Network Deficits
Welcome to this week’s issue of Traversing, as always if you find this newsletter to be interesting, if it helps to inform your thinking about progressive education or if you think it might help others, please subscribe, share it with your friends and neighbors and share your comments and questions.
Welcome back to Traversing, I know it has been a little while, the reality of the school year is that it quickly becomes busy and I end up prioritizing activities that directly impact the experience of students and staff. As reasonable as this sounds, it is also important to continue this conversation with the wider community, maybe with less frequency (I am personally shocked that I was writing weekly when this project began.)
One of the major changes at City of Bridges High School is that our enrollment has rapidly expanded to capacity and of course more students brings more students to support in striving for their dreams. One of the ways that we support students in that striving is through our internship program and through exposure to possible futures, which brings me to what I wanted to talk about for this issue.
Last week I had the honor of attending the grand opening of the HQ for The Pop District, which is, quoted from their website:
“major new cultural and economic development project, spearheaded by the Andy Warhol Museum, that intends to transform a six-block section of the museum’s neighborhood on Pittsburgh’s North Shore into a thriving hub for expansive cultural programming, creative workforce development, and ultimately a new and enhanced cultural tourism destination. The project aims to use the power of public art, digital media production, and live music to create a museum-led destination in the city where Andy Warhol was born.”
It was an inspiring event and I am honored to know the amazing people involved in this exciting work. At one point in the evening, I had a conversation about Network Deficits and here is where the conversation circles back to the internship program and exposure to possible futures.
Human are inherently relational beings, which I have discussed before in relation to learning environments, and that relational nature is also critical for access to opportunities, mentorship, support and inspiration. We all respond to people we have met with a greater degree of openness than those who are strangers. In a course I am currently facilitation, Leadership and Change, we explored Leader-Member Exchange Theory, first developed by Graen and Uhl-Bien in 1991. The theory, while used to describe leadership relationships, can also be applied to considerations of network access for young people. The theory has a number of elements, but the portion that I would like to discuss is represented below:
The progression from a stranger relationship to a partnership has significant impact on the efficacy of leadership and organizations and the same model can be applied to network relationships. Young people may have some success in accessing opportunities with a cold call to a stranger, but will have far more success with someone who they have built a relationship with, although the end goal of partnership may not be applicable in these types of situations. Providing young people with the opportunity to build relationships with adults and other youth in areas of interest it enables them to build networks of support that may be lacking in their lives.
These relationships are built through sustained and purposeful interaction. The job fair or career day, provides students with a glimpse of possible futures, but does not shift the dial from stranger to acquaintance and certainly not to a partnership. In order to build those networks, we need to support long term experiences, such as an internship program that allows students to work alongside and learn from professionals in areas of interest for their futures.
These types of programs are possible, we run them at City of Bridges. It takes time and effort, but the most important thing it takes is the recognition that experiences in possible futures build skills and equally importantly build networks, when we realize that fact and make it a priority, amazing things can happen for young people.
With Gratitude,
Randy