Miriam: Tell me a bit about the students that Word works with. Tell me about the populations of James Lyng and the people who have signed up for the workshops in the past. You can use examples like case studies if you want, you don’t have to in general describe them.

Neil:

Right. Well the two neighborhoods that we’ve worked with are Little Burgundy and St. Henry. Statistically, they are low income neighborhoods, which translates to them being predominantly black demographics – not just black but other minorities, I guess that’s the proper word to say it. When you see our class, you can see that diversity. We had Latino, this girl from Sri Lanka, we had a couple white kids, and Maya, I think she had some Cambodian in her.

Anyway, it’s diverse. Like I said before, the beauty of hip-hop is that it’s a youth movement so it’s not specific to any one race of ethnicity, it’s multi-ethnic. The kids that we deal with are from a diverse background. At the same time --

Miriam: Are they having trouble in school? Do they come specifically?

Neil:

No. I guess a lot of them who are there are attracted to the program. Maybe they’re not having trouble with school, or they’re not having trouble with their classes – they’re still good students; they still do the work and put into school what they think they should to get the most out of it – but I think a lot of them, and I’m saying this from experience in talking with them, feel like disconnected. They feel like they’re this one student in this big school and no-one wants to put in the time to listen to them, or to get to know them.

When we’re talking about on the administration level, amongst their peers or whatever, that it is what it is. That’s what school is for, is for these kids to socialize with each other. It’s also there to educate, and they feel like they aren’t challenged by the education system. They don’t feel like there’s enough one-on-one student-teacher interaction. They don’t feel like the activities or the curriculum that they are learning under is necessarily relevant to them. These are things that they feel frustrated with. It doesn’t make them want to come to school when their teacher is always looking at their watch, and they hastily go through activities, and tell people to stay in their seats and not talk. There’s just a lot of ‘no, no, no’, and they hear a lot of that.

I think a lot of them, when they come to our program, because we create that safe environment for their after school, it makes a lot of sense that they come and they want to unload all this stuff. In our program, when they come to sharing with us their perspective, they think about what they go through at school, and that contributes to what they take away from the program, what they put in their rhymes, how they think about the issues that they talk about, things like that.

Miriam: Do you think it’s better that it’s an after school program? That it’s not part of their daily curriculum?

Neil:

I think so. The one thing that is difficult with after school is attendance. We were talking about earlier, a lot of the time, the attendance is low because they are in high school – they have girlfriends, they have boyfriends, they have things to do; they’re too cool for school. It’s difficult being that it is an after school program for them to come, but when they do come, I feel like they take so much more out of it – they’re there on their own terms and on their own time. It just feels different – I imagine it would feel different.

I was in after-school programs when I was a kid. They were mostly athletic types, but even then I would always go and feel like it was a retreat for me. It feels different when it’s during actual school hours, because there’s more pressure involved. There’s more expectation there. It’s more like, “Okay, I’m getting graded for this”, or, “I have this class coming up next”. I don’t know, I just feel like after school, it’s like, “Hey, after this I’m going home, and having dinner, and this is good times; good vibes now”, you know?