Excerpt
Mark is a fifteen-year-old at a crossroads. He has important choices to make. He wants to be heard and taken seriously and to have a place to come to work on his dreams. The Community Literacy Center is an alternative forum for Mark’s art and argument and a place to begin a broader conversation about the issues he cares most about. In a recent CLC project, for example, Mark and ten other teens used writing to investigate the reasons for the increase in student suspensions in the public schools. To present this “policy paper,” Mark and his peers organized a “community conversation” with the mayor, the media, the school board president, principals, and community residents, in which Mark performed a rap written from a teen’s perspective and his peers interpreted it for the audience. As the culmination of their eight-week project, the teens also presented a newsletter, “Whassup with Suspension,” which has since become required reading for teachers and students in Mark’s high school.
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