Girls Rock!!!

The movie Girl’s ROCK was really an enjoyable experience. It was very uplifting to see a camp that encouraged girls to be themselves and to concentrate on their talents and abilities rather than just their physical appearance. The camp did a great job of following the ideas from Josephine Van Linden and Carl Fertman of Youth Leadership as well as McNeil Carole author of New Directions in Youth Development. These authors noted that an important part of adolescent leadership is giving the girls’ free reign to practice leadership rather than then controlling the girls and practicing leadership FOR them. The camp counselors and directors served as guidance counselors and mediators when the groups had disagreements or needed to be reminded of their ultimate goal, but they didn’t control the girl’s decision-making processes when it came to their band.

 I also like how the camp’s way of assembling groups provided the girls with free reign as well. The girls got to choose the genre of music they were interested in as well as the construction of their own actual songs. The girls were put into a situation where they had to make decisions. Throughout the course of the camp there were disputes, and through resolution of these disputes the girls learned valuable lessons.  For instance, they learned you don’t have to be THE leader to be A leader. Each member in the group exercised leadership in her own right. The conflict resolution was truly enlightening because once again the camp counselors provided an environment that facilitated resolution, but they did not FORCE the girls to make up; they provided an environment where every group member could be heard and their opinions and feelings respected. This shows Girl’s leadership is growing and expanding and is a perfect example of how programs can make a difference. It shows girl’s leadership is alive and well and will only grow to be bigger and more powerful for the future generations of adolescent leaders.

Word count: 328

Works Cited

McNeil, Carole. Bridging Generation: Applying ‘Adult’ Leadership Theories to Youth Leadership Development. 2006: 27-43. Print.

Van Linden, Josephine. A., Fertmen, Carl I. Youth Leadership: A Guide to Understanding Leadership Development in Adolescents.1998:63-95.Print

YWLP Activism Log 2

Activism:

                During this week, my group had our biggest event of the semester, Ucf day. It started at 9:30am and lasted till 4pm. The prior week we fine tuned our lesson plan for UCF Day, and obtained the materials we would need for our scrapbook. A scholarly blog was created where we would document our particular activism, and our overall feelings and even roadblocks surrounding the project. This week was honestly a great success and made me very hopeful for UCF day and the overall success of our project. This week we started posting the tweets from the little sisters, and next week we will be collecting submissions for the zine. Ucf day went on without a hitch, and our bullying presentation went better than we thought it ever would.

Reflection:

This activism relates to what we covered in class because by enabling the girls to take on an active role in the zine we are helping them discover how they are leaders and can be advocates against bullying as well as letting them exercise their leadership potential by way of opening up a creative avenue. I believe my community partner has views very similar to mine and agrees that giving adolescent girls an avenue to show they are leaders is a very powerful thing and can be nothing but beneficial in the long run. Because bullying is such a sensitive subject topic and has had a powerful impact in our little sisters, we believe that the tools we will teach them to become advocates will stick with them for a lifetime. The girls surprised us during the film portion of UCF day with all the powerful things they had to say about YWLP, and their great insight into how bullying requires the support of everyone even before our lesson (Gonick 5). It was truly touching. We made sure to incorporate the ideas of Anita Harris from Future Girl with the emphasis on spreading out the responsibility of girls (Harris 94). The girls designed the pages for the scrapbook, and made twitter posts and truly put their leadership into work the entire day. Throughout the day the girls realized they all experienced the same issues regardless of their ethnicity and social class (Gonick 5). It was a beautiful thing.

Reciprocity:

                Honestly, our project has made me really excited and hopeful for the girls. I feel they are not only gaining powerful tools, but I’m gaining (Through the creation of the zine) a powerful insight into the mind of these young girls, and they never cease to amaze me with their imaginative thought processes, strong opinions, and eloquent speech. These girls are powerful voices, and I hope that our project enables them to be heard because they definitely have something to say. From a feminist perspective this may be defined as Third wave feminism, but with a concentration on girls.

WORD COUNT: 479

Work Cited

Marnina Gonick . Between “Girl Power” and “Reviving Ophelia”: Constituting the Neoliberal Girl Subject.      

  NWSA Journal. Vol 18 No.2

Anita Harris. Future Girl: Young Women in the Twenty-First Century. New York: Routledge. 2004. Print.