The Changing Landscape of Youth Work

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