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Examining Brokering for Future Learning Opportunities Over Time

Tue, April 12, 8:15 to 9:45am, Convention Center, Floor: Level One, Room 103 A

Abstract

Coordinating learning across settings can be difficult for youth, and research documents a need to grow connections between people, places, and practices to attend to this fluid practice (Ito et al., 2013). Taking a social practice theory approach, we examine youths’ connectedness across settings. In ongoing research, we have noted that youth often lack such connections and/or prefer to keep the many evolving parts of their lives in separate contexts. Inquiring about youths’ connections helps us to re-locate youths’ agency for forging connections and maintaining separations as they distribute their engagements across settings and come to understand how practices in one setting may be valued in another setting (Dreier, 2008).

People and program structures help youth make and maintain these connections. This brokering for future learning means connecting youth to future learning opportunities and enriching their social networks (Ching, Santo, Hoadley, & Peppler, 2015). This includes connecting youth to networks that give them extended opportunities to pursue their interests (Brandt & Clinton, 2002) and supporting their agency in developing networks that lead to the imagining possible futures for themselves (Barron, 2010; Calabrese Barton & Tan, 2010).

In this mixed methods study, we surveyed and interviewed youth to better understand their experiences of Connected Learning (CL) and their outcomes associated with participating in CL programs. The survey was administered in two waves approximately a year apart – Wave 1 in 2013 and Wave 2 in 2014. In 2015, we interviewed 50 of the 266 youth who took both waves of the survey. The interviews focused on youths’ interest-related pursuits, specifically, to learn if and how young people formed new connections with others that have helped them in these pursuits, and how other people can potentially help them in the future. Here, we focus on the 2013-2015 longitudinal data from the subset of 50 youth.

We found that youths’ connectedness outcome (the number of people that youth reported helping them in various ways) stayed constant over time. Youth reported a mean of 17 supportive connections (e.g., parents, peers, other caring adults) in Wave 1 and Wave 2 of the survey. In Wave 2 of the survey, 75% of youth reported that someone from the program helped them to where else they could engage in their interest related pursuit, while 76% reported someone at the program helped them to find others with shared interests. For example, Eshe, a young man interested in illustrating and graphic design, said, “Connections is a huge thing. I'm not good at making them, but when I do make them, they're fantastic connections. I need to get better at talking to people.” Now in community college, he still has connections with resident artists he met at his CL program, and they support him through mentoring toward possible futures. Eshe saw these brokers’ pathways into future opportunities as a model for his own pathway. We will present an expanded analysis with implications for understanding how brokers support youths’ pathways over time and across the many settings of their lives.

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