To continue from yesterday...

...while our focus going in was to be learning something about the community, I feel like we did learn some things about event organization over the past few weeks. Some "donts," if you will, courtesy of the Project 2011 people.
1. In the weeks leading up to the event, the Project 2011 organizers sent a series of e-mail imploring volunteers to carpool and take the offered buses only as a last resort due to a limited number of seats. Then, suddenly, the night before the event, the organizers changed their tune and sent out an e-mail saying they had 100 or 200 seats on buses and they weren't sure if there would be sufficient parking for people at the various worksites. Thus, after weeks of DON'T TAKE THE BUS! the message switched to TAKE THE BUS! which I found rather annoying.
2. Signage at Lanier High School was confusing. They had volunteers with large, neon arrows all over the place on the school grounds, and a few poorly conceived signs off of Lamar (northbound only). It was confusing because they had people stationed at various places at the school just to tell you that those were not the right places to go. So after pulling over because you saw volunteers, they'd tell you to keep going, but you wouldn't have pulled over if you hadn't seen volunteers.
3. Some e-mails in the early days after signing up indicated that registration/bus pick-up would be at UT, without specifying the location further. I thought that was pretty funny.
4. Given the general lack of community engagement, I wonder if the Americorps people or whoever made any attempt to engage the local community. I'd really like to ask them, but I don't know how to do so without being passive-aggressive.

Project 2011 Volunteering

Yesterday, three of my classmates and I ventured forth from our cozy beds on a dreary Saturday for what we hoped would be some community-building volunteerism. Bolstered by some carbs and saturated fats from delicious breakfast tacos, we set off into the mist for Lanier High School. After arriving at the school, despite the best efforts of whoever was in charge of signage for the event, our hopes of community-building (i.e. interacting with the parents of kids at Dobies) were all but dashed. The school was simply overrun with members of the Greek community--not from Greece, but seemingly hundreds of UT Greek Life's finest.
Thus, we decided to simply suck the marrow out of the afternoon anyway, hording granola bars, bottled water, and the ever-coveted free T-shirt, as we dug in the dirt of the flowerbeds in front of Dobie, delicately at first, and then with increasing vigor as the middle school's band played a couple of songs for us. Unfortunately, that seemed to be the only sign I saw of any actual "local" support for the day's activities. Nonetheless, amidst the occasional squealing at the sight of particularly hideous-looking bugs and the incessant bad jokes, the four of us managed to enjoy ourselves despite the feeling that we were going to leave without what we had come for.

The Joy of Curriculum

...is a little different than the joy of cooking.
So far this semester, I've been so busy doing to get this event squared away, that it's been hard to find time to keep reading. But read I have, mostly getting a crash course in curriculum development, to bookend Explore UT with lessons/activities related to some of the events on the day. And this afternoon, I submit the product of those labors for consideration.

Proposed Curriculum Schedule

Week of Feb. 7th: Calm before the storm.
Week of Feb 14th: Marine Biology Day. Guest speaker: ? Perhaps someone from the biology department at UT, who could then meet up with the kids at Explore UT at the touch tank exhibit.? Brief review of food chain concepts. Activity: Balanced Ecosystem Spoons game. Ask students what the effect of removing various creatures from a coral reef ecosystem would be. Conclude with brief discussion of the impact of human activity on marine ecosystems. Connect to marine touch tank at Explore UT.
Week of Feb 21nd: International Day. Guest speaker: Us! to talk about our various cultural backgrounds and experiences. Invite kids to share their own. Activity: dancing to debka music or other folk dances, eating a snack from another country, brief language lesson in a language spoken by one of us, but not the kids. Connect to international festival at Explore UT.
Week of Feb 28th: Nutrition and Fitness Day. Brief overview of food pyramid/recommended number of servings of various types of food (probably just a quick handout). Guest speaker: UT student-athlete (TBA) to talk about the importance of healthy diet and exercise. Activity: Nutritional Budgeting? And/or put together healthy lunch for Explore UT Day from three or four choices of entree, side dish, and drink (choices TBA).
March 5th: Explore UT
Week of March 7th: De-briefing from Explore UT. Let kids talk about their favorite parts (possibly go through pictures). Special Guest: UT member of Mexican American Association of Pharmacy students (TBA). Activity: blood pressure/heart rate?

ALA Visit-W

Last Thursday we finally got the chance to see the ALA staff in action with the kids. Unfortunately, little went to plan, but it was still nice to get some "boots on the ground" time.
The initial plan was to do a science experiment, but due to some vigorous high-fiving, eggs, a crucial component of the experiment, were destroyed. So instead we talked about bullying, and then played a dodgeball variant outside. Here are some of my observations:
At least one of the ALA staff at W did not "dummy down" their speech when talking to the kids. They read about bullying from a handout that contained some pretty sophisticated vocabulary. The staff member also mentioned rape and sexual assault, things that I personally could not have conceived of in middle school. I don't mean this observation to be negative necessarily, but I wasn't sure how much the kids understood of what the staff member said.
I was also struck by ultimately how little time we had...ALA programming didn't really start until about 4, if I recall correctly, because of snack and another extracurricular activity. I'm not sure if that is typical or not. The staff seemed to stress that it was an un-typical day, due to the Egg Catastrophe and the No Tardy Party, so I am hesitant to really draw any conclusions from what I saw so briefly.

Environment, more tangible, -structured curriculum (Catalano) Blurb Part 2

Drawing from Bundy and Restuccia PYD Lit Review.
The best positive youth development programs also feature some sort of improvement program, both on the organization and individual staff levels. This allows the staff to have a say in increasing the programs' effectiveness and also aims at improving the skills and abilities of the individual staff members (Bundy and Restuccia 4).
Related to the idea of program evolution and improvement, another important structural component of successful positive youth development programs is their ability to pour funds flexibly into different program components in response to changing wants and needs. Programs that have to go through a lengthy bureaucratic progress to reallocate resources or that must keep different money streams separate may have difficulty reacting in a timely and effective manner. 
On the environmental level, positive youth development programs must also possess "high, clear, and fair standards"  and "safe, reliable, and accessible activities and spaces" (4). Not only do these components serve as inducements for youth to come and keep coming to the program, they also lead directly to positive personal growth for the youth.

Environment, more tangible, -structured curriculum (Catalano) Blurb Part 1

One of the most important aspects of any positive youth development program is its curriculum structure. Catalano's study of program effectiveness found that "twenty-four (96 percent) of the well-evaluated effective programs incorporated a structured curriculum or program of activities" (116). The one successful program that did not have a structured curriculum, the well-known Big Brothers/Big Sisters, is based on positive interactions with the mentor instead of a lesson-based learning curriculum. However, having a formal curriculum makes the program more easily replicable in the context of a different community.
Duration of the program is also a key factor related to its effectiveness. Eighty percent of the most effective programs in the same study lasted nine months or more (Catalano 116).

Just as youth development has evolved to mean more than the treatment of already-present problem behaviors, so there has been some oscillation between prevention and intervention.

Intervention programs, seeking mainly to address existing crises, predated prevention programs by some two decades (Catalano 99). However, in the last ten to fifteen years, concurrent with the emergent emphasis on positive youth development, the idea of prevention programs has become an important facet of youth development. In Roth’s study, fully 92% of the programs purported to feature activities aimed at the prevention of high-risk behaviors. Nonetheless, youth development advocates now “recognize that activities focused solely on the prevention of problem behaviors, such as violence or substance abuse, do not necessarily equip adolescents with the tools for a responsible and productive adulthood” (Roth, 97). Prevention programs, as opposed to intervention programs, are designed to change youths' projected life course, either by adding competency, experience, interactions, or some other ingredients.

Implicit in the discussion of prevention and intervention is the notion of critical periods. Also known as sensitive or etiological periods, these are the stages of development or ages when identity is formed, and risk and protective factors are most influential. By extension, critical periods also represent the most opportune or beneficial times for staging interventions or experiencing prevention programming. Researchers have developed various life course paradigms, which posit and chart when these critical periods occur. Berkman discusses three (33-36).

The first is the latency model, which is based on "critical or sensitive periods in which early childhood or even prenatal exposures shape subsequent outcomes that may or may not be evident for years" (33). This model is supported by experiments with rats--some handled and some not handled in early life. The rats in the two groups remained similar in behavior and development until midlife/older age, when "the nonhandled rats developed significant cognitive impairment and simultaneously had higher levels of corticosterone"(34) (corticosterone is one of those "stress hormones" diet supplement commercials are always pestering us about).
       The second life course paradigm is cumulative exposure, based on the idea that, in the absence of critical periods, life experiences simply have a cumulative effect, so repeated exposure to something would cause significant shaping of behavior or development (33). This model is supported by empirical evidence from studies that link prolonged periods of economic disadvantage to increased risk of disease, for example heart disease (35). It's important to note that the cumulative exposure paradigm "argues that changes in adulthood to modify risk or prevent the onset of risk will partially offset the risks set by trajectories in early childhood (35).
       The final model in Berkman's paper is social trajectory, which contends "that early life exposures do not directly affect adult health. They influence adult social conditions, which, in turn, affect adult health. In this case, intervention in adulthood can completely offset harm incurred in childhood" (36). An example of this paradigm is related to occupational hazards. Early life experiences, such as education and class, put people on the track to more or less hazardous jobs, which results in more or less exposure to contaminants, risk of death, stress, etc. These risks can be undone with an adult intervention to change the workplace (36).