Advancing Youth Work

Current Trends, Critical Questions

Dana Fusco

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136817601
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This path-breaking book brings together an international list of contributors to collectively articulate a vision for the field of youth work, sharing what they have learned from decades of experience in the training and education of youth workers. Carefully designed evaluation and research studies have legitimized the learning potential of youth programs and non-school organizations over the last twenty years, and recent attention has shifted towards the education, training, and on-going professional development of youth workers. Contributors define youth work across domains of practice and address the disciplines of knowledge upon which sound practice is based, reviewing examples of youth practitioner development both in and outside of academia. Raising critical questions and concerns about current trends, Advancing Youth Work aims to bring clarity to the field and future of youth work.

Advancing Youth Work will help youth work practitioners develop a common language, articulate their field in one voice, and create a shared understanding of similarities and differences. This book is also an invaluable resource for higher educators, researchers, and students involved with youth work.

1

A Conversation with Ellen Gannett

Dana Fusco and Ellen Gannett

This Introduction chapter will present an overview of three trend areas: competencies, credentials, and curriculum, through a conversation with one of the leaders in the field, Ellen Gannett. Ellen is Director of the National Institute on Out-of-School Time (NIOST) at the Wellesley Centers for Women at Wellesley College, Wellesley, Massachusetts. As the director of NIOST, Ms. Gannett ensures that research bridges the fields of child care, education, and youth development in order to promote programming that addresses the development of the whole child. She has contributed to the writing and development of ASQ: Assessing School-Age Child Care Quality, School Age and Youth Development Credential (SAYD) as well as the Afterschool Program Assessment System (APAS), and is currently working with the National Afterschool Association (NAA) on a set of core competencies for staff. Here I introduce the workforce trends in conversation with Ellen. The original interview took place on January 29, 2010 and was conducted over the telephone. The chapter was produced collaboratively by editing the transcript to correct and elaborate on the content. Content was again updated closer to the publishing of this volume. Dana Fusco served as the interviewer guiding the questions in relation to the framework of the book, around Current Trends and Critical Questions. The decision to begin the book “in conversation” is intentional in helping to frame the book in both content and style as dialogic and participatory.

Setting the Stage

Ellen, where are workforce issues situated in the overall mission of NIOST?

Workforce development is a very important and vital issue to what we are going to be able to do, if we are going to advance the field, if we are going to make any headway in reaching positive outcomes for kids. I think we have determined both from our own research and looking at others that the quality of the practitioner is critical to helping young kids succeed in school and life. We have to do everything we can to strengthen the workforce as the critical component of quality and helping kids do better.

We have been focused on workforce issues now in a really intentional way for a good 20 years. Progress is being made but it is slow going. I often get discouraged because we backtrack again and again trying to balance limited resources with what is really important. When times are tough, professional development and workforce issues take a backseat to direct service. For vulnerable kids it’s hard to argue that direct service is not important or that we need to think about serving kids before we invest in professional development but I think this is a faulty argument. We will never get out of this cycle of mediocrity and poor quality if we don’t address the issue. It is not either/or. We have to make sure that at the same time we are focused on quality programming, we also are focusing on quality staff. It is part of the same solution and the investments need to be targeted as such. We cannot keep backing off on our commitment to professional development and workforce every time we have a funding crisis.

Starting with Competencies

It seems that a critical first step in the workforce development initiative has been defining the core competencies for youth work practitioners. Tell me about your work defining and studying core competencies.

This work has been a long time coming. We have been looking at core competencies for many years but since my involvement in the Next Generation Youth Work Coalition (Next Gen), it has taken more of a focus and very recently we had a couple of things happen. Number one, the National Afterschool Association in giving up its leadership around accreditation has strategically decided that workforce issues including professional development will be their priority for the next number of years. Given what is going on at the city and the state level in terms of professional development system building, NIOST has put a high priority on helping. Judy Nee, even though she has resigned as president of NAA, will continue as a board member focusing on professional development. Judy and I co-presented (in Summer 2010) at various national conferences including the Beyond School Hours Conference sponsored by Foundations, Inc., the 21st Century Community Learning Centers Summer Institute, and the NIOST Summer Seminars on the topic of nationally recognized core competencies and credentials.

The second thing that happened is the State of Washington contracted with Next Gen to compile and analyze core competency frameworks across the country. Nicole Yohalem, from the Forum for Youth Investment, Betsy Starr, my colleague, and myself wrote a paper, which is now on our websites (see Starr, Yohalem, & Gannett, 2009). The paper summarized 14 state and organizational sets of core competencies and brought to life some of the most commonly cited competencies. Further work supported by NAA, Florida Afterschool Network, Pennsylvania Keys, Child & Youth Care Certification Board and NIOST has produced a draft document, Nationally Recognized Core Competencies for Afterschool and Youth Development Professionals. Following a field review and pilot during the spring of 2011, we hope that NAA will recognize and endorse this set of core competencies as a way to inform what higher education, programs, directors and trainers can do with them and how they might drive credentials at multiple levels.

Are you focused now on afterschool then given the collaboration with the National After-school Association?

No, our work at NIOST is very broadly defined to include all of the different subfields of youth development, not just afterschool. Our work includes school age care and youth work, people who work with adolescents, people who work in summer camps, people who work in a variety of settings, including school-based programs.

Do you see the youth work core competencies cutting across those sectors?

We try to look at core competencies across settings that cut across the full continuum of ages, so we were very intentional in identifying sets of competencies that didn’t stop just at age 12. We wanted to look at the ones that were very intentionally broadly defined, that would range from as young as five all the way up to age 18 or 21 and we were able to collect a number of those frameworks. The other important criterion we used was that the frameworks cut across various settings and auspices. It wasn’t just about afterschool; it wasn’t just about licensed programs. We didn’t want to pigeonhole any of this work or perpetuate silos. The strength of this field has got to be that we think of ourselves in a very broad-based way.

People who work outside of formal classrooms take on a lot of different roles. Some of them work in libraries; some of them work in museums; some of them work in cultural institutions; they work in youth serving agencies, school based settings. It is so much bigger than just afterschool and I think that the terminology keeps tripping me up because I always end up flipping and flopping between my words. When I talk about afterschool somebody inevitably asks—what about before school? What about summer, evenings, vacations, holidays? So it is a complicated field because of its diversity but I am pushing a broad-based definition. It’s about what the practitioner does, not who pays their paycheck or where they work.

What makes them core and is there another list on “noncore?”

As you get more and more specific to the setting, you find yourself moving away from the core, and it’s pretty hard to decide where is the line in the sand and where is the boundary. I am working with a committee from the Association of Child and Youth Care Practice on the revisions of the Competencies for Professional Child and Youth Work Practitioners. What they are trying to do is even more challenging because they are taking a set of competencies that had been previously written with residential and foster care in mind, client-based youth prevention programs. Their aim is to expand those core competencies to include afterschool age care and youth development programs. They have gone through a number of different versions of it but they have made a decision that they are ready to make their core competencies as core as possible so it applies to the full diversity of the youth work field. In order to do that we went line by line looking at each one of the core competencies statements replacing words like client with child and youth or family; replacing words that have been more clinical and more treatment oriented toward development. It was a very painstaking process and took a long time but the committee ultimately created a set of core competencies that could in fact pull together all the different subsets of the field, including the residential group and the foster care group and the treatment groups with everybody else.

The goal is to have different implementation guides, targeted to the particular sectors with indicators and examples of practice that will take that particular core statement and bring life to it. The interpretations that will follow will be more specific but at the core level we are talking about practices that should be non-setting specific and that build on youth’s well being and empowerment in general.

This may be a semantic distinction but when I hear the word “competencies” I think of skills and I wonder if that’s an intentional choice of language. Why not capabilities, for instance?

I don’t know if it is intentional because I often find myself wanting to or needing to define it. What is a core competency and should it stop at a skill level? I think not. There’s the need for understanding our body of knowledge. To the extent that core competencies are often defined as something that can be observed and documented, whereas a body of knowledge is more theoretical and conceptual. A core competency for many states, especially at the entry level, involves not only skills but it also involves attitudes, values and different attributes and the demonstration that you know something. My definition is a lot broader and integrates skill with knowledge. The state of Illinois, on the other hand, very clearly differentiates between body of knowledge and core competencies and has been working diligently on the core body of knowledge level first. Their next phase of work will be around the competency level.

Let me share my concern with the language from the perspective of someone who sits as a dean that oversees professional programs in health, education, occupational therapy, and youth studies. There is kind of an interesting tension in academia as to where youth studies resides and I worry that the language of competencies doesn’t serve us well. It doesn’t serve us well in helping to move youth studies into the core of academia. It keeps us in the mindset of a trade. [See Chapter 9 for a more in-depth discussion of the tensions within academia.]

I am well aware of that tension. In fact, I have sat in on higher ed conference calls where a group of faculty, instructors and deans of various colleges have been meeting together around this conversation. For many of them the terminology of competency was very much a word that they didn’t want to align themselves with. Interestingly, the American Camp Association, which has been doing some work around professional development, very carefully chose not to use the word “competency” and instead they have decided to use, and I like it, what they call KSAs (knowledge, skills and abilities). I know the folks at University of Minnesota tend to shy away from competency terminology as well and I am completely fine with that. I think in the end as a framework it works just as well and I think they can be interchangeable. Often people want to be able to demonstrate knowledge through formal observations, portfolios, interviews and other kinds of data collection as a way to validate what that person knows and can do.

From Competencies to Credentials

Let’s say we have a list of KSAs, competencies, or whatever language we are going to opt for. Now what?

What I think we have learned is that if you use core competencies strictly for the establishment of certifications and credentialing, then you are barking up the wrong tree. The use of core competencies or KSA needs to be embedded in organizational life. I think this is what we have missed in our excitement for building professional development systems that worked so well in early childhood education. We spent much time trying to see if we push these systems developmentally, and we used the same infrastructure of using core competencies and credentials and registries, would it work in youth work? Increasingly I think we are learning that earning a credential is not going to make a difference in what goes on in a program day to day or ensure we reach really strong positive youth outcomes for kids. It is not a silver bullet. It is not something that in and of itself will make a difference for children and youth. We have to be working at the system level but we can’t forget what is happening in programs, in organizations and how the staff is being supported or not. Whether you earn a credential, or a certificate, or get a college degree, you bring it back to your organization, and there may be a huge disconnect between what you have learned in training or in higher ed and what you may find in terms of your practice. I think it is very important that we pay attention to that level and that we use core competencies not only for driving course work, training work, credentialing work; they have got to drive what happens at the organizational level as well.

It’s very interesting because I think as people are coming together from different disciplines, they are bringing with them the lessons learned from those areas like teacher education and there is this kind of “Medici Effect” that’s happening. So it’s really fascinating.

We look to the teaching field as a great example of how certification alone is not enough. There is more and more attention being paid to coaching, mentoring, and the support that new teachers need. Teaching certification has in no way shown the quality of practice that we would expect. The same sort of thing is happening in organizations often caused by the lack of supervision, guidance, coaching, and mentoring around common quality standards. Staff, while they do tend to leave because of the lack of benefits and low compensation, one of the major reasons for the turnover in youth work, as we are seeing from the research, is that they are not sufficiently supervised. They are not supported; they don’t know what their job is, what is expected of them, and how they are supposed to learn their craft.

This could be a fascinating study: Why is it that a credential does not predict success on the job? I have some theories about that and I think some of it is the way that we approach professional education in academia.

It’s the United States of America, and we are very conscious of credentials in terms of professionalism. In medicine you wouldn’t go to a doctor that didn’t go to medical school and didn’t have a MD. That’s the first thing that you look for but that doesn’t make that doctor, a good doctor. So in every field it may be one of the first areas that the public will look for. Okay, so you have taken the courses, you have the core competencies, you got the credential, now what?

What do we need to do to make sure that earning the credential is actually enough? So that once the credential is earned we can put some stock in that credential and that to me is the work of higher ed.

That is one of the reasons that online learning or online credentials make me very nervous because there is typically no relationship with a mentor. Is it only a paper and pencil test? Is that enough to show that the person knows his/her craft? I think not, except in some rare cases. That is one of the reasons I like the CDA [Child Development Associate] model because it is very hands on. There are opportunities for people to work with their supervisor/instructor over time so that they get the support they need. These courses lead to the credential. The cohort model is so powerful where practitioners get to earn their credential together taking courses, discussing, and reflecting on their practice. All of this is the most important aspect of some of the credentials that I really appreciate here in our state in Massachusetts. We have what’s called the School Age and Youth Development (SAYD) credential, and it was a wonderful experience for people mainly because of that cohort model and because of the idea that each participant works alongside of a group of 10 or 20 people discussing their work and reading and going on field trips together. It didn’t get funded again, but the model itself is terrific and was recently adapted by Massachusetts as the Professional Youth Work Credential for youth workers who work primarily with adolescents.

From Credentials to Curriculum

What role do you see higher education playing in all of this?

I think higher education has a very important role to play in legitimizing the field and helping to put a stamp on the fact that this really is a career. It’s a profession, and, once higher ed makes a commitment to it, I think we are going to see a lot more opportunities emerge. At the moment higher ed has not stepped into this arena in the way it could have, and I have a theory about that. I tend to take the long view and I see peaks and valleys of higher education’s interest in all of this. Higher ed acts like a business before it makes a commitment to a new audience. Will people come forward if we establish a discipline, a new discipline in youth work or afterschool or whatever it is? Will people come? You need a stimulus. What is going to stimulate people to enter a field that is under resourced, under paid, abysmally unsupported, where the turnover rate is 40–60 percent a year and there is no clearly defined career track that has been articulated for people as they move into the field at the entry level? Where are they going to go next?

I worked in a school-age program and I know that the only place to go in a lot of afterschool programs is to kill off the director! That’s it—you go from line staff to director and there is no other ro...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Tables and Figures
• Foreword by Shepherd Zeldin
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1. A Conversation with Ellen Gannett
• Section I: Competencies and Credentials
• Section II: Curriculum
• Section III: Contexts of Youth Work
• Section IV: Conclusion
• About the Authors
• Index