"You're Muted": How After-School Programs Worked to Support Youth Voices in the Face of COVID-19

• In Event: Pedagogical Practices and Programmatic Structures to Support Youth Participation and Learning in Informal Environments

Abstract

Afterschool programming often centers around hands-on experiences; however, in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic, such activities were severely limited. Programs drastically changed their organization and function to accommodate new guidelines and meet community needs. To understand how afterschool programs adapted, we conducted semi-structured interviews with nine coordinators of literacy-based afterschool programs. Interview questions were developed to capture changes in organizational structure, techniques used to adapt in-person programming for a virtual space, and the role of literacy in curriculum development. We used emergent coding to identify themes across the different programs. In this paper, we present key lessons learned from the transition to virtual programming and consider how these lessons can be used to inform future afterschool program development.

Authors

• Jasmine Erika Mitchell, University of California - Santa Barbara

• Alexandria Muller, University of California - Santa Barbara

• Devon Michaela Christman, University of California - Santa Barbara