Working with At-Risk Youth: Exposure

Exposure means helping your students connect with the unfamiliar. There are many wonderful and fascinating things in this world, but your students probably have no idea many of them exist! We are all products of our environment, and in some cases, the environment may be rather limited. For this reason, a good teacher is an ambassador to other realms and possibilities. You can open a lot of doors for your students, and one of the best ways to do this is bring the world to them. This doesn’t mean you have to go on fancy field trips, but rather bring the outside world in to your room (although I highly recommend taking the students on fieldtrips if time and finances permit). But assuming you’re working with limited time and resources, here’s some things that open doors and require almost nothing in terms of time and energy, but will definitely broaden your student’s horizons:

1. National Geographic: Possibly the finest publication in the world, this is my number one pick for free time reading (or topical extensions). Reluctant readers seem to enjoy reading National Geographic as much as more advanced students, and if they do nothing more than read the photo captions, they’re still getting a lot of thought provoking reading done. Students who often won’t read anything else will usually read National Geographic. I’ve seen students with severe reading disabilities take a shine to National Geographic, as well as gang members. You just never know who will find it appealing. The beauty of National Geographic is that one little publication accomplishes so much: it increases student’s knowledge of other cultures, the entire gamut of sciences from astronomy to zoology, history, geography (of course), and often provides artistic inspiration and visual interest. It’s inherently interesting for students of all ages, and in an ESL classroom, is a good way of providing visual reminders of home since they run features on every conceivable part of the world. They often prompt interesting conversations, and in and of themselves may inspire you to teach certain topics you hadn’t considered. You can subscribe if you wish, but you can also get them free from all kinds of places. This is one of the most read items in my classroom, and when I’m doing thematic units, I pull out the issues that support the topic we’re reading about and put them in an expanded text set that students can browse during the course of that unit. For instance, in February, we often student China (Chinese New Year), so I pull the issues about China out of the main collection, and stick them in a box with the novels I have, and students often helps themselves to these and read them during class without any prompting whatsoever from me.

2. Temporary Libraries: When you are studying a particular topic, you can check out books from the school library or public library that support that topic, and expand the offerings in your classroom on an as-needed basis. For instance, when we studied Ancient Egypt one time, I went and checked out all these huge oversize picture books of the Pyramids, and the kids loved them. This works well for almost anything, and the library is full of this kind of stuff. Some of the very best items are found over in the children’s section. DK (Doring Kindley) and Usborne put out a huge range of picture reference books on almost every conceivable topic, and these are usually located in the children’s department (but trust me, they are equally fascinating to teens and adults). No matter what you’re studying, there’s probably some kind of complementary publication that would support it. Thematic units I’ve built “temporary classroom libraries” around are marine biology, Black History, Africa, the environment, Native Americans, and survival skills (while reading Hatchet). This is where you can think outside the box a bit, and bring in things that kids don’t normally experience in school. This also brings to life aspects of a topic that are consistently neglected by textbook publishers. For instance, during Black History Month, in addition to all the biographies I checked out, I also checked out a bunch of jazz CDs and we listened to them in class, and we also listened to audio excerpts of authors reading their works (definitely more interesting than the half a page bio in the textbook). I recently did a Driving Safety Week in my reading class, and brought in oversize picture books of cars and trucks, and that was a huge hit. Aside from books, you may to consider magazines, maps, brochures, guest speakers, music, Youtube clips, films, props, instruments, etc. If you are studying a particular part of the world or time period, see if you can bring in objects that represent that. Teens love realia just as much as kids do.

3. Permanent Library: There are some things that are so compelling to students that you should plan on keeping them around all the time. Plan on getting all of this stuff free or cheap because students may “fall in love” with something and it could disappear. Make sure whatever you have, it’s expendable. Aside from the usual suspects (popular novels), I highly recommend stocking vocational reading materials, college level textbooks on a variety of subjects (you can get these cheap at places like Goodwill or yard sales), picture books (National Geographic puts out some really nice ones on various topics), books about sports, manga (Japanese comics), comics like the Far Side or Calvin and Hobbes (reluctant readers WILL read these), poetry books, Art Books, Oversize/Big Books (still fascinating to teenagers), and books about things that students are interested in but not likely to find in a school setting because they aren’t part of the regular curriculum (e.g. Pirates, Ghost stories, etc). The reason you want to have these things around is so that students can enjoy them during their free time. Students can expand on their interests, or possibly develop new ones. I would suggest providing these kinds of materials at a variety of reading levels (easy to college level) and letting the students discover them on their own. I call my collection, the “mental vacation” and when a student is finished/bored, refer them to go take a “mental vacation”, and they know just what I mean.

4. Setting: Sometimes it’s fun to leave the classroom and do the day’s learning in other settings. This is true anytime, but especially true during the blah days of winter, or when things are feeling a bit stale. Things I have done with my classes are read outside (when the weather’s nice enough), go for walks outdoors (observation activities, scavenger hunts, relay races and other physical challenges, trash pick-up). If you have the facilities, you can go to the library, do noisy group work in the cafeteria (if it’s empty—great place for practicing dialogs or doing messy projects that require a lot of space, by the way), use the auditorium, do things in the gym that support academics, you name it. If you live in a walkable community, you can go on community outings that support the goals of your class (almost anything can be justified under the heading of life skills!). Some off campus ideas include navigation/trip planning using public transportation (if you have it), going to a restaurant (multicultural studies or foreign language), going to the store (budgeting/finance), job seeking/career info (set up with area businesses), community clean-up projects, recycling trips, tours of local community services, and so on. Anything that gets the students out and interacting in the community in a positive way is probably something to consider. Consider the merits of incorporating service projects into whatever you teach.

These ideas aren’t new, and I certainly didn’t come up with them all by myself. Frankly I’ve stolen quite a few of them from other people, and had a lot of success using them in my work with at-risk students. The beauty of these principles is that they actually work for ANY kind of student, but some of them are so atypical for your average classroom setting that the sheer novelty of them often catches students by surprise, and promotes engagement. Students with labels aren’t that different from everyone else—they have the same need to be respected, want to belong to a supportive community, want to be able to make choices in how they spend their time, need supportive structures to feel safe, want to learn things that are useful and valuable, and need to be exposed to new things. Will these ideas solve all of your problems in working with tough cases? Probably not, but compared to what these students are used to: sterile/minimal environments, repressive top-down learning (canned curriculum), limited options—the sheer novelty of having a classroom environment that emphasizes a comfortable mix of individuality/community and intellectual freedom often works wonders. There’s a lot more that can be said about working with at-risk students, but in the grand scheme, having an overall structure that promotes the wonders of learning, and open inquiry often invites students into an academic world that they may have never envisioned themselves as being a part of. Students that typically feel excluded or marginalized, tend to be quite disengaged from school by the time they reach adolescence, and often thrive given a more personal, open-ended environment in which to conduct the business of learning.