer
that leaves your soul to bleed

Some say love it is a hunger
an endless aching need
I say love it is a flower
and you it’s only seed

It’s the heart afraid of breaking
that never learns to dance
It’s the dream afraid of waking
that never takes the chance
It’s the one who won’t be taken
who cannot seem to give
and the soul afraid of dying
that never learns to live

When the night has been too lonely
and the road has been too long
and you think that love is only
for the lucky and the strong
just remember in the winter
far beneath the bitter snows
lies the seed
that with the sun’s love
in the spring
becomes the rose

I know you want to tell me something!

I have been thinking hard about several events i observed and experienced during my research at the Youth in Transition Program (YITP). I know they are trying to tell me something….something important for youth workers to know… something for Sri Lanka to understand … something for me to write about.

Why most young people cried at the end of YITP?
Why YITP has often left such a deep impression on youth who have participated in it
(and those who don’t feel strongly about the program, what does that mean?)
Why it’s easy for youth to go back to their normal way of living if no proper follow-up is done?
Why some youth were able to carry out the spirit from YITP and develop further and whty some could not?

The continuous relationship i formed with those youth i met at the YITP not only made my stay in Sri Lanka more fun, but allowed me to think twice about the notion of youth development in Sri Lanka. My friends actions and behaviors after the program have big meanings that need to be understood and recognized. They seem to say something:

“We want our freedom as youth. We are resourceful, creative and adaptive to change. We want to be respected and we yearn for good elders to guide us. We do recognize that we have weaknesses – sometimes too emotions, sometimes not being respectful to the elders – but we are willing to change. We understand how you (the adults) see us. We don’t really blame you if you have negative views on us. But you shouldn’t generalize that all youths are anti-social and just because we like bob marley doesn’t mean that we will not respect you and be good. Sometimes, we can’t help it to make mistakes but deep in ourselves, we want to be better, if you just give us a bit more chance. We smell globalization in our daily, sometimes, we long to enjoy the feast globalization has to offer us, but sometimes, we don’t have the resources to really get ourselves to the feast. oh well….it’s okay even though we cannot enjoy the feast, we can have the left over or just have our usual meal at home. But mind you, one day, some of us would make ourselves there – we are using mobile phones in the most innovative way you have even known. We get frustrated when we don’t understand something- why things have to be in certain kinds of ways, with rules and rigid structure? We get frustrated but we tried to find ways to deal with it. Maybe, the techniques we used were not right…we know we know…yet we are innovative ones who are willing to try out new solutions. Our friends are our best buddies…it is some important to have good friends because that’s where we learn to be good. Friends are important to us and from their supports, we have more motivation to develop our dreams and hold positive views in life. How nice would it be if the society is full of caring adults, good friends, and safe space for us to be ourselves and develop our potentials. So far, some of us are trying to cultivate such space, and your support would be a plus to us. We still have that trust in you and hope you trust us too…we love our country and peoples! We want to be good citizenship too”

Hope somebody with wiser insights can tell me if i have heard what my young friends said…..

An encouraging letter

Sometimes, it’s easy to forget how fortunate we are and how resourceful and wise each individual human being can be.

I was flipping through the diaries i kept during my time in Sri Lanka, trying to look for people’s addresses so that i could send Happy New Year letters to them. At the very last page of my “Richard” brand cartoonish notebook, I found this letter written to me by a participant from one of the youth training programs I studied. It’s one of those many letters that reminds me how fortunate I am and how determined young peoples are. In the letter, my little friend (that’s how she called herself) wrote:

“i said you, one day, my father has left the family. But i don’t be weak, however, we go forward. i’ve a sister only…but i know you have father. you are very fortunate…i’m not sad about my father. You can go to your target. I actually proud about you.
I’m a little one yet. But I have experiences more than you.
* you don’t be week never, never
* You think always “i can”
* Never forget your helpers who met, meeting in your life
* Always be modest
After that you think you will be successful..
You , like a shining star in the darkness sky
You light the all areas in the sky, ever, win the world.
i know you can do it. There are many ways to improve your knowledge.
the life is like a ladders, you must get on the ladder one and one (slowly). look at the world through a soft humanity and a good education.” (excerpt from my “little friend’s letter)

Indeed, i have much to learn from this strong lady who’s 7 years younger than me. Those words, I will keep them in mind in 2008 as I climb my ladder. Wish her Happy New Year. Hope you achieve your dream one day!

Youth in Transition Program Overview (adopted from YITP power point slides)

In the wake of the devastation left by the Tsunami, there has been an influx of NGO led short-term and long-term rehabilitation and reconstruction projects. One group often excluded from the projects is youth. Youth are an important group whose developed potential and positive participation are vital to their own well-being as well as the well-being of the entire community and country. Youth in tsunami-affected areas face a variety of obstacles in achieving self-fulfillment and meaningful employment.

Problem of school leavers: There are approximately 400,000 school leavers annually who have to be supported by parents and for whom there is no clearly defined future plan.

Post-tsunami context: parents on whom the youth rely heavily are having more difficulty supporting their teenaged children.

Disengaged youth: a potential threat to any society. These youth must be provided with positive alternatives to reduce their possible involvement in the conflict.

Limited support: Organizations like the National Youth Service Council do provide support to youth but require additional support in the post-tsunami context.

Youth are now facing a critical juncture in their lives and are left with little guidance to support them in deciding their future. Youth in tsunami-affected areas need support and an opportunity to reflect and ask themselves: what it is they want to do with their lives? what are their aspirations and their skills?

Youth need to be aware of and connected to the resources that will allow them to pursue their career / educational interests. Pursuing their education, developing their skills, and connecting youth to new employment opportunities provides them with a better quality of life that they would otherwise have difficulty achieving.

We must identify these youth and guide them to understand their own ambitions, abilities, and skills.These youth must then be guided to find opportunities within their abilities and talents and supported to develop skills to meet their current and future ambitions.Youth must also be given a sense of social responsibility and encouraged to be agents of positive change within their communities.

Two-fold Project Purpose:
– Short-term: Provide female and male youth from tsunami-affected areas of Southern Sri Lanka with support for their short-term recovery from the social effects of the tsunami.
– Long-term: Provide youth with a foundation of knowledge and skills that will enhance their awareness of potential opportunities

Objectives:
– Build confidence in youth affected by the tsunami
– Motivate and encourage tsunami affected youth to be productive members of society
– Provide knowledge regarding obtaining linkages to other opportunities such as vocational training, credit, further studies, and employment

Specific Target Group:
– Youth aged 16 to 19 years, male and female
– Living in or near tsunami-affected areas
– School leavers up to G.C.E. A level who are under-employed or unemployed
– Desire to learn a vocation or start a career according to his/her ability
– Equal number of boys and girls will be selected, total of 25 youth per workshop
– Interviews will be conducted after screening application form

Description and Approach:
– Seven day intensive training workshop organized like a youth camp
– Organized Group activities
– Indoor and outdoor activities to foster leadership, teamwork, and self-knowledge
– Educational sessions via interactive learning (not like a classroom setting)
– Movies and cultural programming

Content of the program: YITP Modules

Beginning with youth looking inwards and learning about themselves, ending with youth looking outwards to future opportunities.Looking inwards/self-reflection/Internal Knowledge include:

– Self-disclosure: Who am I?
– Setting Personal Goals
– Dealing with Change
– Team Work
– Feelings
– Anger and management of anger
– Communication
– Leadership (What is leadership? Leadership qualities and skills; Managing leadership)

Looking outwards: External Knowledge:
– First-aid and Emergency Preparedness
– Gender and Development
– Awareness on alcoholism and drug addiction
– Adolescence and adolescent behavior
– Reproductive health, STDs, and HIV/AIDS
– Linking youth to vocational training, further education, micro-credit and employment opportunities

Strategies for project implementation:
– Community outreach
– Working in partnership with Government and Non-Government Organizations

Follow-up after workshops:
– Conduct tracer studies to measure the impact of the workshop on the targeted youth
– Provide assistance to link youth to vocational training institutions and projects as well as to employment assistance agencies and institutions

Would i be able to finish my thesis draft by February 2008?

I have sent myself a time line for my 1st thesis draft. It seems pretty impossible but I’m up for a try. My laptop died today and I had sent it to a nearby computer shop for service. I hope I haven’t lost all my data (pray).

Yesterday and today, I went through all the materials I had in hand – newspaper clipping, journal articles, field notes and tape recordings. I read my thesis bible so that I knew how to start drafting my long essay. Feel like it will be a long long journey.

After several months of brainstorming and thinking, I had narrowed down my thesis topic to something that talks about “the meanings of ‘success’ in the Youth in Transition Program”. During my fieldwork, I had heard too many positive comments about YITP. In my thesis, I want to find out what these different peoples – program participations, teachers, program staff – meant when they told me that YITP was so successful and so good. Through linking the program to the larger national, educational context of Sri Lanka and the changing nature of young people, I hope to again question/analyze/ those notions of successes and see how this can suggest something youth development endeavor in Sri Lanka and elsewhere. In a simple term, I will be writing about YITP process which includes practices/structures/values that underlie the program. I will also evaluate how successful this YITP process is from multiple perspectives – youth, adults, teachers, me an outsider, Sri Lanka and international academia.

Evaluation Research/ Ethnographic Educational Evaluations

Hyde, Arthur A. “Theory Used in Ethnographic Educational Evaluations: Negotiating Values.” Anthropology & Education Quarterly 18.3 (1987) : 131-148.

” The emergence of educational ethnography and ethnographic evaluation as a major philosophical and methodological approach in educational has been an important step in the illumination of values in educational research and evaluation” (Hyde131)

“Evaluation research should assume the value differences exist within and among the role groups of any study. Ignoring them or proceeding as if they were nonexistent is naive and dangerous. Theories are derived, at least in part, from value premises.” (Hyde 146)

“Along with the appreciation of the value basis of conceptions must be the acknowledgment of the relative power to bring one’s values and ideas into action through educational programs, the allocation of resources, the structuring of services and the like.” (Hyde 146)

” School ethnographers have a delicate juggling act to perform: keeping aloft the differing values and conceptions of the various practitioners and funders, the intricacies of education, the needs of decision makers ot set definitive polices, and their own sense of self-as-instrument. They should seek appealing theories that clearly communication to others what they see, hear, and experience. However, they should not fall into facile parsimony or politically expedient acceptance of funder/policymaker values and conceptions…It is equally important for ethnographic evaluators to be intellectually honest with themselves, honest with whom the negotiate, and their readers about their own values. Their reports should clearly state their values and describe the process of negotiating the theories used in the study as it occurred. This explication is an important part of th methodology of the study.” (Hyde 147)

I felt fortunate that my value was in line with the YITP practitioners’ values in terms of my research. I didn’t really need to negotiate. Both sides hope to find out what works and what doesn’t with the program, and how to improve it in the future. Though another of my intention to study YITP is to share what i have seen and heard with the public and educators in other parts of the world. I haven’t checked if this of my intention is in conflict with the organization which so kindly hosted me and helped me with my research.

Finally, some kind of focus for my thesis

I was doing some hardcore reflection this morning. I reflected why i started all this in the beginning, and really what i want to do with my thesis. For sure, i don’t want my two years relationship with my research to be wasted on something irrelevant to the world and human kinds. I have to dream big and start small.

Okay, so no matter how my thesis will look like in the end, it needs to have several elements:
– ground view on issues
– inequality in accessing opportunities, what is this all about between me and my friends, betwee youth in sri lanka and other youth around the world.
– reflection on my own privilege as a youth, challenge my own assumptions
– what’s the meaning of education for our generation
– how my experience and my friends’ accounts can advise something bigger, can our voice reach the policy levels? can our voice represent the whole? what are the areas i need to be more careful about.
– YITP program, i need to really need to paint that program in front of my audience in words 🙂

And yes, my 1st draft proposal will be done next tuesday. sorry for the long waiting. my sloppiness.

Medel-Anonuevo, Carolyn, ed. Integrating Lifelong Learning Perspectives, UNESCO, 2002

Alan Smith in “Integrating Lifelong Learning Perspectives” says:
In all part of the world, in their different ways, the impact of globalizaiton, the advent of the knowledge society and the pervasive advance of the new information and communication technologies are radically changing not only the way people work, but also their individual aspirations and the way they interact with one another in the narrower and broader social community. In this changes and ever more rapidly changing world, in which accepted wisdom become redundant even more quickly, high quality edu and training for all are at the premium. Access to learning, the capacity to acquire knowledge and competencies, and the key not only to economic success, but also to individual fulfillment, and social cohesion (Smith 48).

In EU, more emphasis has drafted an action plan on life long learning. 15 members states have reached agreement on a concrete set of common objectives for their education systems, all of which in one way of another relate to the overarching principle of life-long learning (and youth are under the attention of this process) (49).

Smith gives the EU definition of Lifelong Learning (LL). “LL as being an all purpose learning activity, undertaken on an ongoing basis with the aim of improving knowledge, skills and competence…It’s not to do only with formal education, but also with informal and non-formal education” (50)

EU’s Lifelong Learning definition incorporates – employment, improving economy, fulfill personal aspirations, active citizenship and social inclusion,

“Safe Schools for All” and “Minimum Standards in Education in Emergencies”

One great thing about coming back to toronto is that i get the opportunity to attend interesting conferences and seminars related to various education issues. Here are some of the interesting ideas/events i have encountered at OISE Ontario Institution for Studies in Education www.oise.utoronto.ca

On Sept 29, i attended a conference called “Safe Schools for All: Conflict Resolution and Peacemaking Education”. Under the conference, there were 40 or mini workshops that one could participate, all related to conflict resolution, nonviolence, social justice and building peace. Just to give you an idea on the kind of workshops happening that day. So there were “Understanding Anger”, “Connecting Peace to Community Building and the Environment”, “Peer Conflict Mediation”, “Thinking We, building empathy and community through social action”, “Conflict Transformation: Children’s Peace Theater” and more. I went to the workshop on how to facilitate a Peacemaking Circle. It was an interesting one and throughout the workshop, i was thinking how i could use the concept of a circle in different educational situations. A peacebuilding circle project has been piloted in Toronto for youth at risk and in conflict with the law. It’s a huge success and i’m eager to learn more about the model. more info http://www.peacebuilders.ca/

The most important lesson i’ve learned from this conference is that peace education applies to all forms of teaching and learning. There are different layers within peace education, ranging from knowing “who i am”, how to control our anger to community building and resolving ethnic conflicts. Peace, according to the keynote speaker Dr. Ursual Franklin, can be reached when there is an absence of fear that’s justified by the presence of justice. Her words made me think of how important it is to cultivate that feeling of fearlessness, confidence and non-violence among children and youth in rural China, if not the whole country. I think it’s timely that OISE organized such conference focusing on conflict resolution when the world is changing and ideas are moving so rapidly.

Interestingly enough, just two days ago, i went to another workshop session on “minimum standards for education in emergencies, chronic crises, and early reconstruction” www.ineesite.org. What i learnt there, again, highlighted the concepts like non-violent, conflict resolution, psychosocial wellbeing of children and young people. Also, the INEE has created a handbook that explains those qualitative minimum levels to be attained in the provision of educational programs. Though they are focusing on education in emergencies, when i glanced through the standards, they are actually those good things that all quality education programs should be practicing. INEE divides the standards into four main categories, each with indicators that can be used in monitoring and evaluation – 1) Access and learning environment, 2) Teaching and Learning, 3) Teachers and other education personnel, 4) Education policy and coordination. Although they are called minimum standards, they are pretty rigorous as they make sure quality education is provided during time of emergencies.

If you are interested in peacebuilding, conflict resolution, or simply quality programming, log onto INEE. there is a WEALTH of resources there 🙂

cheers,

Thoughts in absolute transition

Writing up my thesis on YITP is not an easy task. Many random ideas popped up in my mind and i tried to catch the most brilliant one as they flew by. I want to keep a journal on my thesis writing process….the frustration, the excitement, the “ahaa” moments, all, i want to record them down. I have been trying to contact different professors to find out if they can be my thesis supervisor. Nah…not much success yet.

My recent interest is to understand the Youth in Transition Project under the larger theoretical framework of peace and peace building. I need to find a framework that helps me understand the touch-feely side of the program. Exploring the terrain of peace and non-violence, why not eh?

Flipping my field notes, i travel back and for between presence and the past. I discover that those reflecting exercise actually consumes quite a lot of energy. Very often, i found myself arguing with the mini-me inside, whether to harvest more details about the YITP through my mixed salad memory. I can easily skip through those details if i just hold those brain cells for a while and not let them randomly break into my deeper memory wall.

What i need at the moment is more inspiration and discipline. Somebody please sprinkle some creative magic dust on me…..

backpain … ouch…need to move