What if Learning and Development Opportunities were an Intentional Priority for Communities?

Dale A. Blyth, Deborah Moroney, and Jill Young

Over the last several months, the COVID-19 pandemic has caused radical disruptions to our daily lives — from the ways we teach, to the ways we work or seek work, to the ways we think about both the present and the future of learning. At the same time, calls for racial justice have focused new attention on the many inequities in U.S. society, including in education. As we come closer to the end of 2020, we are taking a step back for a moment and to ask, “What if?” Specifically, we are asking, “What if opportunities for children and young people’s learning and development were a much higher priority in our country and communities? What if we were more intentional about how opportunities to learn and develop were offered and by whom?”

Notice, we are not simply asking, “What if school were different?” Rather, we are asking, “What if we brought our very best thinking and resources to ensuring all youth had equitable opportunities for learning and development — and that the learning experiences were transformative and the settings fulfilled the promise of robust equity?”

Recognizing That Healthy Learning and Development Can Happen Anywhere

Healthy learning and development opportunities are made up of essentially three basic building blocks: caring people, constructive places, and challenging possibilities. We also know from the science of learning and development that there are five guiding principles for addressing the whole young person:

1. Positive developmental relationships;

2. Environments filled with safety and belonging;

3. Rich learning experiences;

4. Development of knowledge, skills, mindsets, and habits; and

5. Integrated support systems.

These five elements come together in a wide variety of ways in the learning and development ecosystems in which youth live. Schools are one critically important and necessary part of the ecosystem and one place where learning happens. But what if we officially recognized that learning and development happens everywhere? All adults, all settings, and all experiences matter in learning and development. Can we afford to be less intentional about what happens in all these places and the ways we support the people who provide such diverse experiences if learning and development for all youth truly is a priority?

Life experience, decades of research on community programs, social and emotional learning, and the science of learning and development make it clear that schools are only a part of the journey. Too often, schools focus on formal approaches that stress content knowledge over engagement and social and emotional learning. Many definitions of learning and education are mostly limited to what happens in school buildings, even though we know that, in reality, children learn and develop in the ecosystems they experience every day — in their homes, communities, schools, and even in their virtual worlds. The Aspen Commission on Social and Emotional and Academic Development underscores this idea, by noting in one of its priority policy recommendations that community partners are a critical player in fostering whole child learning and development.

The pandemic and educational inequities continue to change how young people learn and develop dramatically, and parents, guardians, and other caregivers have assumed more and more responsibility for children’s formal education as well as their overall learning and development. Perhaps this increased pressure on both the formal educational system and supports outside of school will lead to wider agreement that enhancing community learning and development opportunities needs to be a higher priority — one that is approached with greater intentionality.

Strengthening and Supporting Adults’ Role in Learning and Development

Too often, youth encounter people, places, and possibilities for learning and development that are not caring, constructive, or challenging, but in fact are indifferent, toxic, and disabling. With many young people attending school virtually, and considering that disengagement rates increasing, there is a much greater imperative to keep these youth connected to positive learning and development opportunities and supportive adults, wherever they are.

Heidi Ham, vice president of the National AfterSchool Association, suggests that adults who work with young people are not simply superheroes, but rather skilled professionals — in other words, members of a youth workforce who have core knowledge and competencies. The adults in the youth fields workforce include community center staff, childcare providers, mentors, coaches, afterschool professionals, summer camp counselors, teaching artists, young adult librarians, science program facilitators, youth volunteer coordinators, wilderness guides, and many others. The youth fields workforce understands how to engage with young people, show young people they care, challenge young people to learn and grow, and share power with young people. If we recognize that these adults are the critical lever for engagement, learning, and development, the next step is to consider how to support them, so they can be successful in their powerful and ever more challenging roles.

An Intentional Path Forward

What if, in response to this pandemic and the heightened awareness of the inequities it and other events have made so visible, we actually invest in policies and structures to systematically support the full variety of people with whom youth learn, the diversity of places where youth learn, and the range of different experiences from which youth learn and development? For example, we could incentivize cross-sector alignment or dedicate time and resources to professional development and career pathways across the youth fields workforce professionals. What if we took steps to better understand how youth experience learning and development (including the places where it happens, people involved, and the opportunities youth have)?

In future blogs, we will explore how we must better understand and mobilize the youth workforce and unite and integrate the ways we invest in the success of this workforce — and the success of young people in school, work, life, and civic society. We will also zoom in on the settings where adults in the youth fields workforce find themselves, the organizations and systems that control those settings, the learners who gravitate toward those settings, and the learning approached used in them.