In Education there is always a plan and outcome goal for every lesson. The Youth Voices Project begins with this framework, but it is meant to adapt and change. With each project, we work with students from different areas of the city with different backgrounds. We work in different facilities with varying resources. Education Notes helps to mediate between plan and reality by looking at the weekly workshops from the educator's perspective, and how the process of developing the project relates to larger social and educational issues.

Meet the Youth Voices Student Producers from LA Leadership Academy through their "Meet Me" PowerPoint presentations that they created. It's a straightforward but powerful process where the students represent who they are through found or personal images. It's a great way for students to present themselves and their interests, learn their strengths and weaknesses as media producers, and get a glimpse of the technological tools they'll be using throughout the Departures project. A major part of this production involves students using visuals to tell the story of their relationship to their neighborhood, so what better way to begin than with an exploration of the self? So, come and meet our LA River student producers!

In the process of discovering their neighborhoods, students are asked to draw a map of the places that are meaningful to them. This subjective experience results in a personal map that reflects students' experience and memory of their communities. These maps are not supposed to be geographically accurate, but more represent the students' mental landscape of where they live.

The Student Producers from LA River Youth Voices consists of 20 high school students from Los Angeles Leadership Academy. Students first explore their own neighborhoods and generate various media assets to help tell the story of where they live in relation to who they are. We call it the My Neighborhood & Me Project. Then students work in groups to and help research and produce the LA River Departures Project, building on their acquired multimedia production skills from the first project.