03/26/2026
Being Youth-Focused During Backlash at WordPowered
by Abdi Mohamed Ali, Ed.D
I got word from Elvis, our Teens in Print Manager, that eight TiPsters have signed up to read I’ll Make Me A World: The 100 Year Journey Of Black History Month with me; they will prepare to interview Dr. Jarvis R. Givens at this year’s Pros&Conversation on May 7th. “Eight,” he said, “and I have not asked the Thursday group!”
The more TiPsters, the bigger the thinking. I am looking forward to giving them their own copies to highlight, annotate, and to put their training as journalists to work. Not all will be on stage with Givens, but all their questions, somehow, make it to the conversation.
This is my third time reading with our youth, leading up to our annual fundraiser: I found my way as an executive director to integrate a core identity I carry: the classroom teacher.
The classroom teacher Givens and I mutually admire is Dr. Carter G. Woodson; I tried to fashion a career in public education like Woodson’s, teaching and writing curriculum. Givens has studied him deeper and longer, and gone further to bring contemporary historians and educators to examine the meaning of his life and work.
Woodson is credited for establishing Negro History Week in February 1926, but its endurance despite waves of backlash, Givens contends, is due to everyday acts by “black memory workers,” educators and activists who committed to correcting racist lies, and whose perservation of facts and stories may inspire “those seeking to create and sustain meaningful lives steeped in a cultural legacy shaped by freedom dreams and a commitment to collective human flourishing.”
I am eager to find out which freedom dreams or everyday acts TiPsters will find reachable, and how Black History may feed their curiosity about the memory work they have inherited and must carry forward.
Pros&Conversation has been WordPowered’s open invitation to join writers, emerging and established, as they work out their subject matter and the significance of their craft. We want to see you at GBH Studios on May 7th. Now more than ever. Now more than ever, we must be youth-focused as Givens explains, “that such a focus has to do with more than simply offering young people greater access to the content of black history. It is essential that we support young people (and all learners, for that matter) in developing a critical understanding of what is at stake in the act of preserving critical perspectives on the past. It requires being more transparent about how power informs our social constructions of history and how historical consciousness informs our identities as individuals, as well as how our collective memories of the past shape our aspirations, both for our individual selves and the communities to which we belong.” Join Dr. Jarvis R. Givens, one of the most compelling memory workers of our time, in conversation with Teens in Print reporters on May 7th. Get your tickets here: https://bit.ly/4c3B8Di
