Creating Equitable Developmental Ecosystems for Marginalized Youth
Horatio Blackman, PhD, National Urban League
Alicia Wilson-Ahlstrom, MSW, MPP, Forum for Youth Investment
This is the third 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 Setting. A new blog highlighting a chapter or theme of the book will be posted every other week.
This week’s blog features “Just Quality: How Youth Justice Programs Can Inform Program Quality Efforts to Support Equitable Learning & Development Ecosystems,” Alicia Wilson-Ahlstrom and David J. Martineau; and “Mattering in Allied Youth Fields: Summoning the Call of Black Lives Matter to Radically Affirm Youth Through Programming,” Roderick L. Carey, Camila Polanco, and Horatio Blackman.
In 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic took hold of our nation. Schools and other sites of learning were abruptly shut down to protect the lives of our youth and the adults that serve them. Still, the pandemic wreaked havoc through Black communities and families, highlighting preexisting inequities in our nation’s health and economic systems. It also highlighted long-standing inequities in educational and developmental quality. Coinciding with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, Americans were again “awakened” to the systemic racialized violence mete out by police and civilians against Black Americans. In short, Black youth have had to deal with a “dual pandemic” that challenges their very livelihoods.
Despite these seemingly intractable problems, we have the knowledge and tools to create healthy ecosystems for those who have gone without.
Allied youth workers must support young people’s healthy development by recognizing the impacts of these dual pandemics on the development of Black youth. The science of learning and development has shown us that we must center the lived experiences and the cultures of our youth in our systems and programs as an “intentional counter to inequality” (Osher, 2020). We must also show our youth, through our dispositions and actions, that their lives matter, not for some particular outcome but simply because they exist. In 1969, Whitney M. Young, Jr. wrote that the Black child faces “emotional and environmental challenges” that hinder their healthy development, that sites of learning had not found ways to protect and uplift them, denying them the tools necessary to become healthy successful adults in a racialized world.
In 2021, these same emotional and environmental challenges prove true for our children, but new knowledge about how we can ensure that all of our youth can thrive has emerged. In this blog, we reflect on how the current science on learning and development intersects with an “awakened” understanding of racial and social justice and the ecosystems within which our youth develop, compelling us to call for a change in how youth programs are set up to support the thriving of youth, especially Black and other marginalized youth.
To facilitate our joint reflection, we’ve set up a “dialogue” between the two chapters in the recent IAP volume on Current Issues in Out-of-School Time: It Takes An Ecosystem, “Mattering in Allied Youth Fields: Summoning the Call of Black Lives Matter to Radically Affirm Youth Through Programming” and “Just Quality: How Youth Justice Programs Can Inform Program Quality Efforts to Support Equitable Learning & Development Ecosystems” that we respectively co-authored.
Core findings from the research on the science of learning and development highlight that context is important and relationships are central to development. We examine these findings from two perspectives:
First, the context for mattering.
A healthy learning ecosystem is one in which adults form safe, trusting relationships. Allied youth workers can bring to reality conditions that support Black and other marginalized youths’ healthy development by doing the work to understand their implicit biases and the ways in which the resulting deficit frames negatively impact these youth. To create healthy learning ecosystems requires a mindset and culturally relevant approaches that value marginalized youth in their entirety; from supporting young peoples’ aspirations, to creating asset-based programs and practices that directly address the challenges these youth face due to their identities; including one’s racial identity. The science of learning and development has illuminated for us that youth learn best when they have positive developmental relationships, their identities are affirmed, and when learning is directly tied to the context in which they live. To ensure that youth can thrive they must know that they matter to themselves, their educators, to their communities, and to society.
Secondly, we interrogate what it means to advance an expanded conceptualization of program quality using a race-conscious framework that recognizes the central influence of youth’s ecosystems on development.
Zaretta Hammond (2019) asks, “How will we understand and apply the science of learning and development within the current socio-political context of education systems that are still inherently flawed?” In raising this question, Hammond and others suggest that young peoples’’ lived experiences should be affirmed not only in programming, but also in the ways in which we evaluate, fund, and subsequently execute youth programs. “Race-neutral” or “color-blind” programs are still the norm, yet these often reproduce the very inequalities we are trying to eliminate because they ignore the systems of oppression that so viscerally impact Black youth. In this context, we challenge notions of program quality that fail to take into account and be proactively responsive to the influence that the racialized and social context of young people’s lives has on their development. We offer instead a vision for program quality, gleaned from the practice wisdom of social justice programs which stretch traditional notions of quality to encompass liberatory practices related to how consistently and well program environments provide opportunities to participate in healing-centered practices, develop critical consciousness and political efficacy, and engage in critical action.
The science of learning and development rests on the notion of healthy developmental relationships and the importance of context in youth development spaces as two of its foundations. To meet the charge that this moment calls for, we must utilize what we have learned about youth development. How well allied youth workers create relationships with marginalized youth that support positive development relies on relationships that fully acknowledge, reflect, and center issues of justice that are most central to the lives of young people. The programs and practices put in place as a result of this vision will enable our youth to actively resist messages from society that tell them their lives do not matter. Systems-level changes that recognize science by supporting the sets of practices outlined in our two chapters will drive the development of healthy developmental ecosystems.
We have the tools and we must use them to create a healthy, equitable future for marginalized youth.
