Abstract
After-school centers and programs are lauded for providing space for youth to use free time in productive ways; yet little attention is paid to the work being done in these spaces. Nor is there an understanding of just how varied after-school centers can be. In After-School Centers and Youth Development: Case Studies of Success and Failure, Barton Hirsch, Nancy Deutsch, and David DuBois tackle this issue by raising a simple, yet critical question: Why are some after-school centers successful and why do others fail? Given the recent popularity of after-school centers, the authors fear that more centers will emerge without proper evaluation. As a former youth worker and as a scholar studying out-of-school time spaces, I, too, am concerned that large-scale after-school centers and programs will continue to increase without sufficient examination of their effectiveness and lead to the production of weak programs.
This book is a text for youth workers, researchers, after-school leaders, educators, and those who care about young people and the important role that after-school centers and programs play in the educational and social development of youth. Through a case study methodology over the course of a year, with in-depth interviews of staff members and students, staff and student surveys, and ethnographic observations, the authors set out to explain the successes and failures of three similar after-school youth centers in separate parts of the country (part of the Boys and Girls Club Network): “Midwest Center,” described as having “Pockets of Excellence;” “North River,” identified as “A Study of Organizational Dysfunction;” and “West River,” labeled as “The Jewel in the Crown.” The authors examine the strengths and weaknesses of each program by exploring organizational culture and outcomes, staff effectiveness and learning, and overall outcomes from student participation in each center.
Hirsch, Deutsch, and DuBois begin the book with an introduction that lays out a conceptual framework suggesting that organizational culture, youth and staff relationships, and programs and activities at after-school centers do shape youth outcomes. The authors claim that these factors, along with young people’s backgrounds and lives outside of the center, have a profound impact on youth outcomes. The authors contend that components of their framework are interrelated and that programs and activities that occur in after-school centers are predicated on a particular set of relationships characterized by distinct cultural processes within the organization. In order to explain this and use it as a tool of analysis, they employ the acronym PARC (program, activity, relationship, culture). The PARC profile, they explain, captures youth involvement in a wide range of center activities and the synergistic forces at play that contributes to or takes away from the student’s experience. A PARC profile was created for every student interviewed and featured in the book.
The authors’ organization of the text makes the analysis easy to follow, as they divide the book into three sections, with each section dedicated to each center. Four chapters are devoted to each center. The first chapter puts the spotlight on the organization itself: staff structure, leadership, and activities offered for youth. Across all centers are key programs in the Boys and Girls Club Network, such as Power Hour (a homework help group), recreational time in the gym, dance groups, game rooms, and sports teams/competitions, as well as opportunities for older students to mentor younger youth. This chapter also provides a description of the neighborhood surrounding the center, noting the racial and socio-economic breakdown of the community and for the youth participants at the center. The subsequent two chapters focus on the strengths and weaknesses of the centers through the narratives of two students at each center. Revealed in these compelling student narratives are the stories of how youth came to the center, their lives at home and school, their likes and dislikes regarding their experience in the center, and the relationships students forge with adults and peers at the center. The final chapters of each section, “Putting it All Together,” synthesize the main features of each organization and what the researchers learned from their interviews and observations. The authors also discuss how each center either assisted the student interviewed or added to some of their hardships.
Given the quality of the researchers’ ethnographic observations, these chapters provided great insight into the clear and subtle ways that young people are influenced by interactions with staff, peers, and activities at the center. From long lectures by staff, to a smile and hug between adults and youth, to providing a student with a leadership role—the authors were able to capture some of the special moments and intricacies that occur on a daily basis in after-school centers that make youth workers’ and community educators’ hearts warm. The case study approach provides readers with a rich understanding of the energy, feel, and vibe of each center. Because of this approach, readers will notice the stark differences in organizational culture and practice, staff training, and organizational learning (or lack thereof). Because of the level of detail in their observations, this book shows the number of ways that youth centers, and staff members in particular, provide opportunities for personal development and growth, mentorship, and a sense of belonging for youth. Readers will be frustrated (as the researchers were) in the moments where youth workers and center staff members missed opportunities to reiterate and demand high academic expectations or appeared to have no understanding of the type of sensibility necessary to work in after-school settings.
This book offers some real gems for both youth workers and researchers studying after-school spaces. The authors contend that comprehensive after-school centers can provide significant opportunities for learning and development, but there should be more critical examination of both successes and failures. They conclude by laying out recommendations that include: holding case conferences on youth participants, providing collective mentoring opportunities for youth, providing quality staff development training, and providing structured supervision and coaching for youth workers. The concrete strategies noted in the book are useful for those thinking about developing or working in a center, and most certainly for those already in the field who want to improve their practice.
In this particular area of study there is often a lack of theorizing about after-school education and community-based educational spaces. Greater integration of praxis into the study of after-school research is necessary to give the field more legitimacy in the academy and inspire better practice at the ground level. Additionally, not unlike other work in the field of youth development and after-school education, the importance of adult staff and youth relationships proves to be a significant outcome. Hirsch, Deutsch, and DuBois clearly showed through the youth narratives in this text how these relationships look when they are healthy and effectively aiding positive youth development, and when they are far from healthy. A huge gap in the field is a lack of understanding who the youth workers are, not just how they came to their work, but more attention to their pedagogical leanings and imagining of youth and the communities they serve, as these things impact how they understand and work with youth. Providing more information about the staff members at each of these centers would give the readers a more well-rounded account of how rewarding, contradictory, complicated, fragile, and vital staff-youth relationships are within after-school centers.
The authors should be commended for acknowledging what young people bring with them to after-school centers. At various points throughout the text, the authors highlight the agency of young people that sometimes went unnoticed and unappreciated by adult staff. Also similar to other work in this area (and far too common in political and educational discourse about after-school programs), is the way in which part of the text dances on the dangerous line of deficit rhetoric that is, sadly, very familiar in scholarly work about marginalized youth and communities of color: positioning after-school centers as the “savior” of low-income disenfranchised youth of color or suggesting that without the center the only path for students is gang life, violence, or early pregnancy—thus ignoring the agency of not only youth, but their communities as well.
This book offers great strategies developed out of observations and interviews that after-school center leaders and youth workers should learn from. In addition, the book offers future areas of research into which social contexts and political forces shape youth work in after-school programs. This area of scholarship is starved for theorizing the processes occurring within these spaces, and greater understanding of youth workers and the relationship between after-school centers and schools. While evaluation is also important, there is much more room to study the deeper meaning of this work. What do after-school centers and youth development mean for social theory, teaching and learning, and for broader educational discourse?
After-school programs are popular and attract many advocates. Yet, as the authors plead in this book, after-school programs need more than advocacy—they also need critique and evaluation to ensure that they are created on a solid foundation in order to be successful. A range of pedagogical possibilities occurs within after-school centers that few scholars capture with the depth and complexity it deserves. My hope is that future research seizes these possibilities and pushes past the binary of “good” and “bad” or “success” and “failure” to include the wonderful theoretical complexity and pedagogical nuance within after-school spaces.