Helping Youth Learn
A few days ago I received an email newletter: U-News from the Minnesota Youth Community Learning Initiative (MYCL) of the University of Minnesota. The Table of Contents is a generous sampling of youth-related issues that the MYCL and its community and university partners are dealing with:
- Hot Topic: Out-of-School Time (OST)
- Learning to Finish™: Pew Partnership Tackles Dropout Problem
- Holiday gift giving: Helping families learn how much is enough
- Does where I live influence what I eat?
- Positive Parenting: MYCL Communities at Work!
- About the Konopka Institute
- Center for Urban & Regional Affairs: Building Community Capacity
- MYCL Collaboration: Distance Learning
According to its web site,
The Minnesota Youth Community Learning (MYCL) Initiative, funded by the W. K. Kellogg Foundation, partners Konopka Institute staff at the University of Minnesota and seven Minnesota community coalitions. Their shared goal: to re-engage students who are disconnected from learning by connecting them with school and caring capable adults who provide skill-based mentoring.
It does so "by partnering with seven Minnesota communities to:
- Link high school students who are disconnected from learning with a community teacher;
- Re-engage middle school students who are disconnected from learning;
- Assist schools to enhance a sense of connectedness for young people;
- Strengthen the capacity of each MYCL Initiative community coalition to address the needs of all youth in their community; and,
- Assist parents in providing positive parenting and educational support for their middle and high school students."
The Konopka Institute, located in the Adolescent Health and Medicine Division of the Department of Pediatrics at the University of Minnesota, has the disarmingly simple goal "to get reliable information into the hands of everyone who is in a position to help adolescents." It is named after Dr. Gisela Konopka, a professor of social work at the U who pioneered work with adolescents. Some key parts of her intellectual biography can be seen here.
It's noteworthy that Konopka's vision and work, coming out of the Department of Social Work (in the former College of Human Ecology on the Saint Paul campus) is being carried forward in large measure by the Department of Pediatrics in the Medical School on the Minneapolis campus. There are lots of barriers broken down here: Minneapolis/Saint Paul, Human Ecology/Medical School, clinical medicine/social work. This kind of boundary-crossing is crucial if universities are to be adequately engaged with key societal issues.