Uplifting Voices against Violence

I am Felipe Castañeda, a Hispanic Language and Literature Ph.D. student at the University of Pittsburgh. Under the frame of the Humanities Engage Summer Immersive/Remote Program, I am currently working as a research assistant with RefocusED. This nonprofit organization engages in cutting-edge research relating to the development and redefinition of education practices, curriculum, and programs that foster and cultivate healthier and safer learning and teaching environments. This summer, the organization is providing research support for Voices Against Violence, the first and foremost anti-violence community-oriented organization in Pittsburgh. Voices Against Violence has launched pioneering programs that have focused on issues like street intervention, restorative justice, summer employment, and school-based workforce development.    

Because of my childhood observations of violence in Colombia, my home country, combined with new insights gained through my transcultural personal and academic journey in Korea as a Spanish teacher, I was moved by the work RefocusED and Voices against Violence have done to enhance the social, affective, and human conditions of young populations and adolescents who live and suffer from violence in their communities and family environments. In light of my background, I found this opportunity to volunteer as a research assistant to be particularly interesting. I firmly believe education is a pivotal element in overcoming any abuse of power and inequality because it provides people with the necessary tools to engage in an unbiased debate of ideas, where one can take a critical position regarding some particular issue while building a much fairer space for dialogue. I see education in general, and teaching literature, cinema, and critical theory, in particular, as a chance to help a new generation of thinkers and doers reconsider how we construct our societies and come up with innovative perspectives with which to rethink the world.

Responding to COVID-19 circumstances, RefocusED’s research team is working to understand both the psychological impact of quarantine on families and children and the kinds of attainable social activities that can be implemented to mitigate its negative effects. Mainly, we focus on the adverse impact of the new, sudden, and hitherto unstable online rearrangement of teaching and learning practices on youth education. Our goal is to leverage RefocusED’s partnership with the ongoing Voices Against Violence Summer Camp Program to disseminate well-informed didactic tools that can be useful in this pandemic context. By doing so, we will arrive at a deeper understanding of the emotional and affective issues children might be going through during this challenging time. Some questions that we think through in this project are: How do parents handle the information their children have about the epidemic? Do they act as proper mediators? Is there a filter between the media and the children (or not)? How does fear play a role in children’s education under COVID-19 circumstances and uncertain social environments? Who has access to leisure time at home? (This question is particularly important because social class and economic positioning have an impact on how children live these hardships with their families.) Also, how do we understand leisure time and free time in the COVID-19 context? How do children think about “free time” when all they have now seems to be free time? All of these questions help highlight that to quarantine, following the health policy encouragement to “STAY AT HOME,” is not as easy as the statement suggests. Under what conditions are our communities going through quarantine? And what does “stay at home” mean for our children in this social context? I am eager to share my recommendations around these questions for future program design, which will be based on literature reviews and the final research outcomes from my reading about children and youth education programming related to poverty, health, and academic achievements.  

Felipe Castañeda
Hispanic Language and Literature
July 28, 2020
 

For my reflections post-immersive, please see Understanding Curricula in a Time of Global Crisis.

Learn about all the Summer 2020 Immersive Fellows and their experiences with their host organizations.