{"id":500,"date":"2026-03-02T20:04:35","date_gmt":"2026-03-02T20:04:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/emplace.siue.edu\/stl\/?p=500"},"modified":"2026-03-19T16:16:08","modified_gmt":"2026-03-19T16:16:08","slug":"codes-2022-alton-digital-stories","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/emplace.siue.edu\/stl\/codes-2022-alton-digital-stories\/","title":{"rendered":"CODES 2022: Alton Digital Stories"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Faculty Mentor<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Jessica DeSpain<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Community Partners<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

YWCA of Southwestern Illinois, Alton Middle School, SIUE Center for Crime Science and Violence Prevention<\/p>\n\n\n\n

CODE Scholars<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Madison Delgado, Arianna Grimes, Spencer Steele, Mary Underwood, and Stephen Watkins<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In spring 2024, I was the privileged professor who taught the implementation semester for CODE Scholars Madison Delgado, Arianna Grimes, Spencer Steele, Mary Underwood, and Stephen Watkins. The team was among the first cohort of CODE Scholars, and they had been through three faculty mentors prior to me beginning work with them. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The group began their work with the YWCA of Southwestern Illinois with their community contact Dorothy Hummel. During their first semesters in the program, they learned about the YWCA’s priorities to address racism, support girls, and advance economic mobility. The scholars also learned from Dorothy that the YWCA was partnering with Dr. Anne Scheer from the Southern Illinois University School of Medicine to collect data on youth development and violence prevention in the city with the goal of developing a plan for the future. Dr. Scheer also worked with Trudell Jones, a trusted member of the African American community in Alton, to help collect authentic narratives of young people’s experiences.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When we began our work, Alton\u2019s rates of violent crime were 44% higher than the national average. CODE Scholars learned about the criminology of place, which proves that violence is disproportionately concentrated in high-poverty areas, often in neighborhoods or even specific sets of streets experiencing the systemic racism and classism of community disinvestment. Rather than focusing on policing, research shows pinpointing specific community investment interventions can address high rates of violence, which in turn counteract a variety of negative social and economic impacts. The Scholars developed a problem statement<\/a> that helped them define what made the circumstances in Alton unique. Madison Delgado, who majors in criminal justice with plans to work as an investigator was particularly invested in ethically examining data about Alton using FBI crime reporting statistics.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Building on the data previously collected, partnering with Dr. Scheer and with funding from SIUE’s Center for Crime Science and Violence Prevention, we decided to launch a digital storytelling program at Alton Middle School. CODE Scholars interviewed four teachers at Alton Middle School who were interested in helping us to launch an afterschool program, and they chose Amanda Beiser, who had deep connections with students in her role as a special education teacher, and her commitment to supporting individual students impressed the team. Trudell Jones was working at the middle school at that time, and he helped us recruit eleven students for the program. The CODE Scholars put together recruitment materials and developed the permission and consent documents required by the school and our program.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One of our biggest hurdles was achieving approval from SIUE’s institutional review board to assess the program. Mary Underwood developed surveys to understand how the participants formed bonds as a result of our activities and what they might do to improve the program for future students. We offered afterschool meals from Heaterz Chicken, a local favorite in Alton, and we worked alongside the review board to make sure we were making ethical decisions for collecting data from minors without undue coercion while still incentivizing their participation. As we waited, Arriana Grimes developed a weekly plan of activities, Stephen Watkins wrote tutorials for the students about how to actually make their digital stories, and Madison Delgado developed a slideshow to help organize our weekly sessions. By the middle of the semester, our plans for the program and its assessment were approved.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For the second half of the semester, we visited Alton for eight afternoons in a row. We worked to establish a rapport with students, balance our time between fun and serious activities, and help students learn about how to tell a good story using digital tools. CODE Scholars realized quickly that they’d perhaps made assumptions about what middle school students would enjoy that weren’t quite on point. They also learned that classroom management in an afterschool setting can be a challenge and that it can be a real struggle to get students, especially male middle school students, to open up about their lives without having the appropriate time and atmosphere to build trust.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At first the team wanted to hang back and didn’t want to take on leadership roles, but each week we met to discuss our progress and recalibrate our plans based on the previous weeks successes and missteps, and I watched Stephen develop a meaningful bond with the students, Arriana come into her own as a teacher who can lead a room, and Spencer and Madison learn to simultaneously collaborate and manage a project with ease. Despite the little time we had, the students were able to develop detailed stories that were finely tuned through Stephen’s help. Though they often didn’t talk about violence, they did reflect on what it was like to be a kid, why they loved basketball, and how much they loved their family. The students’ stories were shared at an exhibit of youth art at the Jacobi Arts Center later that spring. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Here are several of the products CODE Scholars developed as a result of their work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Madison Delgado and Spencer Steele, Alton Crime Map<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/a><\/figure>
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Arriana Grimes, Finding Your Place<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/a><\/figure>
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Mary Underwood, Successful Afterschool Programs<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n

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Stevo Watkins, Building Youth Confidence<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Faculty Mentor Jessica DeSpain Community Partners YWCA of Southwestern Illinois, Alton Middle School, SIUE Center for Crime Science and Violence Prevention CODE Scholars Madison Delgado, Arianna Grimes, Spencer Steele, Mary Underwood, and Stephen Watkins In spring 2024, I was the privileged professor who taught the implementation semester for CODE Scholars Madison Delgado, Arianna Grimes, Spencer […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":505,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-500","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-features"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/emplace.siue.edu\/stl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/500","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/emplace.siue.edu\/stl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/emplace.siue.edu\/stl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/emplace.siue.edu\/stl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/emplace.siue.edu\/stl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=500"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/emplace.siue.edu\/stl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/500\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":580,"href":"https:\/\/emplace.siue.edu\/stl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/500\/revisions\/580"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/emplace.siue.edu\/stl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/505"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/emplace.siue.edu\/stl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=500"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/emplace.siue.edu\/stl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=500"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/emplace.siue.edu\/stl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=500"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}