The Crossover Episode

Content

In television, the crossover episode brings two audiences into one. In shows like "Abbott Elementary" and "It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia" or “Rugrats” and the “The Wild Thornberys,” characters from separate worlds come together in unexpected ways, often toward a common goal. In a mutual mentor meeting, Sadiyah Malcolm-Wallace and Bridgette Davis, two SBS faculty members, realized they taught their quite-related courses at the same time, in the same building, on the same days. Jokingly, they asked: “What if we did a joint event with our classes? Like a crossover episode?”

Malcolm-Wallace and Davis are both junior faculty whose research centers young people. Malcolm-Wallace is a youth worker and sociologist, and Davis, a social worker and policy scholar. Their recent joint venture, Youth Programs, Policy, and Praxis: ‘Crossover Episode,’ was a collaboratively designed event merging two distinct courses for a single shared learning experience. Malcolm-Wallace’s course, Sociology of Childhood, examines how childhoods are socially constructed across race, class, gender, and geography. Davis’ course, Policy in an Age of Precarity, explores how public policy shapes the life trajectories of young adults navigating instability in education, housing, and labor. The faculty and their respective courses are housed in different disciplines, but in essence, they both look at deeply interconnected questions about young people’s lives. The collaboration grew out of a mutual mentoring grant and shared research backgrounds in youth work. While crossover is a well-established concept in youth media studies, its application as a pedagogical tool for the college classroom offers fresh perspectives in higher education.

Youth-serving organizations from the Pioneer Valley joined both classes for the event. But students didn’t just show up — they were instrumental in its organization. Students from both classes identified local youth-serving organizations and practiced professional outreach and communication as they reached out to the organizations to invite them to campus. On the day of the event, students came prepared to engage with practitioners as emerging scholars, bridging their semester-long learning experiences into a coherent analysis of how youth workers engage the young people they serve. 

One said: “This area is new to me and often feels extremely daunting, but it confirmed for me that work in policy doesn't need to always be a large ordeal (congress, town mayor, president, etc.) and it is impactful at all levels.” Another student shared: “One of the most valuable takeaways for me was that students are provided with free legal advice and help from a real attorney through the UMass Student Legal Services office. This is something that I was not aware of and don't think many other students are either.” Another student remarked: “It was incredible to learn about how policies impact local organizations in our very own Amherst.”

Beyond discussions of career possibilities and internships, students learned more about how the real structural forces shaping youth lives such as adultification bias, economic inequality, federal and state funding shortfalls, and constraints on agency also shape the work of youth-serving organizations. For Malcolm-Wallace and Davis, students’ ability to integrate theory, research, and community engagement is an essential skill, as many students are aspiring lawyers, social workers, education professionals, policy practitioners, and beyond. This pilot is just the beginning.