Journey to Appreciation

Scholar Euna Carpenter, Human Development ‘23, facilitating the PRYDE Youth Investigators Program at 4-H Career Explorations during summer 2022.

I joined the PRYDE community as a bright eyed, eager sophomore back in 2020. During my first semester as a PRYDE scholar and junior year fall, the two cohorts were combined during our seminar course. It was a fantastic way to start my time as a scholar; I got double the new faces (a delight since the COVID-19 pandemic shutdown many new interactions), double the insights, and a solid dose of pre-existing knowledge and comradery. The previous cohort introduced us to something they had been working on: Youth Investigators. At first, the concept felt foreign – a program which utilized a story-like book and activities to teach social science skills to adolescents. As a human development major and current research assistant in social science projects, Youth Investigators should have felt magical. After all, it was the needed counterpart to all the petri-dish propaganda and exploding volcano experiment ads. Youth Investigators was foundational in increasing youth understanding around social science. And yet, I didn’t click with it at first.

During this first semester as a PRYDE scholar, we split into small groups, sharpened our facilitation skills, then delivered one module in Youth Investigators with 4-H youth who volunteered to participate in the pilot. I became expert in Module 3: The Sleepover Dilemma, which featured activities about qualitative data collection and analysis. With this more intimate knowledge and understanding of Module 3, I came to wholly appreciate it. I mean, obviously, every young person should understand the basics about how to create good interview questions, how to lead a successful, unbiased interview, and how to find themes in the response data. These tools, I began to notice, were everyday tools. They popped up in my own social interactions – having good conversation using good interview etiquette, finding common themes in what my friend’s favorite activities were – and slowly, I was humbled by the applicability of social science skills to everyday life. I noticed my appreciation for Youth Investigators was growing during practice facilitation sessions and within conversations with fellow scholars about their evolving relationship with the curriculum.

Through my next semester as a PRYDE scholar, my cohort worked on expanding and refining Youth Investigators as a complete program by creating our own measures to evaluate it. My cohort met with experts in program creation and evaluation, brainstormed ideas around the core purpose and key takeaways from the program, and worked together to imagine various versions of Youth Investigators. We created an evaluation proposal which outlined pre- and post- surveys for the participants of Youth Investigators to complete. These measures would help us (and future practitioners) assess the program and determine if it was actually teaching the research skills it was intended to. During this semester, I began to wonder about all of the work that happened behind the summer programs I participated in as a youth. The thoughtfulness, effort, and intention that created the art programs, science camps, and even sports camps I participated in during afterschool programs and summer breaks. I began to appreciate the intricacies around effective programming development for youth, another aspect I completely overlooked before.

This summer, I worked with an amazing team of people to lead Youth Investigators during 4-H’s Career Explorations event. Thirteen high school students from all over New York state joined us for three days to engage with Youth Investigators and learn more about social science research. I was impressed by the youth’s excitement about the program and genuine receptiveness to the knowledge we were sharing with them. They wanted to learn more, share their ideas, and collaborate together; they were curious and excited to work through the activities. I was proud to share Youth Investigators with them, and as the program came to an end, proud and trusting in them to share their excitement about social science with their communities. I was humbled to experience the impact Youth Investigators could make on its participants. After Career Ex was over, we combed through the evaluation surveys and transcripts from the focus groups to see what youth had to say about our program. The participants had comments both about what they liked and didn’t like, but to me, this showed just how deeply they engaged with the program. They were able to tell us exactly what they thought could be done better and what they thought shouldn’t change at all. For example, one positive feedback we received from youth was that they appreciated facilitators who enhanced their learning by bringing in additional knowledge about what ethical considerations researchers ponder when designing experiments. Detailed feedback like this one helped us to know what aspects of the program to refine for the next round of implementation.

Through my journey of understanding, practicing, leading, and evaluating Youth Investigators, my appreciation for this program, and any other youth programs based on experiential learning, grew exponentially. The intentionality surrounding all of the steps which created our successful program inspires me to bring the same type of intentionality to other aspects of my academic and personal life; I am grateful for what I have learned through my experience with Youth Investigators and am excited about its future.