Rhetorics of Transformation: Centering the Experiences of Young People to Create Youth Agency and Positive Change
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2022-01-01
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Language, Literacy & Culture
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Language Literacy and Culture
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Distribution Rights granted to UMBC by the author.
This item may be protected under Title 17 of the U.S. Copyright Law. It is made available by UMBC for non-commercial research and education. For permission to publish or reproduce, please see http://aok.lib.umbc.edu/specoll/repro.php or contact Special Collections at speccoll(at)umbc.edu
This item may be protected under Title 17 of the U.S. Copyright Law. It is made available by UMBC for non-commercial research and education. For permission to publish or reproduce, please see http://aok.lib.umbc.edu/specoll/repro.php or contact Special Collections at speccoll(at)umbc.edu
Abstract
Education inequality continues to grow and persist in the United States despite the efforts of reformers and policymakers. One reason for this persistence is what the Scholar Gloria Ladson-Billings describes as the education debt students of color inherit. The debt is historical, economic, sociopolitical, and moral (2006 Presidential Address). It is so large that most solutions to education inequality only begin to scratch the surface. Another reason includes the rise of neoliberal education reform in the 1980s and 1990s. Neoliberalism diverts attention away from economic and racial inequality by producing arguments for individual responsibility rooted in capitalist principles. These rhetorics have only continued to grow, allowing neoliberal education reformers to package and sell solutions never intended to solve root problems. As an alternative, the scholar Bianca Baldridge argues that critical pedagogy offers processes and practices for resisting such narratives. She contends that community-based education spaces can be powerful sites to enact critical pedagogies, and that youth workers are powerful agents acting from within those sites to champion young people. In my research, I study the Choice Program at UMBC as a site with tremendous rhetorical possibilities. The Choice Program was founded over thirty years ago as a thoroughly neoliberal project in education and juvenile justice reform. However, the organization has continued on a transformative path, constantly striving to better the lives of young people and change the systems that affect them. I approach my research as a rhetorician and a critical ethnographer. As a rhetorician, I map Choice's transformative rhetorics across time, showing how the organization continues to improve processes that center the voices and experiences of young people. As a critical ethnographer, I collaborate with Choice's youth workers to map the ecology within which they work and identify strategies for growing youth agency. My research includes extensive archival work, as well as interactive map-making sessions with 26 members of Choice's community. Through my research, I find that Choice is an organization that has created processes for reshaping its rhetorical ecosystem on behalf of young people. The more these processes center the voices and experiences of young people, the more the organization can create positive transformation within its ecology, including larger systems and structures. I also find that the organization's journey has helped create fertile ground for youth workers to foster and create youth agency through their daily interactions with young people. Youth workers describe youth agency as equal parts access, decision-making, and relationship building. They name the spaces in Choice's ecosystem where youth agency might grow. They also reveal how neoliberal rhetorics continue to persist and threaten authentic transformative work. Ultimately, one can learn from the Choice Program that positive transformation is not a destination; it's a journey. It requires not perfection but a constant commitment to processes that uproot neoliberal rhetorics and replace them with rhetorics of youth agency. In doing so, the organization offers a blueprint for rewriting entire systems and structures in education and juvenile justice.