My reading group’s name was “Youth Voices In Modern Society”. The reading group was hosted by Oscar and me, and was held for one week over Zoom. We discussed topics such as police reform, immigration, education reform, and civil rights. With each topic we had specific texts to foster conversations with: Paulo Freire’s “Pedagogy of the Oppressed”, the U.S. Constitution Preamble and Bill of Rights, “Readings in criminology and Penology” by David Drossler, “And This Happened in Los Angeles: Malcolm X Describes Police Brutality”, and “Waking up from the American Dream” by Karla Villacencio.

Going into the reading group, I wasn’t sure what to expect in terms of how our conversations were going to go. But, I was delighted by the openness that people had in our group and by the intimacy of the experiences they shared. A moment that I remember was in our last meeting,  when we met in person and discussed immigration. We prepared for the conversation with the text “Waking up from the American Dream” by Karla Villacencio, which discusses the façade of the “American Dream”. This led us to talk about our backgrounds and a lot about our families and their journeys. We were a diverse bunch, and it was fascinating to hear everyone’s different experiences from their journey. For instance, one of our members was born in the U.S. and moved to Bangladesh for ten years until coming back to the U.S. Another member grew up in Argentina and moved to the U.S. in middle school.

Our biggest challenge came from being remote and meeting through Zoom. At times members wouldn’t speak up. To counteract this we would pose questions and call upon members. This would lead to members adding on and continuing with the conversation. In our first meeting, we prepared by reading Freire and talked about education reform. In this conversation, everyone shared their different experiences with the education system. Coming from different backgrounds everyone brought a different perspective to the conversation. We all had our grievances about the things we experience in this system, particularly the lack of a voice we had. We felt the schooling system did not teach us to learn but instead taught us how to take orders in order to prepare us for a low-skill job. Through this conversation, we imagined how we might recreate the education system as proposed by Freire. The group agreed that as an individual it is very hard to make a change without becoming the teacher Freire describes. Everyone shared a fear of continuing this cycle. 

When Oscar and I were first creating the reading group, the most important thing for me was to have introspective conversations. With the topics we chose, it could have been easy for conversations to get lost in the passion that comes with such discussion. It was important for me to have the group take the content for what it was and talk about their experiences, what they felt could change, and brainstorm how to implement change. On this front, the reading club “Youth Voices In Modern Society” was a renowned success.