so i do a lot of research and then i'm also a social entrepreneur, so i direct the nonprofit in the mountains called page, partners for appalachian education. i help them get access, so i have a couple different hats that i wear. social worker and entrepreneur. >> host: is that a new term? >> guest: i think it was claimed by people like nicholas kristof. it's a very widely used term. for people like me who basically direct nonprofits and do different things in the nonprofit sector. >> host: how did you get involved with appalachian girls in middle school in western north carolina? >> guest: that is a long story that i write about. it really begins with my own

history. i grew up as an appalachian girl, working class in a tiny little town and i was the first in my family to go to college, which was a very big step for me and ended up through a scholarship from a group getting a scholarship going to college and doing super well in college and ended up finally after a lot of stumbles and falls going on getting a graduate degree from harvard and that journey that i experience myself came back to north carolina and founded this nonprofit. >> host: when you say you work with appalachian girls, what do you do? >> guest: i teach. the people that work with me on this nonprofit created this kind of out of school for another opportunity for the girls living in the most rural and remote

parts of the appalachian mountains. they come to an intensive summer program. they have weekly meetings with volunteers and we offered these girls who otherwise don't have opportunities for summer learning and enrichment we offered them an intensive and wonderful education program in the summer. they come into our programs run all over the mountains of north carolina and madison county and they do digital literacy learning. they write literature, and they get a really intensive summer learning experience through the nonprofit that i direct. >> host: in the road out, who iis adriano, blair, mariah, elizabeth, shannon, jessica and alicia? >> guest: these are such an

amazing girls i got to know when i was teaching in cincinnati. so i mentioned that i had gotten my college degree and my graduate degree ended up getting a teaching job in cincinnati ohio, and there i discovered this amazing neighborhood. it's a neighborhood of appalachian people in the inner city, and it sort of goes back to the part o that part of amers history when you have people in the region moving up north to look for jobs in cincinnati and dayton and akron. so i was teaching at the university of cincinnati and found out that there was an aberration community and i went there and decided to the people at the public elementary school in the community called lower price hill, we do on -- would you let me be a teacher in your elementary school and teach kids? so i began teaching and i got to know these seven girls, blair, or i am so forth, and at that

time when i first met my students they were only in second grade. i followed them into third grading fourth-grade and i say to these girls do you all want to have a class of your own and they said i will give this a try so i began meeting with these girls we met during the week every summer for four years of the life and this became kind of an amazing experience for them and for me. in the class of our own where we study and read literature and talk about the stories i listen to the girls dream about their lives and it's a place they can dream and tell stories and read books. >> host: how are these girls similar in their outlook of life lacks

>> guest: they are among the very poor in american children. i love to cincinnati in 2009 and came back to north carolina to sound this nonprofit. as i was later to learn cincinnati in 2010 became a third worst city in the united states from child poverty and urban areas. only 32 detroit and click in cleveland this is one of the poorest cities per child poverty and part of that. many of them have bombs that have drug issues in the abuse of kind of prescription painkillers like oxycontin would be an example of that.

so, i found out that many of my young students, some of them like eight, nine, 10-years-old have mothers who were doing drugs and that was a common factor among the girls. >> host: how did that affect their outlook on life, the dreams as you said? >> guest: i think that for many of these girls, they were -- what i discovered is that for many of the girls they were essentially orphans, they became orphans to oxycontin and american poverty. and so, i was their teacher. we have our own class, but our class became like a family to them. and they became kind of like sisters. and yes i was a teacher. i sometimes have to be teach early and stern but it became like family and it was very intimate. at one point cut two of the girls -- one of them was blair

come into the other was adriano. they put their arms around each other and they said we are sisters and i said to them -- and we often begin our class with a snack and food to get things going and i said we figured out to both of them are out on the street doing drugs and a so for them it was like it had become like a family and the class was their sisterhood. was a sisterhood of girls. >> host: did the childhood that you are seeing coming that it reflect what you grew up with in western north carolina? >> guest: to some extent. i was a working-class girl. i didn't have an opportunity or access. no one in my family had been to college and i was very naïve

about how college worked, but the difference was i was working class and my dad had a job -- >> host: did he lived with the family? >> guest: heeded. >> host: was that where lex >> guest: i think it's pretty common in those days. in rural appalachia as opposed to the urban communities, you do tend to have families where you have a mom and dad living in the house and my dad was living in the house and had a job and that was different because largely they were out of the picture. their moms were starting to lose it because of the drug issues. what i saw and the community in cincinnati is similar to what you see in other urban families

that grandma kind of steps in and starts taking over and taking control of the family and her grandma was her central caretaker and that was pretty common. >> guest: the key word is education. i have to be very grateful. i was a very naïve working-class girl. i was a little bit of an anomaly because i loved reading so that is kind of a bookish little girl and i think because of that i did very well and i got this -- i know nothing about college committed into how to get in or apply to that process. a lot if i of it said i had a scholarship because this wonderful group of women, the american association had given

me a scholarship. >> host: how did you get connected with them? >> guest: i honestly can't remember. i think it is just they probably heard about me through high school. i probably have someone say this girl, this kid can make it and i got a letter saying you have been given scholarships come off so i ended up being able to go off to college. once i got in it was so easy for me to excel and keep going into tonight and onto graduate degrees. >> host: what was the hardest part of leaving your town and coming into college? >> guest: once you take the road out if you go to work the working-class and go elsewhere, you do have to give up a part of your childhood identity and part

of who you are. there is a process change that has to happen on and to some extent, it puts you at a certain, a little bit of a distance from your childhood and your family. it's difficult and involves the change. i went on to college but a nice comeback and helped my own own people, the people that are my people working class people, so i feel like yes, i've had to give up some of who i was but now i can come back and i can help the people who are like me. >> host: are you treated with suspicion back home were the first to go to college? >> guest: no, i think it is a very perceptive. people like me that are very bookish who think she's a little bit different, you know, she's not exactly like everybody else

around here getting married and having babies or whatever and i was seeing it different but that didn't stop me. >> host: >> guest: i have to say that they were colleagues that opened their doors to be added to some extent they didn't -- i think they were a little bit baffled about what i was doing because i was having this class for girls and reading all of this literature and i think they were just like while, this is working out into the girls were thriving and i was trying also at the same time to bring back i learned from the class to the

other classrooms and stuff. so they were absolutely welcoming and wonderful to be in every way. >> host: besides just having a class of seven what else did you bring differently into that classroom? >> guest: i kind of knew where they were coming from so i was a different teacher in that sense and then we also did something that's very unusual these days because now we have a lot of pressure from accountability and testing to teach to get everybody to pass these big tests and in the urban poor settings like urban cincinnati that's tough for kids. instead of doing that, we read literature and that is becoming more and more of an anomaly these days to read literature and talk about literature and stories and talk about the stories of your own life, so

that was different. i'm kind of an old-fashioned literature person. i like kind of novels about characters and character novels and stuff like that and these girls i try to bring young adult fiction to these girls, things that were about girls like them. such as a wonderful short novel for stuff that was about working-class or appalachian girls that would speak to their concerns. and my students wanted nothing of that. thethey turn their noses up at t and say we don't want your kind not to the person but the book i was bringing in. it turned out their duties --

there but -- one of my students it turns out she was by the age of nine and then also tend her favorite was stephen king and they watched on television, they read stephen king, and here i was trying to be this idealistic social justice teacher trying to change the world and change them and all they wanted to read was stephen king so they said we are going to read the horror fiction and stuff and that was transformative for me and my students because they began becoming leaders and enjoyed reading and loving it and stuff. >> host: do you regret allowing them to read horror fiction? >> guest: not call.

we didn't read stephen king in my class. i did a bunch of research after i learned about this passion of tears. so we kind of compromise, but they still insisted that their favorite author was stephan king and that was interesting. >> host: how long were you with these girls and their special class? >> guest: beginning when they were in third grade and going to the end of sixth grade and they made a decision at that point to come back to north carolina and i begin to count my own nonprofit building and what i learned from these girls, so i had to leave and that was very tough because i love these girls -- left these girls when they were just entering adolescence. i kept up with them and i

visited cincinnati. we kept in touch through e-mail and facebook and everything else and i went back and forth but i left when they were in sixth grade. if i've have been able to stay and continue the class, a number of them struggled when they entered adolescence. one of them again a young teenage mom at the age of 16. she finished high school she studied hairdressing and stuff that she has done very well but there's a time for her when there iwhenthere's a number of s struggling and i feel guilty about that, but i knew that i had to come back to my native state and finish in to do my work here as a social social entrepreneur so it wasn't a choice i had.

they were in their early 20s? very early on a snapshot, where is she now? >> guest: adrianna finished a very competitive high school that she got into with some help. she went on kind of like hairdressing training program. >> guest: she is a young mother. she has a beautiful little girl and she's doing quite well that there are some very rough patches. blair is more difficult to talk about. she reminded me most of myself, very precocious because she was a stephen king fan at first.

her desire was to become a lawyer and she certainly had those talents. player dropped out of school and she dropped out in ninth grade and just couldn't finish high school and then she ended up kept trying and trying to get a ged and currently the last -- working the night cleaning jobs in the office buildings and so something like a bigger urban office building. >> host: mirah? >> guest: she got married, divorced, had another relationship and had two lovely children, finished high school, is trying to go back to college and become a nursing assistant, hasn't quite gotten there yet. she left her partner. now a single mom raising these

two beautiful children and is some -- she's doing pretty well. >> host: elizabeth? >> guest: emissivity has struggled as well. it was a bit has a little over a year ago and has a fiancé, so she almost finished high school, doesn't pass one section of her science test, her science high school test and because of that was not allowed to finish high school and because of that she is a dropout. i would love to go back as soon as possible. i would love to go back at least once a year to visit cincinnati. i run a nonprofit in the north

carolina mountains and i have a researchad aresearch physician,m pretty busy but i try to keep up and visit as often as i can and just to stay in touch with these seven girls. >> host: very quickly, shannon, jessica and alicia. where are they today and are all seven of them still in cincinnati right now? >> guest: alicia is the one that has left cincinnati come and she got married to a surface and come into a soldier in the e army and they moved away from cincinnati, and she has a child. she's married and has her first child, and shannon and jessica are both again struggled to finish high school and were not able to finish. she didn't finish high school. she became pregnant in high school and had a baby that died soon after birth. a baby that was very premature,

and after that point, began distancing herself from school and began to sort of fallback and dropped out of high school, and a jessica dropped out as well but has gone back and has gotten a ged and further the college studies and is i think engaged to become married. so those girls are doing well in the context of their communities. i know they wouldn't be sort of seen as let's say they do contexthe dukecontext or whateve seen as having gone far with their professional careers but they've done extremely well given what they were up against, which was a neighborhood of of t severe poverty and a serious drug problem. none of these seven girls have touched drugs. and i think that is a huge thing in their favor that they have not gone the way of their mother. they said to themselves we wanted something better for our

lives and we don't want to go there and they didn't. >> host: where do you think you were successful, and where do you think that you would do things differently? >> guest: i think that we were very successful -- we had intimacy, we had our super successful class, we had several girls attaching themselves to schools loving literature and books and, you know, the school like experience and a teacher. i think the biggest challenge i faced was just about the time that my class finished, i have to leave to come back to my home state and fund my nonprofit that i was thinking about something. biggest difficulty was not being able to finish the class when they were entering adolescence. and that is why when i founded my new initiative page comic i made sure that we are serving girls in the middle school years

and is trying to work with students and girls in the years they are most vulnerable and when they are trying to define who they are and what they want to be in life, and so, that is something i learned from the class in cincinnati that i brought back with me to north carolina. >> host: people are interested in your nonprofit for this website? >> guest: it is carolinapage.org. just like a page in a book into this partnership for appalacian girls. the carolinapage.org you can find stuff on the website, you can go to a story on the page website and watch digital stories and hear their voices and learn about their lives and we would love for people to check out the website and meet these amazing girls.

>> host: are you treated him with suspicion as a harvard do good in a sense? >> guest: in madison county where page is located we have an expression so you obviously been off from here. i am kind of not from here. i rent an old farmhouse in the community with some farmers out of madison county and when i'm there in the farmhouse and when i go to that page program where we offered this page, we are kind of a nod from here. i don't sound like an appalachian girl anymore, and i am just, you know, have become more of a professor and researcher and think there's a part of me that is always from here and it's -- it doesn't leave you. in any way you are always the same girl that you were when you were a child.

>> guest: >> guest:w >> host: we have been talking with educational scholar deborah hicks about her book the road out the teachers ought to se od. we went through a lot. it's hard because i don't think that we remember what it's like. i think that we forget. and i have to give him credit

because he says i didn't give up on him but he didn't give up on me either. we were really having a rough time and even in the present i remember he called and i told him okay. i told him why don't we just stop this nonsense. let's just stop it and change. that's not easy. you can't make it like a magic wand. i see what he's gone through and i know the terrible thing things facedhe isfaced with the abuse s from other guys. it was more neglect.

his poor mother i want to give her credit because she stood by. [inaudible] she stepped up. so it's good to hear -- we went on a trip so that we could finally come to california. we drove away from chicago to california and it was one of the most beautiful trips. we came with our friend and we had a great time and i never argued with him once we just had a great time talking and sharing. he has become a wounded leader

and that is partly what i am seeing. this is why it's important to point out we can make change and become these people and we are able to do poetry. now he is a poet my son. so now i want to thank him. he is honest in that. i think the issue he was rough, he was mean, he was angry, he was violent but he was honest and that's important because i have to go through that and i have seen other people do it. but to see my son, it's powerful and it's really what we are talking about. i think that it is part of what we forget. i never cried for a long time. i was told not to cry. but they are important, being whole.

it's important. wary diana and, the editor of democratization and a part of the innocent and the arab world along with book contributors talk about the promise of democratization in the middle east after the er arab spring. this is about one hour and 45 minutes. >> good afternoon. i am the editor of the journal of democracy and the vice president for research studies here at the national endowment for democracy. it is my great pleasure to welcome all of you to t