WHAT ARE TEENAGERS SAYING ABOUT RISK?
Three Strategies to an Intercultural Dialogue
Teenagers have expertise--and alternative perspectives--on urban issues that involve youth. They can help us define the problems, describe the hidden logics of youth that adults may not see, and evaluate options. Teenagers in Community Problem-Solving Dialogues use the Story Behind the Story strategy to talk about some critical causes of risk and stress:
- Urban teenagers tell how they cope with a constant sense of risk. When the adult community seems to turn its back, teenagers describe the need for alternative groups (including gangs) that can provide three essentials: safety, understanding, and identity.
- Urban teenagers tell how they are motivated by deep needs for respect. Respect is hard to find in inner cities. Adults relate through authority--teachers, police, parents rarely ask why, don't seem to care, won't listen. The future holds no solution: old paths to economic adulthood look closed; other roads to achieving respect are hard to find or follow. Finding identity and respect is the problem teenagers want to solve.
Complex questions don't have single answers. So Community Problem-Solving Dialogues use the rival hypothesis strategy (rivaling) to seek out alternative perspectives on risk, stress, respect, and other issues. In their writing and videos, CLC teens document surprising rival perspectives that people often don't expect.
- RISK: Stressful and potentially risky situations can be open to rival (alternative) readings by teens and adults. For instance, a group of teenagers standing on the street is often seen as threatening--invested in protecting turf and proving a "hard" identity. A rival reading, however, might argue that, given the options in the inner city, teens are actually seeking a safe and social place to "hang" together. And a third rival reading might see in that group individuals who are struggling with not only social pressure to belong, but practical concerns for safety if they don't join. Adding police to the scene can be read as the arrival of help or of harassment; it can be the imposition of order or the imposition of power without recourse. Rival readings occur every day on the street when women clutch purses at the sight of any young African American male: women see risk; teenagers see racism. And when white adults see black youth dressed in hoodies, cornrows, and baggies, they see signs of antisocial intentions, but urban teens see the mark of "fashion."
- STRESS: In trying to cope with the stress of the street, poverty, racism, and adolescence, teen culture often advises its members to "bury" the stress, to just "hang on," or more proactively, to "be hard." The rival wisdom of adult culture, however, urges teenagers to "just say no," disaffiliate with their peer group, or accept adult counsel. Teenagers, facing everyday risk and stress, bring a deep skepticism to the advice of adults who grew up before the violence started--adults who "haven't been there."
- RESPECT: Is respect the obligatory response one must give to those with age, status, or power? Or, the rival goes, is receiving respect also the right of the young, the powerless, the learner? Authorities often use subordinate "respectful behavior" as a way to judge urban youth (and a prerequisite for even listening). But teenagers (who hold the rival view) often look for signs of mutual respect and zero in on signs of "dissing" (disrespect) from adults--including teachers, police, and business people. They see resistant behavior as part of their demand for dignity. Adults want to manage behavior; teens are trying to manage stress.
It is not enough to listen empathetically. A Community Problem-Solving Dialogue tries to weave rival perspectives into a community-constructed plan for action by, first, generating multiple, competing and complementary options. Secondly it subjects these options to the test of local knowledge--it uses teenage expertise to play out probable outcomes under real conditions. Action plans are then judged, not by good intentions, but by predicted
consequences.
- When teenagers talk about options that would make a difference, they start with a direct call for respect, compassion, and serious conversation with adults--a change from the familiar outcome in which adults put out advice, give instruction, and rehearse the situations of their time.
- Teenagers also ask adults to take more committed public action: to create safe opportunities for socializing and athletics in poor neighborhoods, too; to create schools that can motivate, encourage, and educate even the children under stress; to create an economic future for us all. But when policy makers focus on youth, they often end up trying to manage behavior, create constraints, and punish. And the outcome of that policy is polarization.
- Teenagers don't stop at suggesting options and outcomes for adults. As you'll see in later sections of this report, they place equal emphasis on the role this strategy plays in the decisions they make on a daily basis.
A Community Problem-Solving Dialogue follows a strategic path that leads from constructing Stories, to seeking Rivals, to examining Options. Join the table, and read on to see what this three-step strategic process is revealing.
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