Working with At-Risk Youth

Working with At-Risk Students

Ever since the beginning, I have seemed to gravitate towards working with at-risk students. While other teachers drool over high income school districts and teaching assignments like IB/AP classes and Honors English, I actually prefer a good old fashioned remedial reading class full of Title I students. My first students at the Memphis Literacy Council were adults who were former Title I students. As adults, they were very low-income, and had grown up poor (the older ones grew up out in the cotton fields of rural North Mississippi), many were (or had been) teen parents, several had obvious learning disabilities, some were homeless (or had been), and some had problems with drugs and alcohol (and a few even had parole officers that would call to check up on their attendance!). Others had overcome the same risk factors, and were in pretty stable situations, had worked successfully for years in entry-level jobs, but couldn’t advance to supervisory positions due to their low literacy. These guys were the inspiration for a lot of the things I have done ever since, knowing what the outcomes look like when you don’t get the help you need earlier in life.

During the four years that I worked with the adult learners at MLC, I went on to develop a rather Freirean philosophy of teaching. (I highly recommend reading some of Paulo Freire’s writing if you are planning on working with adolescents in any kind of learning or mentoring context—in his situation, he’s writing mainly speaking to working with adults in the area of literacy, but a lot of what he says is applicable to any sort of teaching that involves working with teens—who are basically adults in training, and have a similar desire for both personal autonomy and to belong to something greater than themselves). For some reason, Freire really resonates in my work with at-risk youth. If I had been aware of Paulo Freire back in my MLC days, I could have saved myself a lot of time developing various ideas about effective teaching that I arrived at by trial and error.

Boiled down to the essentials, and stripped of any fancy philosophical talk, my five basic principles of working with at-risk students are these:

1. Respect 2. Healthy Relationships and Belonging 3. Maximum choice (within supportive structures) 4. Real-life applications (what can I do with this here and now) 5. Exposure

For a breakdown on each of these, read the subsequent posts.