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There's nothing like a newsroom to make the world feel big and small at the same time. Put young people in charge, and the effect can be even more extreme. At Youth Radio, a Peabody Award-winning, youth-driven production company headquartered in Oakland, California, young people produce stories distributed through global broadcast and digital outlets including National Public Radio, The Huffington Post, iTunes, and YouTube. At a single editorial meeting at Youth Radio, young people and their adult producers might pitch stories on the effects of budget cuts inside local Oakland schools, young soldiers returning from the Iraq war, healthcare reform in a rural Kentucky town, and the transnational Korean musical genre known as K-POP. Inside these freewheeling discussions are recurring teachable moments through which young people can use media to learn about places close to home and far away. The connections they form seem to shrink the physical distance that separates citizens around the world, even as they can reveal disparate experiences and inequalities that young reporters examine through their media stories.
In my new book, Drop That Knowledge: Youth Radio Stories, Vivian Chávez and I take readers behind the scenes at Youth Radio, inside meetings and stories like the ones I've just described. In each chapter, we present a series of Youth Radio media features, detail the negotiations and inquiries that supported their production, and then highlight implications for learning, teaching, journalism, and media justice efforts.
Hearing Home: Viry and Elena's story is an exploration of home. The reporters consider what it means to have access to one place, the United States, but feel as if they are really from another place, Mexico. They also convey an image of what each of their homes is like within Mexico, with Elena's scene of her mother preparing tacos as an example of a moment that is composed partially through the sound of fish immersed in bubbling oil. Home is never a simple idea, perhaps especially for those who have multiple homes, or who live away or apart from the place they consider home, or who have been denied a sense of home, or whose home is a space of struggle. Here are some questions for your students to ponder: What does your home sound like? Create a sound portrait of your home. What voices do you hear? What noises? Is it loud or quiet or silent? How does it sound different, depending on the moment? If you had to pick a musical soundtrack to accompany your sense of home, what would it be and why?To go one step further, students can use some of the same techniques Elena and Viry deployed to create their own Border Stories (also check out Youth Radio's Production Tips).
If You Had the Microphone: As we have seen, a border isn't necessarily a concrete wall. It can be a metaphor, a line that demarcates separation, and also the possibility of crossing. In this sense, a border story could as easily be set in a tiny rural town, a space of suburban sprawl, an inner-city neighborhood, or even a bedroom, apartment building, or playground. For students: What questions would you want to raise in your border story? Who would you interview? What sounds would you gather? How would you put the story together? Describe the most important audience for your story. What would you want your listeners to learn?Drop That Knowledge highlights a range of stories like this one. Our hope is to use these stories, and the production processes behind them, to provoke new thinking and action among those working on the front lines of education and journalism, at a time when both are fighting for their futures.
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The virtues enshrined in the Boy Scout Law--trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean, reverent--date back more than a century to founder Lord Robert Baden-Powell's original manual, Scouting for Boys.
Well, some of what we eat does, but most of us rarely see our food get grown or raised. Often, we don't even know where it comes from. We gave scouts photos of familiar fruits, veggies, nuts, and meats and asked them to find the countries that export them most on a giant map of the world.
The abundance of resources and comparative wealth in much of the U.S.
can make it difficult to relate to the plights of impoverished people
elsewhere, or to understand the value of something many of us take for
granted: Water. We stacked buckets enough to hold the hundred gallons
consumed by the average American each day (according to U.S. EPA
estimates) next to a single five-gallon bucket, enough to hold the
daily water consumed by many entire African families. 
Once upon a time, cartographers made maps and the rest of us viewed
them. Now with Geographic Information Systems and digital cartography,
all of us can customize the maps we use. We asked scouts to draw their
home states from memory, then to find them online in a digital atlas
and customize them with the landmarks that matter most to them.
It's never been easier to document and share stories about the places
we travel with photos. And it's possible for nearly any scout to take
great photos with the tools at hand, from inexpensive point-and-shoots
to cell phones. We led a crash course in taking better photos with
no-frills cameras. 
... or just to crash in the shade for a few minutes out of the 100-plus
degree heat. (Shhhh, don't wake him! The rest of the troop's back at
camp short-sheeting his cot.)]]>
Plus: more newsletter highlights on the next page!
The ancient Egyptians and Greeks used the term to refer to the time of
year when Sirius, the "Dog Star," rose at the same time as the Sun,
typically during the hottest part of the summer. Because Sirius was the
brightest star in the sky, its presence was believed to contribute to
warmer summer temperatures (as in from additional radiation reaching the Earth). 
2010 Fine Art is an international exhibition and sale of original artwork, specially commissioned for the World Cup. Check out the work of artists around the world, including the World Cup's host country, South Africa. 
ABOUT THE SURVEY:
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MACY'S 4th OF JULY
Parents: Talk with your kids about how the size of the spill compares to geographic areas they might be familiar with (e.g. your county, the size of the national park you visited on vacation last year, etc.)