User:Collaboration0826

My name is Jamie Willer and I am a Junior Sociology Major at Drake University. I am enrolled in Global Youth Studies course. One component of this course is to create or make edits to a Wikipedia page about a subject that surrounds global youth studies. Upon completing my undergraduate, I plan to pursue my M.S.W and work towards my goal of becoming a school social worker. I would like to use this course to strengthen my understanding of the concept of youth and the factors that affect an individual's experiences throughout this critical transitional period in order to better understand my students.

I am interested in researching the following topics for the Wikipedia component of this course:

• A country that has a significant disproportionality in the representation of a certain population in the Juvenile Justice System, I want to look at what the school disciplinary policies are and if there is a relationship between the two that has been presented in research done in that country, much like the school-to-prison and zero tolerance policy research done in the U.S. where there is a disproportionate amount of Black and Latino youth, males specifically, affected by the ZTPs and involved in the juvenile justice system. I want to see how other countries handle certain behaviors in schools and if certain populations are more greatly impacted by these policies. Are certain groups of youth hyper criminalized, specifically in the school setting?
• In other countries, do youth come into contact with law enforcement in the school setting, is there targeting, are students criminalized and targeted early on as youth in the school setting? At what age do students start coming into contact with law enforcement and through which methods, do they do this through the education system?

Project Proposal

My current plan of research will be adding a more globalized component to the School-to-Prison Pipeline page. It currently is need of an entire complete restructuring and is under a lot of critique for its controversial political discussion and lack of representative data, only discussing the United States. It is clear the first step in my research will be to see if this phenomena is existent in other country's educational systems and I will attempt to use a global discussion, comparing the U.S. Juvenile Justice System and its tight relationship with the education system to the systems in South Africa, who has similar incarceration rates. If this phenomena is existent, I will work to use less politically fueled, more representative language in order to shift the discussion away from U.S. politically fueled terminology to a more sociological conversation that is rooted in facts and theory.

In terms of what changes I will make to the article, I will work to determine a different article name, based on the terminology I see coming up in my research, that has the same essential meaning as the school-to-prison pipeline but is more evidence-based and direct, without leaving room for individuals to discount important research because of political views. By doing this, I hope to make the article more neutral, which was a huge issue discussed on the talk page. After conducting more research I will be able to determine if this phenomena is existent on a global level. If it is not, I will do my research on how the U.S. exclusionary disciplinary policies, which disproportionally affect black and Latino students, directly impact lives of immigrants and refugees, and in some cases result in deportation. Both research topics relate to the way a relationship between schools and juvenile justice systems affect the life outcomes of youth, specifically marginalized populations within society.

If I am able to use the school-to-prison article and add the global component through the case of South Africa, I will change the lead paragraph to discuss the concept of a relationship between schools and juvenile justice systems and how it directly impacts youth outcomes. I will break the page into U.S. zero tolerance policies and excessive policing (combining the information they use to describe the phenomena as a whole), and add a section about the Case Study of South Africa. I will compare the two studies and show how the relationship can have similar effects on students across multiple contexts to help strengthen the evidence behind the concept itself. I will try to provide more research and remove the comments made on the page that may point towards a specific political opinion, to remove biases that are currently present in most parts of the article. By adding in less politically affiliated sources, with sources coming from a more representative community, I hope to improve the current perception of the article.

I also hope to point out different views on the theory and include the various viewpoints on how prevalent the policy is and how strong the effects are on student's success. There are multiple views on whether certain school disciplinary policies target black and Latino students in the United States or if the disparities are actually reflective of the misbehaviors of the populations. It must be recognized that the topic is indeed controversial, but it is important to effectively include and discuss both viewpoints and use statistics and other case studies outside the U.S, to define the school-juvenile justice system relationship itself and its implications for certain student populations.

Training for Students complete!