Hello, my name is Timothy Kipruto, and this past week I have had the opportunity to meet up and get acquainted with the youth, who are majority in middle school. Over the summer, I will be working together with the CCE Erie County in the 4-H Youth CAN team to develop community projects that seek to address racism, as well as take them through leadership and career development that will hopefully set them up on a journey to be positive change makers in their communities.
My first encounter with the youth was intriguing. We had driven down to one of their schools where the 4-H club is active and they were preparing to make a presentation about mental health and disparities brought about by the social stereotypes based on one’s social identity like race and gender. They were presenting this to to their peers in eighth grade bravely and had worked on it for a few months during the school year and this was a culmination of their work. It was encouraging to see young minds wanting to engage in such topics in their formative years, a testament to the exposure and insight they had especially considering that the project was entirely their idea.
A concept that I came to interact with from this play that captured my attention was social learning. In this context, it was the idea that the stereotypes that people of particular social identities seemed to fit into (and I speak in generality) are behaviours that are learned from others around them by observation and what they consume through listening and watching the media, be it social or entertainment (i.e., movies, music). Also, for those individuals that may have consciously or unconsciously internalized and therefore served to perpetuate these stereotypes, this can also be a result of social learning. Whether or not this is the case, i choose to look at it from a lens of hope. Hope in the sense that, for both parties, especially those with these internalized stereotypes, they were not born with them, and therefore, they can unlearn the negative aspects of social learning and learn better ways or relearn others by having a paradigm shift. I say negative aspects as I believe there are positive social values that we pick up from social learning and those should be encouraged certainly.
I speak of all of this to lead into the fact that, working with young minds, we have the unique opportunity to have a positive influence and impact in their ways of thinking about social justice and well as other societal issues that they are bound to encounter as they grow up and hopefully, shape the next generation to be better than the last. The endeavour of these 7th and 8th graders in speaking out on mental health through the eyes of varying social identity groups, and in relation to our work in addressing racism, is a step in that direction and I’m looking forward to working with them this summer.