A Call to Action for OST Leaders
This is the second in a series of blogs from the editors and authors of It Takes an Ecosystem: Understanding the People, Places, and Possibilities of Learning and Development Across Settings. A new blog highlighting a chapter or theme of the book will be posted every other week.
In November of 2019, our then forming Readiness Projects core team came together in Pittsburgh with 25 co-strategists and 75 of their colleagues, to ask the question, how can we use the increasing consensus around the science of learning and development to give teeth to the ideas of whole child, whole school, whole community, and to galvanize a broader movement to create strong ecosystems of learning and development that are truly equitable?
It Takes an Ecosystem: Understanding the People, Places, and Possibilities of Learning and Development Across Settings was the first project conceived following the convening.
We offer you these excerpts from the books concluding chapters as a call to action to each of you to join us in this continued journey to build, strengthen and attend to the health of equitable learning and development ecosystems.
“Youth development and community organizations, especially those who have worked with adolescents, have a deep, intuitive understanding of what it takes to help young people beat the odds set for them by circumstances and contexts. Increasingly, they have become more vocal about what it takes to scale up practices, programs, and policies within their systems that go beyond helping individual young people beat the odds to actually change the odds (Pittman, 1995)…”
“There is considerable survey and anecdotal evidence that OST and community organizations were, as a group, better at building and maintaining relationships and creating meaningful learning experiences during the pandemic than schools. But, narrow definitions of learning perpetuate inequity (Pittman et al., this volume). Without acceptance of the need to build forward together, there is no guarantee that the focus on relationships and, concomitantly, the recognition of the value of the kind of flexible and free-choice learning experiences found in OST and other community programs will be sustained and built upon once schools and communities are fully reopened…”
“Without a strong, steady, strategic campaign, OST programs — however defined — could quickly be dropped back into the category of “nice but not necessary” once educators and policymakers conclude that a sufficient allocation of resources and enough energy has been devoted to re-establishing relationships, routines, and resilience (SoLD Alliance, 2020).
The next few years offer an incredible, unprecedented opportunity to position and strengthen the OST field.
We believe, however, that this field-facing, system building work is best done within the broader focus on creating equitable, porous, learner-focused ecosystems.
OST programs and systems are, because of their flexibility and youth-centered focus, best positioned to push for allied youth fields (or a reinvigorated thriving youth field) that positions and leverages: a) the determination, resiliency, agency, and activism of youth and young adults, b) the range of roles adults play to connect, support and champion youth within learning and development ecosystems, c) the array of settings where this work happens, d) the roles frontline adults and youth play in critiquing and changing the systems where these settings are found, and e) the different types of coordinating infrastructure needed.
The chapters in this volume provide a solid base of evidence for these claims.
The best way to do this is to lead with language that centers the learners and, in doing so, showcases the nimbleness (albeit unevenness) of OST and community programs and organizations in “meeting learners where they are.” There is an opportunity to reprise and update the more inclusive ideas associated with the positive youth development movement to galvanize support for a learning ecosystem approach (Benson and Pittman, 2001). The Readiness Projects has had success calling out the extent to which program leaders, funders, and policy makers rarely specify who all is included in general calls (or claims) that endorse broader whole learner, whole community visions. There are real, concrete opportunities to get system leaders (including OST leaders) to be specific about:
All systems.
To actively see themselves as a part of a broader community ecosystem that includes other public systems as well as the array of “invisible” community partners and to talk about these partners by name.
All settings.
To use the science findings to push beyond big descriptors that describe systems and organizations– school, youth program — to describe the settings within them (classrooms, gyms, playgrounds, cafeterias) where gathering happens with some regularity, some resources, and usually some adult supervision.
All learners.
To not only disaggregate data, but document and discuss the learning gifts and needs of different groups of learners (including adults). To put more emphasis on developmental processes, including putting a spotlight on adolescents as a group that is much larger than “enrolled secondary students” and a group that is typically engaged with multiple systems.
All learning approaches.
To emphasize the importance of nonformal and informal learning experiences (in addition to formal) for overall development of competencies, agency and identity and to emphasize the fact that all learning approaches are used, to varying degrees, in all systems.
All adults.
To call for sustained and more substantial investments in all of the adults (and young adults) who have assumed roles as contributors to youth success and who, therefore, need training, supports, and resources to optimize the relationships they have with youth and the experiences they co-create.”
Excerpted from Irby, M., Pittman, K., Smith, H. & Moroney, D. (2021). Building Forward Together: Toward Equitable Ecosystems for Young People. In K. Robinson & T. Akiva (Eds.), It Takes an Ecosystem: Understanding the People, Places, and Possibilities of Learning and Development Across Setting. IAP.
