Broader Than Just Learning: Youth/Families' Competing Perceptions of Engagement Within an Opportunity Landscape

• In Event: Community Knowledge: Learning Beyond School Spaces With and From Students, Parents and Families

Abstract

This presentation will examine how one out-of-school time program provided opportunities for youth and families to consider local community assets as shared, communal, and instrumental to their learning outcomes. We focus on data collected within one programming year and drawn from the fuller corpus of programmatic data. We focus on the design of our inquiry and how that design contributed to outcomes that were broader than learning, where participants discussed and debated the historical context of why specific barriers to participation exist (e.g., generational, cultural, and gendered differences regarding what counts as relevant to learning). Such conversations led to deep discussions of how community members, youth, and parents collectively address these challenges across the gendered, intra-cultural, and generational divide.

Author

• Yolanda J. Majors, Northwestern University