Not Everything That Counts Can Be Counted: The Perplexing Viability of a Noninstrumental Youth Program

• In Event: 66.058 - Roundtable Session 28
  In Roundtable Session: 66.058-7 - Learning From Youth: Examining Education From the Perspective of Youth

Abstract

Light Up Learning (LuL) is an interest-driven school-based youth program in Scotland that supports adolescents in learning about what they love. Since 2015, LuL has been well received by youth, teachers, and parents, despite that it suffers from ambiguity in programmatic scope, and espouses outcomes that remain unable to be measured by contemporary school assessment metrics. Indeed, its approach to programmatic design and delivery is at odds with instrumental approaches to teaching and learning that characterize contemporary theory and practice in youth development. Bringing together critical theories of power and youth development, I discuss LuL’s perplexing viability, while demonstrating the ways in which it is simultaneously pushing against and being complicit in the neoliberal project of today’s market-driven educational landscape.

Author

• Daniela Kruel DiGiacomo, University of Colorado - Riverside