Youth Learning on Their Own Terms: Creative Practices and Classroom Teaching by Leif Gustavson

"I have become acutely aware of the disconnect between the was in which many school districts and schools design learning environments and the ways in which youth design learning environments for themselves..."

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"Common culture is the everyday practice of producing popular culture like graffiti murals, zines, and turntable pieces. Ian's practice of zine writing for example, is a part of his everyday life.... Ian's creative practice is part of who he is and how he understands the world around him. The way he lives his life informs his zine making and his zine making influences the way in which he lives day to day.

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"..shifting our sense of a learning environment as an imposed structure to an infrastructure... Often when teaching and learning are considered a structure, the outcome of the learning is predetermined... Conversely, pedagogy as infrastructure is dynamic and generative. Students build off the framework of the class, utilizing tactic and conceptual knowledge to build new skills and knowledge. Pedagogy as infrastructure is designed around rituals, habits of mind and body, and criteria. The objective of learning is not for everyone to arrive at the same conclusion."

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"Youth also constantly interpret through their creative practices. The act of interpretation enables youth to evaluate their own work as well as construct meaning out of other people's work. It is these skills of youth practice that should in part become the practice of working and learning in classrooms."

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"How can the work of youth influence educators in designing learning environments that are rigorous, interesting, and personally meaningful for both youth and teachers?"

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"How can we take advantage of the skills and conceptual knowledge that youth bring with them to school? Instead of viewing them as empty vessels needing to be filled or as being deficient in some way, we need to see youth as complex people with valuable life and work experiences."

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"Moving from interpretation to appropriation: youth culture as legitimate work and learning... When students learn about poetry in schools, for example, they often talk about what a poem means. Teaching and learning as appropriation talk within the practice."

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"How can the ways in which thee youth work in their creative practices - the intrinsic aesthetic or crafting that underlies the practices - influence the daily activity, the ways of working, in classrooms?"


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"Placing popular culture at the center of the curriculum legitimates it and allows students to speak about their own experiences within the classroom. Nevertheless, youth do not necessarily want their cultural practices to be legitimated or co-opted by teachers or schools... If the teacher's interest in the art for is merely a tool of motivation or interpretation, students will read this as an ultimate dismissal of their interests, rather than as a 'cool' way to learn."

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"Youth Habits of Mind and Body in Creative Practices:

- communities of practice
- experimentation
- evaluation and assessment
- interpretation
- performance
- reflection"

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"In order to sustain their creative practices, youth are involved in making connections with groups of people who share their interests. These groups are commonly called 'communities of practice'... A community of practice is a group of people connected through a shared interest in an activity."

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"According to Reinsmith (1997), people instinctively want to make meaning out of experience. In order for meaning to occur, people need freedom to fiddle around with new ideas and new object, to try ideas that they have, and to -- perhaps most important -- make mistakes. These mistakes are what enable people to refine ideas and attempt something else. It is in this refining and course altering that one develops understandings regarding skills or concepts."

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"Ethnography makes visible the ordinary and taken-for-granted details of what particular people do together. It is sensitive to nuances. It identifies cultural frames for acting and making sense that vary and change as individuals and groups occupy differing positions in society.... Ethnographers approach their phenomena realizing that they know little and that people who are part of the phenomena, the "natives," know a lot. With this realization, ethnographers position themselves as the learnings and the people who are part of the phenomena as the teachers. They observe, interview and participate in order to better understand the people whom they are studying. When we make this analogus to teaching, it is our job as teachers to to figure out how our students are mathematicians, historians, writers and scientists in their lives, instead of assuming that they are not or that they need to be taught how to be."

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"Multiple forms of performance creative authentic reasons for students to experiment further, reflect on their work, evaluate its efficacy, and interpret audience reactions."

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"Abandon the notion of subject-matter as something fixed and ready-made in itself, outside the child's experience; cease thinking of the child's experience as also something hard and fast; see it as something fluent, embryonic, vital; and we realize that the child and the curriculum are simply two limits which define a single process." -Dewey-

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"When educators in investigate and acknowledge the creative practices of youth within their pedagogy, opportunities for authentic learning emerge: teachers tune their teaching practices more closely to the ways in which youth learn and make meaning in their everyday lives."

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"In classroom environments driven by prepacked curricula or standardized testing, students are figured as finite and closed systems, lacking essential skills and knowledge. These classrooms lack the open-ended fluidity of authentic, meaningful learning and fail to acknowledge the disciplinary strengths that youth bring with them, regardless of background. They make it difficult for students and teachers to develop a shares sense of how they can earn together."

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"Inquiry based learning honors the personhood of each of our students and provides an opportunity to reframe traditional questions."

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"Through this recasting of teacher and student roles as well as how learning looks, sounds, and feels, we transform the classroom into a youthspace where youth ways of knowing are embraced and put to work."

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"Perhaps going to school would not be such an alienating endeavor to many youth if adults in positions of power recognized and valued the many ways youth learn on their own terms."

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"Perhaps by recognizing the role creative practices play in how youth learn... school can be a viable and essential space through which youth and adults can learn together."

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Chapter 1 : THE WRITING LIFE OF A ZINE MAKER
Chapter 2: THE SHIFTING CREATIVE PRACTICES OF A PUERTO-RICAN AMERICAN YOUTH
Chapter 3: SCRATCHING, CUTTING, AND JUGGLING: THE TURNTABLIST AS A 21st CENTURY SCHOLAR
Chapter 4: TEACHING AND LEARNING: A SHARED PRACTICE

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