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Contents Acknowledgmentsix Introduction 1 Part I. How Activism Contributes to Human Development and Democratic Renewal 1. Critique and Collective Agency in Youth Development 23 2. Millennial Youth and the Fight for Opportunity 53 3. \"Not Down with the Shut Down\": Student Activism against School Closure 83 Part II. learning ecologies of youth activism 4. Teaching without Teaching 107 5. Schools as Sites of Struggle: Critical Civic Inquiry 134 Conclusion: Activism, Dignity, and Human Development 163 Methodological Appendix185 Notes201 Bibliography213 Index233 About the Author237

The purpose of this book is to compile and publicize the best current thinking about training and professional development for youth workers. School age youth spend far more of their time outside of school than inside of school. The United States boasts a rich and vibrant ecosystem of Out?of?School Time programs and funders, ranging from grassroots neighborhood centers to national Boys and Girls Clubs. The research community, too, has produced some scientific consensus about defining features of high quality youth development settings and the importance of after?school and informal programs for youth. But we know far less about the people who provide support, guidance, and mentoring to youth in these settings. What do youth workers do? What kinds of training, certification, and job security do they have?Unlike K?12 classroom teaching, a profession with longstanding - if contested - legitimacy and recognition, \"youth work\" does not call forth familiar imagery or cultural narratives. Ask someone what a youth worker does and they are just as likely to think you are talking about a young person working at her first job as they are to think you mean a young adult who works with youth. This absence of shared archetypes or mental models is matched by a shortage of policies or professional associations that clearly define youth work and assume responsibility for training and preparation. This is a problem because the functions performed by youth workers outside of school are critical for positive youth development, especially in our current context governed by widening income inequality. The US has seen a decline in social mobility and an increase in income inequality and racial segregation. This places a greater premium on the role of OST programs in supporting access and equity to learning opportunities for children, particularly for those growing up in neighborhoods of concentrated poverty.Fortunately, in the past decade there has been an emergence of research and policy arguments about the importance of naming, defining, and attending to the profession of youth work. A report released in 2013 by the DC Children and Youth Investment Corporation suggests employment opportunities for youth workers are growing faster than the national average; and as the workforce increases, so will efforts to professionalize it through specialized training and credentials. Our purpose in this volume is to build on that momentum by bringing together the best scholarship and policy ideas - coming from in and outside of higher education - about conceptions of youth work and optimal types of preparation and professional development.

The three articles in this dissertation explore in-service educator learning through participatory approaches, with an aim toward equity in education. Combining sociocultural theories of learning as increasing participation within social and cultural practices (Gutiérrez, & Rogoff, 2003), and the political commitments of participatory action research (Strand et al., 2003), I hope to contribute to discussions on approaches to teacher education which center equity and justice. The articles in this dissertation demonstrate that participatory approaches can support educators at different levels throughout the system- within a single school and with leaders across states. Participatory approaches to inquiry, with the intentional use of mediational tools, can support shifts in educators’ research use (Weiss, 1979), equity literacy (Gorski & Swalwell, 2015), and practice-linked identities (Nasir & Hand, 2008). While national political discourse focuses on standardization, it is crucial to consider how education research can support educator learning, agency, and action. Participatory approaches to teaching and learning can shift the focus to collaboration, inquiry, and community: ingredients to work toward social change. In the first article, “Going on a Statewide Listening Tour: Involving Education Leaders in the Process of Research to Enhance the Practical Value of Qualitative Research,” my colleagues and I illustrate how researchers can design for practitioners’ research use by involving education leaders in the process of conducting qualitative research. We found that science leaders became more engaged with research findings from their own collaborative research projects than from other sources, and that engaging in participatory research enhanced the practical value of the research. In the second article, “From Fiction to Action: Queer Reading for Educator Equity Literacy,” I explore how educators utilized a queer reading lens to discuss young adult (YA) novels; data from a discussion about the popular YA novel Every Day by David Levithan showed how they engaged in a process of becoming literate to the structures and systems that maintain inequity. And in the third article, “Educator as Ally: Developing Identity Resources Through Collaborative Inquiry,” I share illustrative cases which demonstrate how educators began to shift their actions as their identities expanded, through allying with students and colleagues.

There is much room for improvement in the opportunities afforded to young people to learn through becoming active civic and political participants (Campbell, Levinson & Hess, 2012). In addition to calls for a “new civics” (www.spencer.org) or “action civics” (www.centerforactioncivics.org) approach to organizing for learning in this domain, scholars have identified promising trends in out-of-school spaces, such as “participatory politics” (Kahne, Middaugh & Allen 2014) “participatory culture civics” (Kligler & Shresthova 2012) and “connected civics” (Ito et al, 2015) that address the current need for more engaging civic learning opportunities. Within this field, there are lingering questions about how program directors and educators can best design work to organize opportunities for civic learning. This study follows 15 high-school-age creative interns as they collaborated with a professional artist to complete a public mural for the city. In planning meetings interns conducted background research on the neighborhood, deliberated findings of the research as a group with the lead artist guiding discussion and tried artistic work such as sketching and collaging to represent the concerns that were being pondered. An analysis of the social organization of endeavors (Rogoff, 2014) throughout this project showed how learning opportunities varied between times when the group worked in a flexible ensemble and times where adults directed the pace and ideas through storytelling. The narratives told to interns during this project played a socializing role (Ochs, 1997, 2004), encouraging a critical stance towards artistic work and active stance towards civic issues. Neighborhood residents and artists were powerful civic educators, and the analysis of this project contained examples with utility for the design of similar opportunities, such as organizing occasions for stories to emerge.

There is a long tradition in college access research suggesting that low-income parents without college diplomas are either unable to help their children or do not value college education. Additionally, these studies tend to neglect the experiences of rural students. I attend to these issues by drawing on Cultural/Historical Activity Theory and using two sets of interviews with 26 first-generation, rural students to complicate the current understanding of postsecondary pathways. This study found that parents and school personnel provided a variety of college-going supports. Although supports differed, both articulated a \"College at All Costs\" Discourse, which posits a certain set of rational choice assumptions about students' post-secondary options. The tenets of this Discourse advocate for students to make whatever sacrifices necessary to attain a college degree. In order to understand students' final decisions, the second phase of my analysis focused on the thirteen seniors. Of these seniors, nine scaled back their plans from either a 4-year to a 2- year institution (n=6) or from an out-of-state to an in-state (n=3) institution, two students persisted in their plans, and two students' shifts were not measurable. This study highlights tensions between the \"College at All Costs\" discourse and locally situated factors tied to students' family relationships and finances. Although students articulated ambitious post-secondary goals in the first round of interviews, as graduation neared, most students' post-secondary plans shifted to account for these tensions between their family practices and the messages articulated in the \"College at All Costs\" Discourse. The two students who persisted in their plans had differing experiences than their peers. These students were not exposed to the same parental concerns with feasibility and they both had a positive family history of college-going. This study is significant in recognizing the ways that the \"College at All Costs\" Discourse contradicts family practices and blocks honest discussion about what makes sense for a particular student in relation to her or his family. This leads students to change their post-secondary decisions late in their senior years, which may be preventable by including parents' voices and recognizing family practices earlier in the process.

The interdisciplinary field of the Learning Sciences has made significant strides in understanding basic processes in human learning, and identifying implications for the design of learning environments (Meltzoff et al., 2009). Of significance, scholars in educational psychology and human development have generated insights about the importance of adult-youth relationships for engagement and motivation in learning settings (Piaget, 1969). The field lacks clear understanding, however, of how educators can design learning environments that support and cultivate humanizing relationships between people of different ages, social identities and institutional powers. A humanizing relationship in educational settings is characterized by relational equity, or relations in which participants’ sense making are taken up and brought into joint activity in equally valued ways. Grounded in sociocultural theories of learning—which understand learning as fundamentally constituted by and through social and relational interactions—I empirically investigate the development of human social relations as supports in the design of equitable learning environments. By investigating the design of humanizing relationships, I provide case study evidence from two distinct informal learning environments, in the United States and in the United Kingdom. Toward this end, my research contributes to equity-oriented research on the role of more symmetrical adult-youth relationships in school-based, informal educational contexts.

This dissertation was motivated by a longstanding interest to understand how to design and sustain robust learning ecologies for youth from nondominant communities. Toward this end, this study examined El Pueblo Mágico, a social design experiment, designed to re-organize traditional forms of learning for novice undergraduate teachers and elementary school children. Grounded in cultural historical theories of learning, social design experiments (Gutiérrez & Vossoughi, 2010) attempt to re-mediate functional systems by saturating environments with new tools and practices oriented toward transformative ends. Designed to foster mediated praxis, participants engage in a tool-saturated ecology organized around practices that promote reflection, theory-building, and a new pedagogical imagination. The present study examined the processes of mediated praxis of undergraduate teachers whose learning spanned two environments, an undergraduate course and an innovative STEM-oriented after-school program. Specifically, this study sought to understand: 1) shifts in novice teachers' common sense notions around teaching, learning, and culture, 2) how the learning ecology was organized to foster shifts in their common sense understandings. By documenting initial undergraduate perceptions of teaching, learning, and culture, students' commonly held assumptions were recorded. An important finding was that narrow notions of teaching and learning and static notions of culture have the potential to foster banking models of education (Freire, 1970), deficit thinking (Valencia, 2011), and the \"othering\" of students of color (Deloria, 1998). Through the appropriation of new theoretical tools, reflective-mediated practice, and sense-making of those new understandings in joint activity with children, undergraduates examined their previously held assumptions and engaged in new learning activity. This study also identified three tenets central to mediated praxis and design: 1) The cultivation of a \"mirror\" to create a space to refract and work through inner contradictions and foster a pedagogical imagination (Gutierrez & Vossoughi, 2010); 2) The organization of a simultaneity and layering of learning which positioned all participants as learners in ways that challenged the binary roles of teacher and student (Rogoff, 2003); and 3) The development of boundary artifacts that stitched together theory and practice across environments (Gutiérrez, 2008). This study has implications for teacher education, design based research, and higher education.

Many policymakers, administrators, and other K-12 stakeholders have long advocated the use of computers and information technology in schools. Even in settings where such technologies have been introduced, however, evidence suggests that the impact on student outcomes has been mixed. In some cases, teachers simply do not adopt the new technologies. A better understanding of teacher technology adoption would help both education researchers and practitioners foster technology use by teachers. In my mixed-method study, I investigated teachers' adoption of a new Web-based instructional planning system, the Curriculum Customization Service (CCS), in the context of a larger instructional challenge: how did educators adapt their instructional practices to the learning needs of a diverse student population? I found that teachers reported three major reasons for adopting the CCS: to increase their efficiency in utilizing digital resources, to offer alternative representations of key concepts, and to differentiate instruction according to student differences such as reading ability and language proficiency. The CCS also impacted both teachers' instructional planning and classroom teaching: teachers reported that the CCS helped them integrate digital resources into their teaching practices with greater confidence, frequency, and effectiveness. My study made two significant contributions to the literature on technology adoption: a new case study describing how and why teachers adopted CCS and a novel conceptual framework that characterized technology adoption according to four perspectives: quantitative, qualitative, mixed-method, and longitudinal.

This dissertation analyzes teaching practices and learning opportunities in three youth organizations that used strategies such as political organizing, action research, and educational outreach to address problems in their neighborhoods and schools. Although opportunities for youth voice have become more common in recent years, there has been little scholarly examination of adult assistant strategies or the ways that youth interpret their experiences. This study addressed three research questions: How did adults guide and assist youth? How did youth participants interpret public problems? How did youth participants interpret their capacity to enact social change? Data collection was conducted over the span of two years and included participant observation, interviews, and program artifacts. Three findings are discussed. First, adults in the three programs supported youth leadership and autonomy using different assistance strategies, which I describe as “facilitation,” “apprenticeship,” and “joint work.” Each strategy offered distinct advantages and disadvantages for opportunities to develop leadership and civic action skills. Second, youth across programs deliberated about the origins and solutions for public problems. In their work on the campaigns youth participated in a sociopolitical discourse that emphasized the influence of social context on public problems. They learned how to interpret problems in ways that facilitated political action. Third, in their efforts to address problems youth exercised “collective agency,” defined as sustained efforts that were socially coordinated and generative for others. The campaigns were socially coordinated in that participants relied on each other to accomplish their goals and build broad bases of support. Youth's actions were generative for others because they sought to improve policies and institutions affecting young people. The dissertation's focus on youth agency and sociopolitical thinking contributes to a new direction in research on adolescence that emphasizes the development of purpose, meaning, and moral commitment in young people's lives.