Below is a transcript of our conversation with Dr. Gina McGovern and Michyah Jones: David Nicholas:
I'm David Nicholas and this is central focus, a weekly look at research activity and innovative work from Central Michigan University. Students and faculty best practices to include children of color have been adopted in the classroom, adapting them for after school programs as a more recent trend and the focus of research of Dr. Gina Mcgovern's assistant professors. Emus, Department of Human Development and Family Studies. She began the work as part of her postdoctoral studies in 20/22. She worked with CMU student Anaya Lewis Macaya Jones, Chicago Senior and CMU. McNair Scholar assisted in the current project. Doctor McGovern and Miss Jones join me in studio to tell me more.
Gina McGovern:
So, my work is connected, but there's different aspects to it. So again, when I was at my postdoc, we started to develop a measure. Where teachers would self-report on some of the practices that they use in their classrooms with middle school students, 5th through 8th graders, to integrate social and emotional learning with a racial equity focus. So, paying attention, especially for black and Latino youth, to pay attention to issues of racism and xenophobia and immigration. And talk about the emotional response to those things. Right. And learning social and emotional skills to figure out ways to address. And challenge and push against those challenges. And so, with that measure, Anaya and I, the following summer took that measure to focus groups of out of school time programs because it was originally developed for school and thought about an after-school time programs. They might have more flexibility. They have, they can do programming. You know, that looks different than schools and is more engaging and in different ways they can. Address topics that teachers might not be able to, and so through those conversations within the after-school programs, we kind of extended that. What does it look like in after school programs?
DN:
How wide was the gap when it came to funding and? What these programs were able to offer, what (what), what the experience would be like for the children based on the resources that were available for that particular program.
GM:
Yeah, we didn't focus on the funding so much, but more just if programs were if programs that served black and Latin X youth were engaging in conversations around race when they were doing social emotional learning activities. And we found that there with these educators in that that study, we found that there was interest and desire to have those conversations. But oftentimes, especially with white program leaders, there was hesitation right or not feeling like they had the right words or enough training, or they didn't want to step on someone's toes or do something wrong. And so, they wanted they were. They're sort of this readiness. To (to) learn more, to do more, but not this kind of support or foundational like knowledge, to be able to do it.
DN:
So then taking that and then forming the framework of how to build the better after school program, how did you formulate the questions going into this? What were the things that you wanted to know as this next step?
GM:
So, this project was to really scour the literature for programs that are already doing this work well. And so, looking for programs that are focused on black youth that have it as a part of their mission and purpose to serve. Youth and are, you know, these studies that are showing the success of those and the studies that have sort of rich descriptions of what happens in those programs and so can we distill some of the things that are the same in those programs and help other folks who are not sure what to do right with like here's what it looks like this is how to support black youth development.
DN:
And Michyah, it's a similar question as to (to) what questions you brought to the project, but clearly I(I) know that anywhere around where we are at Central Michigan University wouldn't compared to Chicago, not a big city; not (not) as probably extended or involved or wide-ranging, it sounds like, as the program that that you had a chance to participate in. Was that a factor at all in looking at this from your point of view or more directly, what questions did you have coming into the research that you did with Dr. McGovern?
MJ:
Yeah. So, when Doctor McGovern approached me with this project, we had kind of that big question. How do after school programs help black youth development, things like that. And as I was coming into it, we were doing some of the coding. I'm like, OK, we got these codes. What do we do with them? We see these trends, these trends, these trends. So, it's a matter of putting them together and coming up with these ideas, and that is mostly part of what I've been contributing to the project.
DN:
What's the focus of developing the best practices?
MJ:
Yeah, this is something that can be applied for black youth everywhere. We find what best practices work. Like I said, those trends and the goal is to implement these just to support youth in different aspects of life, meet them where they are and things like that.
DN:
Michyah Jones, McNair Scholar here at CMU and Dr. Gina McGovern, Assistant Professor, CMU's Department of Human Development and Family Studies, good luck with the remainder of the project and pulling this together, and thanks for both of you very much for taking the time to talk with us.
GM:
Thank you.
MJ:
Yeah, thanks for helping to raise awareness about our work. We appreciate it, yeah!
