Year: 2021
Type: article
Abstract: Youth workers are educators who play an essential role in the social, emotional, and academic development of youth in afterschool contexts (Fusco and Gannett, 2012; Pozzoboni and Kirshner, 2016). They build expertise on the job, learning implicit know-how through contextualized and relationally constructed practice and reflection (Polanyi, 1966; Taylor, 2007). The field, however, has under conceptualized how to foster implicit knowledge development in youth workers. Most youth workers learn experientially throughout their time in-service as they gain the skills and knowledge necessary to navigate complex dilemmas that arise in the field. I build on other scholars of youth work to argue that dilemmas crack open for the learner – who in the case of this paper are novice youth workers – tensions that exist at the nexus of their personal and professional identities. Structuring learning around “dilemmas” offers us a key pedagogical move that affords the field a framework from which to build novice youth workers' implicit skills. I take a case study approach to present how and what four novice youth workers learned in their experience with dilemmas of practice, which were leveraged as a pedagogical in a higher education course called Adolescent Development and Educational Psychology (ADEP).
Author: Erica Van Steenis
Institution: University of California, Irvine
Language: English
Subfield: Human Factors and Ergonomics
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
Estimated APC paid: $2,360
OpenAlex ID: W3170070697