Education and Technology

This is a thoughtful blog about our youth, their education and new technology. The link is called danah boyd | apophenia making connections where none previously existed and it will go in the Links section for future reference as well.  For now, it discussses such topics as why kids under 13 are not allowed to create Facebook pages.  Another article is about what kids think about their own reputatons and issues of privacy:

Pew Research confirms that youth care about their reputation

In today’s discussions about privacy, “youth don’t care about privacy” is an irritating but popular myth. Embedded in this rhetoric is the belief that youth are reckless risk-takers who don’t care about the consequences of their actions. This couldn’t be further from the truth.

Harassment by Q&A: Initial Thoughts on Formspring.me

(This was written for the Digital Media and Learning Project.)

Questions-and-answers have played a central role in digital bonding since the early days of Usenet.  Teenagers have consistently co-opted quizzes and surveys and personality tests to talk about themselves with those around them.  They’ve hosted guest books and posted bulletins to create spaces for questions and answers.  But when teens started adopting Formspring.me this winter, a darker side of this practice emerged.  While teens have always asked each other crass and mean-spirited questions, this has become so pervasive on Formspring so as to define what participation there means.  More startlingly, teens are answering self-humiliating questions and posting their answers to a publicly visible page that is commonly associated with their real name.  Why?  What’s going on?

When I first got online in high school, I found email chain messages entertaining.  I fondly remember receiving surveys about my friends’ favorite movies, most embarrassing moments, and food peculiarities. The task was to erase the content written by my friend, fill in my own content, send it to my friend and forward it to 10 more friends.  With every new genre of social media, surveys and quizzes keep coming back as popular ways to get to know the people around you. Some of the basics have gotten baked into the average profile, especially favorites that can help guide behavioral marketing.

Education and the New Technology in Latin America

Henry Jenkins is the most important man in "Transmedia" and teaches at USC.  Transmedia is the newest thing and involves telling a story in different media, e.g., the Movie, the TV Series, the webisodes, the 1 minute telecom, the comic book, the novel, even a painting or a song about one or more or new characters in a story.  The story might come from a famous book or movie, or might be made up by one of our own children or friends.

Anyway he was invited to speak to Latin American education leaders and I am reprinting his blog here.  Some of it may apply to our situtation with The Literacy Project.  Please go to his blog as there are pictures and art work that are beautiful.

JUNE 9, 2010

Down Argentina Way...

If my trip to Brazil ended up focused primarily on convergence culture and transmedia storytelling, the second leg of my trip -- to Buenos Aires -- was much more directed towards my work on new media literacies and issues concerning education. I was invited to Argentina by Ines Dussel, an educator and public intellectual, who is one of the co-authors with Luis Alberto Quevedo of a new white paper exploring the impact of new media on education in Latin America,Educacion y nuevas technologias: los desafios pedagogicos ante el mundo digital. The report was being released at the VI For Latinoamericano de Educacion, hosted by the Fundacion Santilla. It was an event attended by education ministers and educational researchers/policy makers from many of the Latin American countries. I was asked to give a keynote address which shared with the group some of the perspectives on new media literacies, participatory culture, and informal learning we have developed through Project New Media Literacies, including some discussion of the curriculum we have developed around "Reading in a Participatory Culture." A key concern throughout the discussion was the distinction between introducing technology into the classroom and developing the skills which would enable young people of all economic and cultural backgrounds to participate more fully in the emerging media landscape. Ines and her associates have promised me an interview for the blog, which I hope to share with you soon.

I ended up using two examples from my family history to illustrate my key points. First, I talked about my father's tool box. My father spent much of his life in and around the construction trade. He was the son of a sheet metal worker. For both of those generations, their tools were vitally important to them, but their knowledge consisted of how to deploy those tools and could not be contained in the tools themselves. If my father sat his tool box on the table and told me to build a house, I wouldn't know what to do. Trust me, we went through this many times when he was alive. I never could think using hand tools. It isn't just that I didn't know how to use the tools well -- how to use a hammer or a saw -- but rather, I lacked the skills needed to use them effectively and I lacked the larger understanding of how a house -- or in my case, a bookcase -- would be put together. I had the tools but I lacked the competencies which would allow me to use them in meaningful ways. I lacked the sense of my own empowerment to take those tools out in the world and construct something with them.

So, we can bring computers into the classroom but unless the tools are accompanied by other kinds of knowledge -- and I don't just mean how to use the keyboard and some basic software -- then they are not going to be able to deploy those tools in meaningful ways. For some of my friends back at MIT, the key knowledge is how to code -- and that's certainly part of what I mean -- but also I think that knowledge involves how to network, how to participate in new structures of culture and knowledge, how to read a Wikipedia page, how to assess the credability of information. And a technically focused curriculum which is not met with the integration of those skills into how we study culture and society will only get us so far in terms of closing the digital divide and the participation gap. That's the heart of the white paper I wrote for MacArthur.

The second story I drew on heavily there had to do with my grandmother, who, among other things, made quilts, growing up in rural Georgia. We might think of quilting as a kind of remix practice. She took bits of cloth left over from other sewing projects, sometimes drawing on the shared reservoirs of the female community, to create new works. In doing so, she was also building on a shared tradition with its own patterns and formulas. And she was producing an artifact which was designed for sharing -- often the quilts were made as gifts to mark social occasions of significance in the life of the community. My grandmother would have known how to engage with a participatory culture.

We can imagine moving from stitching together and remixing textiles to stitching together and remixing media content. Indeed, Francesca Coppa uses the metaphors of "cutting" and "stitching" to talk about the work that goes into producing a fanvid. In the United States, these folk traditions were radically disrupted by the rise of mass production and mass media. Today, quilt making is a specialized skill, more often trained in art schools than passed along from one generation to the next. And the logic of folk production has become disassociated from our understanding of the media.

One of my speculations about digital culture in Latin America is that because it exists alongside a still vibrant folk culture, a new model for thinking about remix may emerge. And this is part of what I am trying to understand through my travels to the region. I don't want to romanticize this possibility since it is also the case that many Latin Americas worry that the web may simply open up another gateway through which North American influences will be felt upon their traditional ways of life, and it is hard talking to people there to dismiss those concerns.

These next two images suggest some of the complex ways that these two ideas -- remix as part of the logic of folk culture and the importation of Northern culture on the south -- interact on a regular basis in Argentina. My brother owes an affinity to the brand community around Coca Cola, living in Atlanta, so I was especially interested to see the many ways that Coke's presence was felt in Buenos Aires. And yet, as cultural theorists might suggest, Coke is localized -- not only by the decisions made in the boardroom but also by the ways it is inserted into a distinctly Argentinian context.

As I traveled around the city, I was struck by the graphic arts of Buenos Aires, the expressive ways that paint -- especially bright primary colors -- was used to transform the urban landscape.

This focus on street art carried over to a strong tradition of murals and graffiti, such as the soccer related image, which also reminds us of how intense the country's connections are to sports fandom.

And this pub sign depicts Carlos Gardel, Tango performer who became a key figure in Argentinian cinema of the early sound era. I was introduced to Gardel's music while visiting Argentina, along with a wide array of appropriations and remixes of Tango music as it gets absorbed into jazz, hip hop, and techno/dance musics.

Gardel remains a key figure in Argentinian popular culture -- if you look closely, you will see his image on the wall behind these contemporary street performers who were in their own ways keeping the Tango tradition alive.

Ines and her husband took me to visit a curio market on Sunday, which is full of cultural debris, some reflecting the local traditions of Argentina, others suggesting the flow of goods and brands from the North. This still life suggests the complex assemblage of objects (and the cultural traditions they embodied) on every table.

The one thing I was taught about Argentina growing up in American public schools of the 1960s was that it was the land of the Gaucho, so I could not resist capturing this image of a Gaucho selling ropes and bolos in the marketplace. I am sure some of this was performance for tourists, but there was still something fascinating about confronting an icon which previously had lived for me only on the pages of battered and largely forgotten textbooks. Besides, I always loved a song Lupe Velez sings in one of the Wheeler and Woolsey comedies that "You can keep Harpo and Chico. I love my Gaucho."

And during this same trip, I was intrigued by these street performers. Like so many living statues, I have seen in the United States, they were frozen in a pose, defying the attempts of visitors to make them move from their static composition. Yet, what amused me here was the attempts to create what seems in still photographs to be a highly dynamic image -- they used a variety of illusions to convey a sense of movement, even as they remained absolutely still.

Pardon me for what has devolved into a series of tourist snapshots which fail to capture the complex thoughts and feelings which this trip stirred within me, but part of what I carried away with me was a real affection and fascination for the kinds of folk and popular culture practices I observed in Buenos Aires.

Posted by Henry Jenkins at 7:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

JUNE 7, 2010

My Big Brazillian Adventure

Of the foreign language editions of Convergence Culture, probably the best selling one was the version published in Portuguese and distributed primarily in Brazil. Thanks to the support of Mauricio Mota and the Alchemists, a transmedia company which works in Rio and Los Angeles, my book has stimulated enormous interest in that country, with companies such as Globo and Petrobras buying hundreds of copies to give to their employees and clients as Brazil seeks to better understand the digital age at a moment of deep cultural and technological transition.

Why Brazil? Two primary reasons: First, Brazil is at the center of the so-called BRIC nations (Brazil, Russia, India, and China), countries which economists believe are going to be dominant economic (and I suspect, cultural) powers in the 21st century. These are countries on the rise, countries which have embraced new media and are surfing it to gain greater influence over the planet. Much as China has gained greater visibility in recent years through the Olympics and the current Shanghai Expo, Brazil is positioned to gain wider attention by hosting the Olympics and the World Cup in the next few years. It is a country with a strong digital infrastructure and thriving creative industries.

Second, unlike the United States, Brazil has held onto strong folk and participatory traditions, despite the rise of modern mass media. Seymour Papert famously used the Samba Schools as his illustration of how informal and community based learning works and that example has stuck in my head from my early days at MIT:

If you dropped in at a Samba School on a typical Saturday night you would take it for a dance hall. The dominant activity is dancing, with the expected accompaniment of drinking, talking and observing the scene. From time to time the dancing stops and someone sings a lyric or makes a short speech over a very loud P.A. system. You would soon begin to realize that there is more continuity, social cohesion and long term common purpose than amongst transient or even regular dancers in a typical American dance hall. The point is that the Samba School has another purpose then the fun of the particular evening. This purpose is related to the famous Carnival which will dominate Rio at Mardi Gras and at which each Samba School will take on a segment of the more than twenty-four hour long procession of street dancing. This segment will be an elaborately prepared, decorated and choreographed presentation of a story, typically a folk tale rewritten with lyrics, music and dance newly composed during the previous year. So we see the complex functions of the Samba School. While people have come to dance, they are simultaneously participating in the choice, and elaboration of the theme of the next carnival; the lyrics sung between the dances are proposals for inclusion; the dancing is also the audition, at once competitive and supportive, for the leading roles, the rehearsal and the training school for dancers at all levels of ability.

From this point of view a very remarkable aspect of the Samba School is the presence in one place of people engaged in a common activity - dancing - at all levels of competence from beginning children who seem scarcely yet able to talk, to superstars who would not be put to shame by the soloists of dance companies anywhere in the world. The fact of being together would in itself be "educational" for the beginners; but what is more deeply so is the degree of interaction between dancers of different levels of competence. From time to time a dancer will gather a group of others to work together on some technical aspect; the life of the group might be ten minutes or half an hour, its average age five or twenty five, its mode of operation might be highly didactic or more simply a chance to interact with a more advanced dancer. The details are not important: what counts is the weaving of education into the larger, richer cultural-social experience of the Samba School.

My Student Ana Domb Krauskopf recently wrote a fascinating white paper for the Convergence Culture Consortium on Techno Brega, a form of popular music in regional Brazil, which operates under a radically different model of production and distribution which is being studied by many in the Free Culture movement.

If you accept my premise that digital participatory culture is what happens when we apply folk culture logic to the content of mass culture in an era where we have expanded capacities for circulation, then it makes sense that digital culture is going to take a very different shape in Brazil than in the United States. Given this history, my work seems especially resonant with Brazilian readers and I am feeling a strong tug to spend more time in that country.

I spent the last week and a half of May in Brazil, speaking with several key players there in the efforts to make the country a key digital player, including Petrobras, the leading oil company, and Globo, a key media producer and distributor. While I was there, I was interviewed by half a dozen or so of the leading print and television journalists.

The key event during my stay in Rio was a talk to creative workers inside Globo's Project, their primary production facility on the outskirts of the city, at the foot of a truly spectacular cluster of mountains and on the edge of the rain forest. I was consistently impressed in Rio by the ways that the natural world was fully integrated into the life of the city.

I was able to go to the top of Sugarloaf Mountain and look down on the city. Scattered throughout Rio are massive outcroppings of exposed rock -- to call them mountains, though they are mountain sized, does not really capture the oddness of these protrusions. They are much closer to Stone Mountain in my native Atlanta (of course without the carvings of Confederate generals!) than anything else I had ever seen. The city is wrapped in and around these mountains. In some cases, the Favela run up the sides of mountains. The more desirable land is at their foot. They are contained by the beaches and oceans that surround much of the city. And threaded through these pockets of development remain large forests. The effect is close to the technological utopian conception of the city as an integrated environment where nature and technology can co-exist. It is hard to go far in Rio without confronting the natural world and the companies where I spoke were very overt about their commitments to Green policies.

The event at Globo was simply spectacular. The production people had turned a soundstage into what can only be described as a set. Not only had they taken a key motif from the cover of my book and blown it up to the size of a wall, adding in massive television screens on either side, but they had taken other elements from the book's design and decorated the entire hall. It was packed with hundreds of people who wanted to learn more about convergence and transmedia. And the event was being webcast and live-blogged so the words were being transmitted to many who could not be physically present. I presented an opening talk on transmedia which drew upon my recent He-Man essay and my 7 Principles of Transmedia Storytelling paper, both of which have already been shared on my blog, and ended with some thoughts about future challenges confronting transmedia producers which I hope to share with my readers soon.

Afterwords, I was joined on stage by Mark Warshaw, who had developed transmedia for Heroesand Smallville and now is a key partner in The Alchemists, and Florish Klink, a recently minted graduate of MIT's Comparative Media Studies Program who is becoming the group's Chief Participation Officer (their expert on fan relations). And we were hit with all kinds of thoughtful questions from the audience, questions which showed just how carefully they had listened and absorbed the insights from my work and how much they were thinking through the future of media in their country. In some ways, they are a step behind developments in North America -- for example, the DVR has not yet come to Rio -- but they are learning the lessons of the early adapter countries and will be ready as they reinvent their media system for the 21st century.

Afterwards, we went on a tour of the production facilities. In many ways, they resemble the classic film studios of the Golden Era of Hollywood, except that they are managed by digital dasebases. So, there are large backlots and vast sound stages. We were shown, for example, a scale reconstruction of a Sao Paolo shopping mall which was used as the setting for a youth-oriented telanovela.

And we were driven through a lovingly recreated neighborhood from the south of Italy which is the setting of another of their popular series. I am posing here with Mauricio Mota and Flourish Klink from The Alchemists.

We toured a vast warehouse holding props which were in storage from previous productions and could be called up from the database when needed for new series and another warehouse where costumes were stored, organized by the decade where the stories were set. Alongside the storehouses, there was a factory of workers sewing new costumes to be used, often in just a few hours, on one or another of the projects they were filming and there were construction crews that could build and breakdown sets on a daily basis.

We walked through the soundstages and saw Passione, a telanovela, being shot. We met briefly the young and very attractive stars Mariana Ximenes and Reynaldo Gianechinni, who have been called the Jennifer Aniston and Brad Pitt of Brazil. And we were able to watch them shoot a scene from an upcoming episode, standing in the booth with the director as they swapped between five cameras which were filming the scene. It was one of fifteen scenes for the series that were scheduled to be shot that day amongst ten or so settings in the studio devoted to Passione's production. The scenes were shot out of sequence 4 or 5 episodes at a time to allow them to complete their needs of a setting, break it down, and make way for the next setting, all in the course of a 1-2 day period of time. The folks with us who worked in Hollywood were astonished at both the attention to detail in the production design but also the efficiency of the operation over all.

(Next Time: Down Argentina Way)

Posted by Henry Jenkins at 10:17 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Henry Jenkins is the Provost's Professor of Communications, Journalism, and Cinematic Art at the University of Southern California. Until recently, he served as the co-founder of theComparative Media Studies Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. More about Henry Jenkins is available here.

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All content © 2010 Henry Jenkins

A message from Sydney

This is to my friends at The Literacy Project:

I've heard some of you are asking about me and I want to share with you where I am and why you won't seeing me until July 1. I went to France to see my sister's two sons and their wives and their children...I'll share some photos of them with you. Then Peter and I went ...to Cannes Film Festival where we didn't see as many movies as I would have liked but met lots and lots of people. After that we drove around France, stayed with a friend, traveled to Berlin where we'll stay for the month. Pictures to follow. I miss you and hear you are all doing so well! I want to read your journals when I get back!

2nd Meeting of the Mentors and Mentees

I’m happy to report we have a new mentor, Marco Samayoa who is a writer, has taught before and lives in East LA. Cookie Fischer is back (hooray!) having just missed the volcanic cloud which kept Europeans in Europe and Americans in America and is still holding back international travel patterns. Marco Torres will also be here for the first time, for the 6:30 session.

We have 10 mentors and need 6 more by the end of the month! I’m going Thursday to talk to UCLA School of Social Work to see about getting more mentors on board.  The suggestions to go talk to Trade Tech, FIT, USC Schools of Social Work and Education, Cardenas High School continue as ways to attract mentors.  Meanwhile VolunteerMatch.com has brought in several as well.

I got an array of 3 types of "tween" books and the kids can write their name in one they want to read and you can begin reading with them. They can take the book home with their journal if they promise to bring them back. We have Hannah Montana, High School Musical books. If they finish one, they can start the other if they want and keep it too. I know Alexa will love them, I hope the other kids will…or that they can choose from other books in the library hopefully.   We will also start our own book drive to bring in more books and in a couple of weeks The Molina Foundation may be ready to give us around 200 more books.

On the blog you will find some help about recognizing reading patterns. In the library are various work books as well which range from math to puzzles, bilingual books and English.  Bring your iPODs…I hope we’ll have some access to computers as Biro likes gaming Barry was going to look into that.

I attach a roster of everyone with a special note from Sara to the mentors in her program. (Barry, Carla, Marco Samayoa and Troy Krouse).

So far so good!!!  Many thanks for your high levels of commitment!

Mentors Meet the Particpants and Their Parents April 14

El Centro del Pueblo (ElCentroDelPuelo.org) had its first mentoring session for The Literacy Project  yesterday, and we are all enthusiastic and thrilled about its success!


We had 3 children at 4pm at Virgil Middle School and 3 mentors (still could use one as another participant is waiting to get in).  This group is part of the Mayor's Office Gang Reduction and Youth Development Program Ramparts Area. These three 14 and 15 year old boys were so sweet and vulnerable, so eager to have someone hear them and to help them excel where they are now having difficulties. I was totally touched by their willingness to work with us.  You could feel their neediness in a way that almost hurt.

Later at 6pm at El Centro, there were 8 children from 11 years to 17. Most were accompanied by their parents. They were also very interested in participating and their parents were so interested and curious that El Centro’s Family Source Center will now also organize a Parent Support Group for helping their children and planning family events aside from the one hour weekly mentoring (6-7 or 6:30-7:30 Wednesdays).  Perhaps they'll plan the weekly screening program or events like father and son night or mother and daughter tea.

We could surely use 2 – 8 more mentors to complete the program of 16 participants. Conversing, relating and starting from their interests to help the children in reading and understanding, writing and expressing themselves to increase their sense of self esteem, and supplementing it with groups which are ready to offer musical training, art training, cooking and many other activities – that is the goal of The Literacy Project.  The end goal is to help these individuals find their own voices and express themselves as they deserve to be heard and helped.


I hope to meet some interested Social Work students this coming Thursday at UCLA's School of Social Work.  El Centro has already hired a graduate of this school as a therapist.


El Centro del Pueblo is in Echo Park, just off Sunset east of Alvarado. Virgil is at Vermont and 1st Street. The program will be mentoring one-on- one for 3 months and a group project the following 3 months. We are hoping to get a 6 month commitment from both mentors and participants.

How to Assess Progress

Luisa Crespo, The Literacy Project's cofounder and administrator, yours truly (Sydney Levine, cofounder) met with Erica Shehane, MSW, MPH who graduated from UCLA's School of Social Work and is now working with El Centro del Pueblo (one of two jobs she's holding). One of her specialties is program assessment. We want to build in program assessments to keep improving and eventually to expand.

 

Before beginning Erica suggested ways to find mentors. We might promote by email with large institutions or even visit them as I will this Thursday when I go to UCLA and speak with students in the School of Social Work. There are other colleges and universities from Otis Art Institute, FIT, and Trade Tech to USC's Schools of Social Work and Education. There are also nearby high schools.

 

Literacy and self esteem are crucial to social growth. We recognize at 68% of the dropout rate at UC are Latinos. We recognize the correlation between illiteracy and criminality. With schools closing down their preschool programs and the after school programs the need to help the youth of our cities is urgent.

 

To assess aspects of the program and its impact there may be milestones by month and larger milestones such as looking at participants' grades, graduation, etc.

 

An how can we engage volunteers and keep them? What works for each student? These are the two audiences whose retention is crucial.

 

These are some points to be aware of and to follow:

 

• Follow up with those who do not stay
• Qualitative conversations with participants, parents, El Centro and among mentors themselves
• Track attendance
• Clarity about where we are going
• Bi monthly meetings with Erica by phone and / or email
• Journal keeping is very important
• Anecdotal means are fine as a method of assessment.

A branded reassessment tool is called REAME.

 

REACH –

• Target: 16 mentors, 16 participants.
• What is our outreach plan to mentors and to participants

EFFECTIVENESS - Outcomes and changes for both the target populations

• Bigger commitment?
• Getting to know one another?
• Visible changes?
• Are kids progressing?
• Are the mentors staying?

ADOPTION – Reach at an organizational level – Of the 4 programs at El Centro:

• How much buy-in?
• Are there champions pushing it?
• Virgil MS staying together?
• El Centro – staying together?
• Setting staff support leadership?
• Top down?
• Implementation and change – what and why?

 

MAINTENANCE – Over time, resources

 

EFFECTIVENESS – 3 months, 6 months

• Need a Mission Statement
• Improving literary skills
• Improved self-esteem
• Need mentor goals 
• Need first month goals: e.g., get 16 mentors and participants
• Long range goals:
• Grants from such as Annenberg, Mary Pickford Fndn for Funing Meida, Liberty Hill, Federal Gov't
• Partners such as Community Centers, Schools, LA Latino Film Festival and membership, Los Angeles Film Festival

 

 

 

Agreement Between All Parties

Agreement Between Mentors, Participants and Their Parents




Dear Parents,

Your child has been chosen to participate in The Literacy Project, a mentoring project at El Centro del Pueblo. A volunteer will meet with your child for 50 to 60 minutes every week at either El Centro or at Virgil Middle School, where they will work on improving your child’s skill in language arts. The mentor will also consult periodically with the program’s coordinator and perhaps with the classroom teacher to assess your child’s needs.

CHILD’S NAME________________________________________________________________

MENTOR’S NAME______________________________________________________________

DAY, TIME AND PLACE OF MENTORING SESSIONS___________________________________________

A mentor journal will be kept in which the participant, mentor, program coordinator and teacher may place their progress notes. The journal will be kept at the El Centro and you are welcome to leave notes in it as well. The mentor will contact you monthly to report on your child’s progress. A participant journal will also be issued to your child to write notes, progress or problems or any other issues in reading, writing and understanding.

You are a vital part of the network that supports your child’s academic progress. The attached Literacy Project Team Contract outlines the responsibilities of each team member: parent, student, mentor, teacher and program coordinator. Please review the sections of the contract with your child and discuss your responsibilities and theirs. Please sign your name on the back of the contract where indicated and have your child do the same. Return the contract to Sydney Levine, Luisa Crespo or Sandra Figueroa at the center. It will be kept in the child’s file at El Centro.

Please feel free to call if you have any questions. This promises to be a distinguished year for us all. We look forward to working with you and your children.



Sydney Levine

Project Director

SydneyJLevine@gmail.com

201 887 3469



Luisa Crespo

Project Administrator

LCrespoart@aol.com

562 882 3994



LITERACY PROJECT CONTRACT



Child:

I, ______________________________________ will work with The Literacy Project to maximize my academic potential.

I understand that my responsibilities are to:

1. Attend weekly sessions with my mentor

2. Come to the sessions ready to learn, cooperate and do my best

3. Share with my parent/ guardian what I have learned after each session

Parent/ guardian:

I, _________________________________________will work with The Literacy Project to maximize the academic potential of ____________________________________

I understand that my responsibilities are to:

1. Attend an orientation session for the program

2. Participate in training sessions and special events when possible

3. Inform the mentor or contact at El Centro by phone on mornings when my child will not be able to attend

4. Maintain monthly communication with the child’s mentor

5. Ensure that my child will come to the session on time, rested, fed and ready to learn

6. Listen to what my child has learned and share with my child what was learned after each session

Mentor:

I, ___________________________________________will work with The Literacy Project to maximize the academic potential of ________________________________________.

I understand that my responsibilities are to:

1. Attend an orientation/ training session for the program

2. Participate in ongoing training sessions when possible

3. Maintain consistent attendance at weekly mentoring sessions

4. Inform The Literacy Project coordinator of any cancellations of mentoring sessions or call the partipant’s parent/ guardian if it has been advised

5. Maintain monthly communication with the participant’s parent/ guardian

6. Faithfully record each session in the mentoring journal

El Centro Administrator Team Leader:

I ,__________________________________will work with The Literacy Project to maximize the academic potential of _______________________________________.

I understand my responsibilities are to:

1. Attend a first meeting of the Literacy Project team for each student

2. Inform mentor administrator of scheduling conficts in advance.

3. Review participant’s progress with mentor at least every 3 months.

4. Review mentor comments and report on student’s progress in mentoring journal.

5. Proved assessment data (pre and post test scores, attendance records and any other reports) to The Literacy Project Administrator as needed in a timely fashion.



The Literacy Project Administrator

I will work with The Literacy Project team to maximize potential of ____________________________.

I understand my responsibilities are to:

1. Maintain communications between all parties on the team.

2. Provide continuing learning opportunities for mentors and parent/ guardian.

3. Provide materials and other resources to support academic success.

4. Monitor and evaluate team progress.

________________________________________ ______________________________________

Student Parent/ Guardian



_______________________________________ _______________________________________

Mentor El Centro Staff



_____________________________________ ____________________________________

The Literacy Project Administrator Date