So we know everyone's favorite lecture read in dialogues is describing the cycle of socialization and liberation. So Bobby Haro who's a noted sociologist has come up with this construct to help explain oppressive socialization. How does that occur through the life cycle? Then also the possibility for a cycle of liberation. So as a tool that we use with the young people, how do you go about trying to describe that for a teenage population? I think for us it was really important having the visual of the cycle as a cycle of socialization with us. We had gone through the steps, but to really cement it for them we gave each group the option of choosing their own social identity and allowed them to work in small groups where they were then thinking about how does this cycle show up in the lives of certain identities? For us it was really particular that we focused on school cause these are high school students who are still in high school and how can we understand high school as a part of a social institution that does socialize these students. So a lot of our conversations were grounded in experiences at school and how that affects how they show up and how they understand their own identities and their own positions. For me working with youth and as well as my co-facilitator it was easiest to break down and there's an easy way to talk about and discuss the cycle of socialization, but it was most useful for us to do it in pictures. So we asked the students to come up with ideas or pictures of what they thought each kind of step looks like or maybe do some keyword just to jot down. So I think having them draw it out, point some arrows really let it click in their head that this is the sequence of things and this is how it happens. Great and you mentioned a timeline activity which basically asked him to think back to their earliest memory of being part of their in this case racial identity group. So it graph that out in a chronological sense and they map that to the cycle of socialization. Knowing that most of our high school students are at that second lens of the cycle of oppressive socialization where like you said there's institutions school, the church, synagogue, mosque, the sports teams, the co-curricular organizations, and programs that they are part of. All of these things as reinforcing these messages that they've been told about themselves and about other people, what do you see is the power in the cycle of socialization at that age?. I think something we had also had to understand for the group was seeing their family as an institution. For them it was difficult because as children who are still living in the household with their parents, who were leaving our dialogues to go back home there was a lot of tension between what they were learning in this space and taking that back home with them and having to realize that they can see their parents now is socializing forces in their life and at times there were disagreements, right. So it was difficult getting them there because there's so much trust and love that you have for your family that they are guiding you in the right direction. You also have to understand that your parents and your family is also a part of larger society where there also socialized by different institutions. To think in particular ways that can be oppressive or harmful. So for them it was really important that we talked about all of us as a part of this larger cycle of socialization and reminding them that they're are bad cause I think they kept falling into the binary of you're good or you're bad. So because their parents had certain ideas that they were socialized into believing that might have been harmful. Specifically for the woman in the group the young girls they were talking about how they were raised differently than their brothers and than their other siblings and how that felt so unfair, but they wanted to trust and love their parents that they were doing the right thing even though they were losing opportunities or that they were not being able to lead the lives they had wanted to live. They had to then engage in dialogue with their own family to help them see their own experiences and how there are unjust ways of parenting in instilling family values that was happening. So it was a lot going on for them to have to reconcile with the fact that their parents are teaching them oppression and the household, but also realizing that they can still love their parents and still see the good in them regardless of that, but still to continue to hold them accountable and to want them to change. Wow, I really hope that they not only felt empowered, but felt like they had the tools and the skills, the dialogue skills be able to do that. Yeah. I think for me when it came to cycles socialization something that the participants realize or that they are realizing while doing this activity was how young they were when they first started becoming aware of their identities and how exactly they had been oppressed because of their identities. As young as five years old or kindergarten preschool, so again playing into how much school plays a role and to the young lives and I think my particular group spent a lot of time focusing on the order. So we were children and we experience this now we are young people in this and it got to the point that they saw it l like, "Oh wow, we're in the institutional part of the cycle of socialization from here we can go to A's we can create change or we can continue this cycle." That was a really powerful dialogue for my students just if we don't go against or provide a counter narrative for what's been going on both in our family and outside of our families then we're just going to end up repeating the same cycle. So that for my students. From participants was just something that was mind-blowing cause they saw that they were in a place to go to [inaudible] Essentially. Yeah to go off of that, it was also really important as the facilitator to then draw attention to the fact that they were breaking the cycle of socialization and the dialogue. As young people they are taught that they are to be taught, to be educated. Not that they were sources of education too that they were able to teach other people, and so getting them to a space to realize, hey, you as a young person can teach us something, and we can learn from you, and listen to you. That's right. Right. We are doing that in this dialogue, we are breaking the cycle of socialization moving into liberation, this is happening here, and it really motivated them, and empower them to keep going into see themselves as people who are already enacting in some change in this space and then outside spaces too. So let's explore that some more. So at the core of that cycle of socialization where there's the fear, and the ignorance, and risk in all these negative emotions, dialogues become this space where we can mute some of that. Some of that core of the cycle of oppressive socialization, and guess what? They're adolescent which is synonymous with rebellion. So they're at a point where they're willing to be rebellious in entrance to a new cycle around liberation. With that guidance where you all are saying in dialogue is where you're starting to interrupt the cycle of socialization for yourself but also with others, what did you do? How did you promote that sort of exiting? As Camilla said, you're not reinforcing but you're exiting the cycle of socialization and entering the cycle of liberation. What did you all actively do as facilitators? I think the way Shama mentioned, it was crucial to me to show them that participating in SYD, they were doing exactly what they had started to want to do. I think the activity was also place really well. So the activity was placed in the beginning of the summer. So they still had time to finish through dialogues, they still had time to create their own project, to go on the retreat. So I think just starting them off with the cycle of socialization, and then there's a way to exit it, and then here it is, you're in the exit to the cycle of socialization, what are you going to do? What do you want to do? Yeah. I think a part of that was also emphasizing on doing community building activities too. Because to enact change it is very isolating and difficult to do that on your own, very draining. That it's important to have the community, to have a support system, and support is really one of the core of the cycle of liberation. So it was important that our dialog participants got to build experiences with each others and memory's doing activities that are more fun and not just in the dialogue space. So with that we had taken them out to play basketball with each other, and then we had taken them out to go to the arcade and play games. With that they were already like interacting with each other and building that relationship, building that trust which then makes it easier to create a space where they could all hear each other, and listen to each other, and build off of each other's ideas when they were building and creating their community projects. Fantastic. Just thinking about the cycle of liberation for a moment, how it moves like you say from the individual to the collective. Right. What would make a teenager want to do that? I mean there's all the social anxiety they have about just being liked and fitting in, and now they're being asked to work across differences, sometimes very unfamiliar difference with other people. What could you all do in your roles to move them from this beginning phase of greater awareness about their own cycle of socialization to now the cycle of liberation where I'm being told I have to move from individual liberation to working collectively? How did you promote that? Yeah. I think we had the brave space poem in some of these dialogues, and with that it really helped to remind our participants to do this work, you need to be brave, you need to be willing to make mistakes and acknowledge them, that it's all part of this larger process. So it was really important that we had to do those fun activities to build trust, to build relationships so that people are willing to be more vulnerable with each other, to be more open about what they don't know, about their confusion, their own insecurities, their own experiences. So with that it created a space where people were actually sharing their own knowledge as an experiences with each other and understanding that my identity doesn't look the same way as your identity, and how it's important that we all understand the history and knowledge is of different experiences, so that when we are working collectively, we not reproducing those harms and inequities in the same space as we do liberation work. Yeah. I think the youth were much more willing to challenge themselves because they're constantly being challenged in society. Yeah and I think that a large part of them realizing that they wanted to do, are realizing that they wanted to continue with change in making change, is that they had people from the community. I think being in those cohorts being with people that was from their city, some from their school, just surrounding themselves with people who were learning the same things that they were in, just all inspiring each other, it's like yeah, let's go create a community project. I think that was really crucial to them all wanting to do that. I can definitely see how the outcome would have been different if you would have taken for my example my group, one [inaudible] , next person from Flint, three from Detroit, and then five from Ypsilanti, it would have been a different outcome than them all being from South West Detroit, them all being close to each other near to each other and able to more reasonably make change. I think just in the two cycles, you almost get a synopsis of the whole program. It's wide that some of these dialogue program is a social justice education program. Because diversity education in multicultural education would be, let's just study these differences and the similarities. Wherein the some of the youth dialogue program there's an expectation for liberation, and working together for common dignity, common humanity, and for liberty. In liberation of oppressed people. Co-resistance. Co-resistance. Not co-existence. Before co-existence.