August 12, 2000

We're upstairs in the choir room of the Angelica Lutheran Church in the Pico-Union neighborhood. This is our headquarters for the Democratic National Convention. Ms. Berta Saavedra, the director of the Pico/Westlake cluster is speaking to the seminar students about issues confronting the impoverished, yet vibrant community that has unwillingly inherited the National Party meeting. The temperature in the room is well over 90 degrees and her voice competes with the hum of the medley of fans that have been loaned for our use. The students are into it, though as, pens and pencils are scribbling furiously in the little black notebooks while heads nod in agreement. The questions are flying and I have to cut the students off so that we will have time to make it downtown to the Staples Center to get a tour of the convention site…As we walk through the neighborhood, the students are asked to pay attention to the different participants in the Pico-Union neighborhood and the DNC. Students are asked to notice what different roles people are playing both in the convention and the neighborhood and to analyze the power relations that accompany those roles. As we walk the students are writing and commenting on the lack of traffic, on the literal and figurative sanitization of the downtown neighborhood, on the 13-foot perimeter fence with a concrete base that will keep out undesirables…

These notes are from Education, Access, and Democracy in Los Angeles: LA Youth and Convention 2000, a high school Urban Studies seminar established as a collaborative between UCLA’s emergent Institute for Democracy Education and Access and the Los Angeles Basis Initiative, a UC-wide outreach project targeted at students attending schools that have not traditionally produced many competitively eligible applicants for admission to the University of California. The summer course was designed to advance the development of academic and critical literacy in LA Urban youth while simultaneously demonstrating to the university faculty and administrative communities that urban students who are usually written off are capable of engaging in meaningful college-level work.

To gain a sense of what academic literacy meant in the context of the University of California community, we asked university professors and consulted recent speeches and other literature from chancellors, regents, and other administrators who have spoken to the mission of the University of California as it pertains to undergraduates. All spoke to the need to develop independent thinkers who investigate, take risks, synthesize existing theories with new understandings, and produce critical and coherent texts that would push our understandings of how to move forward in a rapidly changing society. Critical literacy theorists, on the other hand, speak to the need for citizens to develop a consciousness of the function and power of language in a stratified, hierarchical society. In the seminar, we wanted to ensure that students had the opportunity to develop and demonstrate skills valued by the university, but we also wanted to facilitate a critical consciousness of the reproduction of social stratification that disproportionally disaffects students of color in urban communities.

The 30 students who participated in the seminar, all entering their senior year of high school, selected one of five research teams that dealt with an area of youth access. The five research groups were: Access to Quality Schooling, Access to Community Learning Resources, Access to Media, Access to a Livable Wage, and Access to Civic Life. During the first two weeks when we met at UCLA the students received background information in critical research, political conventions as narratives, and the key issues affecting participants inside and outside of the convention. Students also began working within their research groups framing questions, reading literature, and collecting preliminary data. During the third week of the four-week seminar, we met at a church in a downtown Pico-Union neighborhood and participated in the Democratic National Convention. Students visited Staples Center, the Shadow Convention, and the designated Protest Area and collected data for their research projects. During the final week of the seminar, the students returned to UCLA where they began data analysis and prepared to present their findings to a university faculty panel, community activists, high school faculty, and family members.

Students had the opportunity to write extensively everyday in the form of: journals, interview protocols, surveys, lecture notes, field notes, and portions of a collaborative research paper that contained an introduction, a literature review, methods and findings sections as well as a conclusion. Students were also given opportunities to engage in critical and meaningful dialogue with team members, with section leaders, and with invited speakers that included politicians, business leaders, activists, members of the media, and attorneys. Before engagements, students would read background information on the speakers and prepare critical questions. During the conversations, students would take notes and, during the final week of preparation for the presentations, students would refer back to these notes as part of their data analysis.

In addition to the opportunities to engage in college-level writing and critical conversations, students were able to acquire college-level research skills such as, the ability to: turn a critical question into a research study, relate theory to research design, conduct interviews, and read various forms of data (i.e. charts, census data, maps, interview transcripts, surveys).

The students were able to develop and draw upon existing expertise in ways that lead to increases in both meaningful textual production and critical awareness of social issues. Many expressed a vested interest in conducting research on urban issues. They felt that the research mattered to their lives and communities, that their work products were authentic and, as a result, were more willing to put in the extra effort and obtain what we feel are some extraordinary results that hold powerful, yet promising implications for all who are connected with urban students and urban issues.