The Youthwork Paradox: A Case for Studying the Complexity of Community-Based Youth Work in Education Research

Abstract

Community-based youth work, through which young people are engaged in community-based educational spaces (CBES; e.g., after-school programs, out-of-school time settings, youth organizations, etc.), is celebrated for supporting youth academically, socially, culturally, and politically. However, when these spaces receive attention, their social and political complexity is often overlooked. Studying the complexity of community-based youth work in education requires interrogating the multiple systems of oppression that impact young people’s lives. It also demands examination of the sociopolitical context of youth work, including how race logics and economic pressures inform the construction of CBES and how these forces surface and intersect with market logics and educational policy reform. Building on existing scholarship on community-based youth work and my current research, I present the youthwork paradox, a framework that captures the complexity of the field and its relationship to structural forces and larger systems of oppression. I detail how this paradox does not always lead to dichotomous discourses; rather, CBES can encompass many logics at once. To illuminate the usefulness of this framework for deeper theorizing of community-based youth work, I ground this concept in an empirical case focused on Black youth workers.

Anti-Racism Education and Training for Adult Mentors Who Work With BIPOC Adolescents

“…Because mentoring programs exist in and are a microcosm of a larger society, the foundational underpinnings of most mentoring and youth development programs are rooted in White supremacy culture. Even with the best intentions, and sometimes without fully knowing or understanding, out-ofschool-time programs, including mentoring programs, are most often designed to fix, correct, or remedy some imagined blight within BIPOC communities (Baldridge, 2020;Weiston-Serdan, 2017). The very beginning of the problem, then, is that mentoring programs are built upon deficit ideas of particular communities and young people who belong to them.…”

“…Given that over half of volunteer mentors are White (Garringer et al, 2017) and that Whiteness is centered in youth work (Baldridge, 2020;Weiston-Serdan, 2017), we also focus on Helms's (2020) White identity development model from the field of counseling psychology to inform antiracist education and training for mentors. This model is relevant because of its anti-racist focus in developing a positive White identity, and Dr. Beverly Daniel Tatum has used Helms's model extensively (for example, see Lawrence & Tatum, 1999;Tatum, 1992Tatum, , 2017 in her undergraduate courses on the psychology of racism and in anti-racist training and professional development for educators.…”

Critiquing Empire Through Desirability: A Review of 40 Years of Filipinx Americans in Education Research, 1980 to 2020

“…It is noteworthy to highlight the limits of education research and the need for our field to acknowledge the richness of nontraditional spaces of education and subversive sites of learning Filipinx Americans have created (Baldridge, 2020; Hernandez, 2020). Such spaces emerged because existing spaces within formal institutions did not readily support nor reflect the experiences of Filipinx Americans.…”

The Wretched of the Research: DisenchantingMan2-as-Educational Researcherand Entering the 36th Chamber of Education Research

“…As a part of the selection process, I focused on scholarship that was U.S. nation-state-based (i.e., written about and concerned with education research taking place on the lands of the U.S. nation-state, as a constructed and dominant political order), and considered education as a social process of teaching and learning that can take place inside and outside of compulsory state-sanctioned schooling (Baldridge, 2020). This systematic examination made use of Google Scholar and the Educational Resources Information Center database.…”