Ross VeLure Roholt

“Our Kids Aren’t Dropping Out; They’re Being Pushed Out”: Native American Students and Racial Microaggressions in Schools

ABSTRACT Poor graduation rates, truancy rates, and standardized tests results have been presented as indicators of a school crisis among Native American youths. This crisis, however, relies on ahistoric and deficit models of intervention, which imagine academic success as an individual- or family-level phenomenon. Responding to Reyhner’s (1991) suggestion to assess the role of schools and teachers in working to push students out of school, we explored the experiences of Native American youths in schools. This article documents findings from a community-based mixed-methods study. It establishes not only the significant prevalence of microaggressions for Native American youths in schools but it also presents the unique discriminatory experiences and aspects of those microaggressions. We suggest that these microaggressions play a role in school climate and push-out and provide suggestions for research, professional development, and social action.

Youth advisory structures: Listening to young people to support quality youth services

Creating structures to include young peoples opinions and advice has been recognized as important for high-quality youth programs and services. Recent scholarship has begun to learn that most of these efforts are often symbolic rather than substantive. While continually advocated for, the practice is not widespread or well done. Using data from a statewide study of youth advisory structures and a case study of one advisory structure used within a municipal parks and recreation center, this article describes what both of these teach about creating substantive, meaningful, and useful youth advisory structure for program and organization development.

Unintended Consequences of Professionalizing Youth Work: Lessons From Teaching and Social Work

In this article, the authors use a comparative historical approach to examine the consequences of professionalization within teaching and social work and to answer the following questions: What are the unintended consequences of professionalization? Has professionalization in these fields supported higher quality practice, increased working conditions and salary, and improved social standing for these professions? What did each of these occupations lose when they professionalized? Did practice change as a result of professionalization? How or how not?

Improving Community-Based Youth Work: Evaluation of an Action Research Approach.

Few formal post-secondary educational programs in the United States focus on youth work, thus youth workers often enter the field with diverse backgrounds and varying levels of experience working with youth. Drawing on mounting evidence that quality youth service requires skilled staff, professional-development opportunities have received increasing support by agencies and funders. Typically, youth work professional development supports propositional (theory) knowledge learning to develop a more skilled workforce. This article describes an approach to youth work professional development that supports professional-craft knowledge learning (practice wisdom). Based on action research methodology, the approach has been developed over the last three years with groups of youth workers in a public organization. Using program evaluation data over the last two years and university-facilitator reflections, the authors describe what have been found to be the critical components of this approach. Also discussed are implications of using such an approach in day-to-day youth work practice.

Past Informs the Present: Work With Young People From Marginalized Communities

The articles in this issue were all shared during the 4th History of Youth Work conference, sponsored by the University of Minnesota and held in Minneapolis, Minnesota, during two days in May 2014. While the first 3 conferences were organized by the University of Minnesota, Extension Center for Youth Development, this 4th conference was supported by the University of Minnesota, College of Education & Human Development, School of Social Work, Youth Studies program. The theme of the conference changed several times before settling on the topic of youth work with young people from marginalized and contested communities. At the time, we wanted to create a forum to share and learn about the history of youth work practice in a variety of marginalized and contested communities, both locally and internationally. The conference did bring together scholars and practitioners from different countries (Northern Ireland, Croatia, and the United States) but mostly focused on work in the United States, and attracted mainly scholars and students at universities in Minnesota. While most presenters were from Minnesota, this did not have an impact on the diversity of presentations. Presenters shared studies about the history of youth work in Northern Ireland and Croatia, the radical camping movement during the 1940s–1960s in New York, the NAACP Youth Advisory structures during the civil rights, work with Hmong young people, youth work in Native Communities, the pedagogy of Highlander and the Citizenship Schools, and Gay Straight Alliances in the United States. During sessions and between, conversations often returned to the disparities found in marginalized communities and the limited official and professional response. In Minnesota, this theme has particular resonance, given the high academic achievement gap between White students and students of color, and the well-known disparities within juvenile justice, child welfare, and public health that continue not only in Minnesota but across the United States.

Evaluation Advisory Groups

Evaluation (like applied social science research and social work research) exists to be practical. This means that its very being and certainly its job in the world is to be used—used to help individuals learn, assess, reflect, and be useful in imagining, proposing, deciding, and recommending whether and how to refine, improve, close, or otherwise respond to the realities of organized efforts to ‘‘make a difference’’ in the material and other worlds of individuals, groups, organizations, programs, or the like. It exists to repair (Spelman, 2002). To do this right and well requires facts, values, beliefs, and ideas which can be placed over against criteria of rightness, goodness, appropriateness, efficiency, and effectiveness so as to conclude that a process, practice intervention, activity was/was not consequential and effective, that is, whether it ‘‘worked,’’ and if so, in the ways expected and desired, without major, troubling, or other anticipated and unanticipated consequences on/for the same or other persons, things, or processes. Conventionally, these ideas have informed the creation of the now widely accepted standards of program evaluation (Yarbrough, Shulha, Hopson, & Caruthers, 2011). To do this work well requires technical competence, facts and other information, thought, and wisdom. Needed is both Aristotle’s epistome and phronesis—practical wisdom. Doing evaluation well—responsibly, with credibility means to do it accurately, fully, openly, transparently, with awareness of one’s stance, biases in all directions, strengths and limitations, along with those of one’s approach, methods, tools, and hermeneutic practices, at least. It can, indeed should, mean to include as a corrective and for utility, that is, for use, evaluation should reflect multiple perspectives be multivocal, and include the ways of seeing, knowing, and doing, as well as the content of what is seen, known, and done, of multiple others, those with interest in what is being evaluated, how the evaluation is undertaken and completed, and how it can and well be used—for policy, program improvement, decision making, and conceptual clarification and refinement. The involvement of others can be as respondents, informants, observers, evaluation workers, or as advisers. Our focus here is on the latter. Advice is a primordial, socio-intellectual process—a system of soliciting and providing, of asking others for ‘‘input’’—perspective, technical ‘‘know how,’’ thoughts, and meanings. And of deciding whether or not to use what is offered. Advice is a way to help correct one’s limitations, or a way to solicit support, a way to increase the likelihood that a study will meet its life purpose by being used in the everyday world in ways practical, useful, meaningful, and consequential. Most researchers, including evaluators, bring advice to their work. This can be in the form of solicited and unsolicited others or interior self-inquiry—reflective practice, where one interrogates oneself to ensure, self-consciously, that one’s biases are explicit and clear; this is one way to minimize the errors brought by arrogance, incompetence, or normal human failing. Like all advice, it can prove preventive and corrective. Less common and the focus of this essay is the inclusion of advice using formal structures—groups, such as an advisory committee or council, or individuals, who can offer consultations and technical assistance on the evaluation enterprise, from contract through research to report and use. A review of the literature on the use of advisory structures in social work research texts shows that, just as with the literature on advisory structures in evaluation research texts, more is hortatory than practical, far more promotes this practice than describes, suggests, or evaluates advisory structures. Here are the two literature reviews. Both literature reviews used a similar method. Texts were found using general searches in Google Scholar, Google, Amazon.com, and the University of Minnesota library system. Publisher-specific searchers were also run on major evaluation and social work publishers. Text book indexes and table of contents were initially searched for the phrases: advice, advisory, advisory board, advisory committee, advisory group, steering committee, committee, and working group. Full text searches were made of texts available on Google Books (http://books. google.com). When such titles were available in table of contents, texts were also searched for phrases like ‘‘stakeholder engagement,’’ ‘‘advisory board,’’ ‘‘participatory evaluation,’’ ‘‘evaluation management,’’ and so forth. Few textbooks and handbooks available at the time of this survey (2011–2012) included the mention of evaluation or research advisory boards/groups/committees. No specific sections of any books examined contain specific or substantive

From lessons learned to emerging practices

Organizational development is based in part on knowledge development, both formal, scientifically proven and also nonscientific practice wisdom. This article brings together all of the lessons learned over our six years of work with Saint Paul Parks and Recreation, and suggests the practice utility of these.

Missing in the youth development literature: The organization as host, cage, and promise

Good, high-quality youth development programs require effective youth organizations. While youth organizations are commonly understood as valuable and supportive of healthy youth development, attention and focus on youth organizations in both scholarship and practice are missing within the youth development field. The authors advocate for a more distinct and clearer focus on youth organizations to foster positive youth development.

Youth work as engagement

Foreword, Shep Zeldin Preface Introduction 1. A Conversation with Ellen Gannett, Dana Fusco and Ellen Gannett I. Competencies and Credentials 2. Embedding and Sustaining Youth Worker Core Competencies in Out-of-School Time Programs, Sarah Jonas 3. Assessing Youth Worker Competence: National Child and Youth Worker Certification, Dale Curry, Andrew J. Schneider-Munoz, Frank Eckles, and Carol Stuart 4. Establishing Expertise in an Emerging Field, Joyce Walker and Kate Walker 5. Youth Work and the Education of Professional Practitioners in Australia, Judith Bessant II. Curriculum 6. A Decade of Educating Youth Workers at an Urban Community College, Pete Watkins 7. A Chicago Story: Challenge and Change, Michael Heathfield 8. The Journey to Becoming a Youth Worker, Camille Williamson 9. On Becoming an Academic Profession, Dana Fusco 10. Preparing the Next Generation of Professoriate in Youth Studies: Mapping the Contested Spaces, Ross VeLure Roholt and Michael Baizerman 11. Youth Development Network: A Site for the Professional Development of Youth Workers, Jacqueline Davis-Manigaulte III. Contexts of Youth Work 12. Youth Work Practice in England, Helen Jones 13. Youth Work as Engagement, Ross VeLure Roholt and Judie Cutler 14. Youth Work across Two Diverse Domains of Practice, Jim Sibthorp, M. Deborah Bialeschki, Carol Stuart and Jack Phelan 15. A Community Education Approach to Youth Work Education, Joel Nitzberg IV. Conclusion 16. Advancing Youth Work: Opportunities and Challenges, Jane Quinn 17. Framing Trends, Posing Questions, Dana Fusco About the Authors