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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

This book compiles the latest thinking on training and professional development for youth workers, highlighting the importance of Out-of-School Time (OST) programs. It addresses the lack of clear definitions and policies for youth work, emphasizing its critical role in positive youth development amid rising inequality.

Recent studies have documented the potential of youth activism for influencing political change toward socially just ends. This special issue builds on such research by focusing on youth activism as a context for learning and development. What kinds of learning opportunities are generated through working on social action campaigns? How do adults support youth's participation in ways that foster youth engagement and leadership? In addition to previewing the articles in this issue, this introduction proposes and describes four distinctive qualities of learning environments in youth activism groups: collective problem solving, youth—adult interaction, exploration of alternative frames for identity, and bridges to academic and civic institutions. It concludes by highlighting directions for future research.

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.