Abstract
Many of us see youth programs as a unique and important context in adolescents’ lives. They have been described as “sanctuaries” and “safe havens” that provide teens alternate spaces—apart from the often more vulnerable domains of school, family, and neighborhood. Similarly, they have been seen as intermediate “transitional” settings between the worlds of adolescence and adulthood, settings that combine valuable components of both: a youth-centered focus and openness to youth culture with the presence of caring supportive adults who serve as bridges to adult worlds. A central element in this positive narrative is a belief—supported by increasing evidence—that effective programs can emancipate youth’s often untapped capacities for individual and collective agency and social emotional development (Durlak, Weissberg, & Pachan, 2010; Vandell, Larson, Mahoney, & Watts, 2015). At their best, programs are thought to be powerful developmental settings that support active processes of youth empowerment, self-discovery, character development, healing, sociopolitical awakening, and acquisition of valuable social capital (Eccles & Gootman, 2002; Gast, Okamoto, & Feldman, 2016; Ginwright, 2010; Larson, 2011).
But is this narrative realized for all youth, especially youth of color and immigrant youth? At times, this powerful narrative is treated as though it transcends culture and race. It is assumed that a youth-centered space necessarily allows all young people to feel safe and engage in these processes. However, is it possible, for example, that a youth’s immigrant background or membership in a “minority” culture or race can create barriers to the experience of belonging, empowerment, and awakening within a program? Is it possible that staff members’ ways of understanding this narrative can prevent them from recognizing and supporting youth whose processes of self-discovery and development are shaped by unfamiliar cultural values and frameworks? An important rule of thumb in matters of culture and diversity is, “We don’t know what we don’t know”—especially if we have not made rigorous efforts to ask the relevant questions.
This special issue is aimed at posing these questions. The goal is to examine how issues related to culture (including race, immigration, and intersecting dimensions) matter to the effectiveness of afterschool programs and staff practices. Demographic changes in the U.S. population make these questions increasingly relevant to the field. In 2015, a majority of all U.S. children younger than 5 years were racial or ethnic minorities and that will soon be true of U.S. adolescents (Cohn, 2016). Currently, 25% of children under 18 have an immigrant parent, and this figure is rising (Suárez-Orozco, Marks, & Abo-Zena, 2016).
How Does Culture Matter in Afterschool Programs for Adolescents?
The two of us have struggled for over a year on how to introduce this issue. There are so many layers to consider. One starting point is that humans are inherently cultural creatures. Culture matters because each day youth and staff bring their cultural experiences to the program, and these experiences influence how they think, act, and learn. The culture people bring can include expectations about how things should be done, cultural beliefs and frameworks for interpreting things that happen, and dispositions toward other cultural groups—including stereotypes, positive attitudes based on prior experiences, or an unexamined sense of privilege as a member of a dominant culture. Low-income minority and immigrant youth may carry with them feelings of perpetual uncertainty about their physical safety (Coates, 2015); frequent experiences with adults in official roles (i.e., teachers, police) who treated them in hostile, unpredictable, or demeaning ways (Cohen & Steele, 2002; Yeager et al., 2014); and awareness from observing kith and kin that society is rigged against them (Furstenberg, 2006). Researchers, intermediary organizations all have roles in helping programs and staff ask: what might we not know about youth in our programs? This should include, what cultural assets might they bring to the program that can enhance their capacities to engage and learn?
Another starting point is that institutions are cultural creations. Culture matters because it permeates every aspect of programs: program design, logic models, program culture, activities, staff practices, and relationships. It shapes fundamental beliefs about what a good program looks like: What values and goals are prioritized, what language(s) are spoken, conceptions of how youth development occurs, and, in turn, what actions and assets of youth are (or are not) congruent with those conceptions. Again, it is a job of researchers, staff, and all in field to ask questions.
We must also recognize that culture matters in special ways to programs serving adolescents, because of their life stage. Adolescence is a developmental stage when use of stereotypes and acts of bigotry can increase and when peer-groups can become more closed and hostile to out-group members (Gaertner & Dovidio, 2000; Killen, Lee-Kim, McGlothlin, & Stangor, 2002). Adolescents also become more able to detect unfairness, discrimination, and differential treatment by adults (Cohen & Steele, 2002; Quintana, 1998) and to understand processes that shape cultural/racial attitudes, behavior, and conflict (Killen, Mulvey, & Hitti, 2013; Kirshner, 2015). These new behavioral patterns, sensitivities, and capacities for understanding can all be manifest in programs (Gutiérrez, Larson, Raffaelli, Fernandez, & Guzman, 2016).
Many adolescents also become concerned about issues of ethnic identity and cross-ethnic relationships. Teens are more likely to actively engage in questioning and exploring their membership in one or multiple culture groups (Kiang, Witkow, Baldelomar, & Fuligni, 2010; Quintana, 1998). The youth-centered philosophy of programs can provide powerful affordances for youth to engage with these issues in constructive ways. Programs with deliberate strategies can provide valuable contexts for youth to develop a range of culture-related skills, including those for building understanding across cultural groups and for identifying and controlling their biases and prejudicial behavior (Hammack, 2006; Watkins, Larson, & Sullivan, 2007).
We cannot do justice in this short introduction to all the important ways that culture can matter to programs. Additional issues can involve the actions and policies of program administrators, staff selection and training, and appropriate approaches to ensure recruitment of diverse youth (Simpkins, Riggs, Ngo, Ettekal, & Okamoto, 2016). They can include how programs respond to socially relevant issues that are important to youth, their families and neighborhoods (e.g., immigration policy, housing issues, gang violence). They also include how programs address the intersectionality of ethnicity with socioeconomic status (SES), inter-group conflict, youth’s internalized racism (Gutiérrez et al., 2016), language dominance (Gast et al., 2016), and the enduring processes of structural racism that affect youth and programs in manifold ways.
So much is at stake. Understanding how culture matters is both a pressing challenge and a powerful opportunity for programs to most effectively serve youth of color and immigrant youth.
The State of the Field
Despite this critical importance, issues related to culture, race, and immigration have been neglected in the mainstream field of youth development. Research on culture and programs is sparse (Fredricks & Simpkins, 2012). Many studies (including those by the first author) obtain data from ethnically diverse youth, yet have often presented findings without evaluating how culture matters. The reports of panels convened to formulate principles of positive youth development discuss the importance of cultural inclusiveness, but limited attention is given to how to achieve it, especially from the point of view of youth of color (e.g., Eccles & Gootman, 2002; but see Simpkins et al., 2016). Furthermore, issues of culture, race, and immigration have not been a high priority among many funders. Indeed, some programs report recent pressure to reduce their attention to issues of culture in response to funders’ shifting their priorities to other goals, such as youth’s academic achievement and scores on general developmental measures (Baldridge, 2014; Gast et al., 2016).
To be sure, there are programs that have a programmatic focus on issues of cultural and racial identity and provide powerful developmental settings for immigrant and minority youth (e.g., Ginwright, 2010; Kirshner, 2015; Quiroz-Martínez, HoSang, & Villarosa, 2004). Furthermore, as described in this special issue, there are mainstream arts, STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics), and leadership programs that demonstrate components of culturally responsive practices (Gast et al., 2016; Gutiérrez et al., 2016; Ngo, 2016). But a substantial number of programs either ignore these issues or deal with them superficially (Gutiérrez et al., 2016; Quiroz-Martínez et al., 2004).
The cost of this neglect is that many programs inadequately serve youth from immigrant and minority ethnic and racial groups. Research in U.S. schools and other institutional contexts shows that when issues of culture are not discussed, institutions are shaped by European American, middle class values, assumptions, and privilege, often with little awareness by staff and administrators (Valenzuela, 1999). Rogoff, Baker-Sennett, Lacasa, and Goldsmith (1995) provide valuable documentation of how this works for youth programs. They provide an in-depth examination of how the activities of the Girl Scouts programs (at the time of their study) were embedded in an historical tradition and set of assumptions based on European American youth and families. This is how culture typically works: The values and practices of the dominant group are passed down and accepted as customary and good. The problem is that the cultural values, beliefs, assets, and practices of youth from outside the mainstream are then readily marginalized, seen as abnormal, ignored, and silenced (Neville, Awad, Brooks, Flores, & Bluemel, 2013). Youth from non-mainstream groups are disadvantaged. They can feel isolated and powerless; they are less able to draw on the cultural tools and experiences they have learned since childhood. Therefore, it is essential that researchers, funders, program administrators, and staff be proactive in developing awareness within the field and creating culturally inclusive programs.
Articles in the Special Issue
The four articles in this special issue bring together developmental and critical studies perspectives from diverse fields of psychology, anthropology, and sociology. Each provides a distinct spotlight on the multifaceted ways in which culture matters in afterschool programs, as they reflect and respond to internalized racism, language dominance, inter- and intra-group conflict, and other issues. Against the backdrop of racial discrimination by police, globalization, and immigration debates, the collection of papers brings timely and important insights to socially relevant issues faced by afterschool programs.
In the first article, Sandi Simpkins, Nathaniel Riggs, Bic Ngo, Andrea Vest Ettekal, and Dina Okamoto examine the eight widely used features of high-quality programs identified by the National Research Council’s report, Community-Level Programs for Youth Development (Eccles & Gootman, 2002). The authors draw on research and theory to suggest how each of these features, originally framed in universalistic terms, can be implemented in programs in ways that are culturally responsive. Next, Bic Ngo uses data from an intensive ethnography of a youth theater program in a Hmong community organization to examine how it addresses the needs of Hmong American immigrant youth, grappling with disjunctures between their lives in two cultures. The article illuminates how the program facilitates youth’s explorations of culture, identity, and belonging in ways that allow them to “name the world.” In the third article, Vanessa Gutiérrez, Reed Larson, Marcela Raffaelli, Mariela Fernandez, and Sandy Guzman draw on interviews with 50 program leaders about culture-related incidents that occurred recently in their programs. The findings elucidate the varied and complex nature of these incidents and the varied ways in which program leaders responded to them. Finally, Melanie Gast, Dina Okamoto, and Valerie Feldman use ethnographic data to examine the effects of funder-mandated English-only language policies in four afterschool programs. Their findings demonstrate how these policies restricted the developmental opportunities for immigrant bilingual and English learners in these programs.
All of these papers point to ways in which programs can effectively draw on the assets of minority and immigrant youth and respond to their needs. Simpkins et al. use a strong developmental framework to provide a set of suggested culturally responsive practices for programs and staff. Ngo demonstrates how a culturally relevant pedagogy can facilitate constructive processes among youth who are navigating bi-cultural identities. Gutiérrez et al.’s findings suggest staff practices for responding constructively to culture-related incidents and ways in which these practices should be adapted for younger and older adolescents. Gast et al. suggest how use of non-English languages can be a valuable asset that increases the benefits of programs for immigrant youth.
We want to stress that these four papers are neither comprehensive nor do they present the final word on the topics they cover. Our hope is that they serve as a stimulus for future research and a stimulus for greater discussion among programs, staff, and funders on how to insure that programs provide rich and powerful developmental settings for all youth.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.