UO Book Club fall term

We are now halfway through the fall term Inside-Out Alumni Book Club with the youth at Serbu.  This time around we have twelve youth and eight Inside-Out Alumni!  We are reading Calvin and Hobbes, and the term is going amazingly well.  Melissa Crabbe held a second Inside-Out facilitator training for the alumni who are participating, and this was a fabulous opportunity to work through best practices and trouble shooting, in addition to gaining the skills Melissa was teaching.  We are becoming quite the team of alumni together.

Only two I/O alumni were able to participate who had been involved over the summer.  Ted and myself are therefore leading the group, with the new participants as extremely active members of the group.  Five of the youth are participating again from the summer, and only one summer participant chose not to rejoin the group (the others were released).  The more balanced numbers are great: we have done wagon wheels, held small group discussions, and overall had a much more involved and integrated feeling in the room with the balance of youth and I/O Alumni. 

Two weeks ago, we had a half-hour discussion of the ideas of "fate" and "destiny," inspired (of course) by Calvin and Hobbes.  We talked about free will, and about the possibly contradictory idea that everything happens for a reason.  The youth were eloquent on both counts, reflecting both a desire to feel control over their actions and a need for the security of a guiding plan to life.  The level of dialogue, consistent with our own Inside-Out experiences, was much higher than what is often achieved in a college classroom.  On Friday, we discussed war and peace, our tendency to turn violence into entertainment, and the damage this has on individual lives.  People were so willing to be vulnerable, and to ask questions (the comic dealt with Mutually Assured Destruction and the Cold War, which the youth knew nothing about).

We'll see what comes up in the comics next.  I'm hoping to have a conversation about bullying sometime in the next couple of weeks.  I'm also hoping develop a final project, hopefully to include some comic strip writing and drawing of our own. 

If anyone has suggestions for material, projects, or activities, I would love to hear them.  In the meantime, expect more updates soon!

Katie D, University of Oregon

Developing Inside-Out Alumni Guidelines

Hey everyone! There is a developing group of Inside-Out Alumni, working together to put together protocol and guidelines for alumni groups. So far, the leadership is coming from the Inside-Out Center at Temple University in Philadelphia, and at the other strong alumni site in Oregon. We are working together to create not only the guidelines for new groups, but also ideas for how to best support our alumni and to encourage future work on Inside-Out related projects and reflecting those values.

If you have suggestions for us, or want to be involved, please write to us! We can't wait for a time when there are dozens of authors on this blog, and hundreds of voices across the country contributing project ideas and program support.

If you're like me, you know that what you learned in Inside-Out has changed you in a fundamental way. You also probably know that you have learned things that have the potential to change the world. Now the point is to find a way to do that together.

Please send your feedback and suggestions, keep checking this blog, and help get this off the ground!

Write us at nationalinsideoutalumni@gmail.com and encourage your local professors to get involved with the Alumni subcommittee.