I'm Big. You're LIttle. I'm Right. You're Wrong. I'm Smart. You're Dumb.
Hello! We are Court King (she/they) and Phyllis Gingerella Wade (she/hers). We’re both youth workers, artists and community members in Providence, Rhode Island. We’ve been friends for years and have worked in similar circles for even longer. Most recently we both participated in the Youth Development MA program at Rhode Island College. This project, and the very paper we are now writing, represents the last work in the last class of our master’s degrees. Wooo. Congratulations to us.
In this project, we decided to blend the media analysis content we covered in class with a tool that we were introduced to by a guest speaker who visited our class to talk about her digital media work with middle school students. After an opportunity to experiment with Soundtrap during her visit, we were excited by the program and decided to dive right in like the creative and brave techno-constructivists we are. For our final project, we created a podcast as a vehicle to explore media representations of youth work.
We have observed that all media, digital or otherwise, both reflects and shapes the perceptions, priorities and values of the dominant discourses in culture. By analyzing media, we can identify and think critically about the discourses that are present within its creation. Media’s perpetual cycle of influence and reflection persists on scales large and small, painting broad brush strokes about cowboys and individualism within the American cultural monolith, or revealing the persistent misogyny in the cat lady trope. For our podcast, we decided to focus on the way that film portrays our work of youth development.
There is plenty to choose from under the somewhat vague umbrella of “youth work movie.” For a society that seems to value the safety and autonomy of young people as little ours does (as evidenced by low wages for care workers and teachers, bare-bones resources allocated to youth work and education, zero movement on policies that would tangibly improve young people’s lives), we certainly seem to LOVE a coming of age story. Perhaps because of the universality in the narrative; every adult, at some point, went on some form of a coming of age journey. Or perhaps it’s because the kind of creative people writing scripts and making films are more in touch with their adolescent selves than policy makers. Regardless, we believe that films about the interaction between youth and their unrelated adult mentors have a lot to say about the work we do within our field- a field that is largely unrepresented in the media outside of these specific kinds of narratives.
There are positive, nuanced portrayals of our work in film, and there are straight up bad takes. However, even the bad takes represent and perpetuate common racist and classist discourses about working with young people from historically oppressed communities- discourses that even youth workers themselves sometimes accept. Two particularly egregious examples of this are Dangerous Minds and Freedom Writers, both white-savior narratives making heroes out of white women working in black schools. As youth work specialists, one of our core beliefs is that if we treat kids less like they’re trash, the world will become less trash. If as adults we become a soft space to land, eventually the world will get softer. For our inaugural podcast, we decided to focus on two very different portrayals of our work, however they both represent it in a positive, soft light.
Matilda is a movie that champions its title character. Her parents, played by oddball power couple Danny DeVito and Rhea Pearlman, don’t pay much attention to her, preferring to focus on her brother, who has a style very similar to the raptor boy from the paleontology dig scene in Jurassic Park. Her father is a grifter being investigated by the FBI for selling lemons made from stolen car parts for a living, while her mom is more focused on chatting on the phone and wearing seriously excellent outfits than paying attention to her uniquely intelligent, independent daughter who is starting to develop actual magical powers. Eventually Matilda is sent to school, Crencham Hall, run by the grotesque, abusive, power-hungry Miss Trunchbull, who overtly hates children, yet loves to terrorize them. Matilda’s teacher, Miss Honey, is the very opposite. She’s soft, quiet, and nice. Her classroom is a secret brightly-colored paradise within the grim, gray school. She and Matilda immediately form a bond. Matilda also connects with the rest of her class, especially a little girl named Lavender. After tea at Miss Honey’s house and a sneaky mission through Miss Trunchbull’s, it’s revealed that Miss Trunchbull is Miss Honey’s aunt, who likely killed her father to steal everything from Miss Honey. This injustice, her love for Miss Honey, the support of her classmates, and Matilda’s emerging magical powers are enough for Matilda to take on Miss Trunchbull. She triumphs, joined by her friends in the act of rebellion. At the end of the film, Matilda’s parents are fleeing from the FBI and let her be adopted by Miss Honey, who takes over as new principal for Crencham Hall.
The Angel’s Share is a very different film. It opens with Robbie- a young working class guy from Glasgow, on trial for assault. Despite his history in and out of the justice system, the judge takes into consideration the fact that his parents spent a lot of time in jail during his childhood, and that his first child is about to be born with his girlfriend Leonie and he’s sentenced to a community service program. While painting a community center as part of the program, one of the program’s staff, Harry, gets a call that Leonie is in labor, so against regulations he takes him to the hospital. There he is beaten up by Leonor’s uncles who threaten him and say he isn’t allowed to see Leonie or the baby Harry takes him back to his house and cleans them up, counsels him and they toast to the birth of Luke, Harry’s son with a special bottle of scotch whiskey. From there, the other kids in the service program form a little community, with Harry as their mentor. They go on a tour of a whiskey distillery and Robbie shows an innate understanding of whiskey tasting.Harry also takes them to a fancy whisky tasting in Edinburg. There they learn of an extremely rare whiskey being auctioned off in a few weeks- a single bottle of which is worth hundreds of thousands of pounds. Harry calls it “the holy grail.” While there Robbie impresses a whiskey dealer with his skills.
Meanwhile, Robbie is trying hard to get his life together for Leonie and Luke, but the world seems against him. He feels like he can’t escape working class identity and past mistakes, and it would be better for Leonie and Luke if he got out of their lives. Robbie and his friends hatch a plan. They dress in kilts and travel to the highlands to attend the whiskey auction, where they sneak into the distillery and siphon four bottles of the whiskey from the cask, then hightail it back to Glasgow. On the way home, cops harás them resulting in two bottles being broken Disheartened, the gang waits anxiously while Robbie negotiates with the dealer. He asks for cash, as well as a proper job in the whisky industry so he can live a stable life with Leonie and Luke. He gets $100,000 for the whiskey, $25k for a member of the gang. They can’t believe he got that much for two bottles. One bottle, he reveals. The film cuts to Harry, finding the second bottle in his kitchen table, with a note thanking him for giving him a chance.
Though these were wildly different films, both explore common themes that are reflective of the values of youth work.
The first common value was building youth power. In our own youth work practices, we feel strongly that if youth do not have power or feel empowered in a program or relationship, then it’s not actually doing anything of value. In Matilda, youth power manifested in the violent revolt against Miss Trunchbull. Matilda always held power for herself through the autonomy of neglect of by her parents, but at Crencham hall it became systemic. It was her experiences existing in the community for the first time that emboldened her to better harness her power for her community. While Matilda used literal magic power, Robbie took back cultural power. For the working class of Scotland, fine whisky and wool kilts are not accessible. As he connects with these ancient and powerful symbols of his Scottish identity, he reclaims the power of his birthright, transcending the conditions in contemporary Scotland which have oppressed him.
Robbie’s cultural transcendence is connected to the second common value we identified, which was about ending generational trauma through caring relationships with non-family adults. In both films, the youth protagonists were struggling not to inherit the toxic behaviors of their parents. Matilda wanted a life removed from the morally dubious and intellectually empty lifestyle of her mother and father. In Angel’s Share, Robbie felt both desperate and powerless to escape the criminal legacy of his father. Miss Honey and Harry’s gentleness, empathy and passion helped guide and inspire Matilda and Robbie respectively. Additionally, in both circumstances, while Miss Honey and Harry’s own backstories were present, humanizing their characters and honoring their lived experiences, they were not the hero protagonists of the film. Unlike the aforementioned white-savior trope, it is the youth who are the heros. The adults are supporting - not saving - them in their journeys to escape generational trauma.
Lastly, both films acknowledge that the process of building power and transcending trauma require risk taking. Miss Honey and Harry are both established as rule breakers/benders early in the film, however mild their subversion is. In the punitive worlds of the Crunchem Hall and working class Glasgow, Miss Honey and Harry acknowledge our youth-protagonist’s humanity by bending or breaking rules in order to offer meaningful, effective support. While neither adult compromised the safety of their youth, they did recognize that authentic security and self-actualization required actions that wouldn’t be sanctioned by the status quo. Because the work of liberation-centered youth development is about breaking down oppressive power structures, subversion of systems is an essential tennant.
In the end, we felt very proud of the podcast we created, and the fun but substantive conversation it generated. As youth workers, we are very underrepresented in the careers pantheon, despite the fact that the work we do is highly skilled, and the partnerships and communities we co-create with young people are building movements. We hope that in the future, this podcast will continue, and it will serve as a resource for practitioners of our work. We hope to tackle problems of practice, as well as to continue to discuss media, power and disrupting dominant discourses which strengthen systems of oppression we're fighting against.
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