Chicago voices: Youth workers struggling with schooling and welfare

The paper uses the voices of Chicago youth workers who are students in a community college program geared to the professional education of youth work practitioners.  This college program sits within a wider national movement to professionalize youth work in which both welfare approaches to young people and the ideology of schooling still dominate much of the field.  Explicit social justice frames of reference have limited presence in much U.S. youth work, in part because of the dominating power of schooling and welfare ideologies.

While there is a strong Federal drive to improve U.S. college graduation rates, youth workers receive very limited support for higher education participation and many youth workers struggle with higher education realities; are employed in increasingly vulnerable community-based agencies; and, see an employment market in which their qualifications have limited value.

Assessment data using the voices of Chicago youth workers highlight the challenges workers face in establishing more democratic youth work practices and the struggle to move away from the dominant ‘risk’ paradigm that as long historical roots in adult interventions into the lives of young people.

The paper presents a critique of newer program quality initiatives that have come to dominate the field in Chicago and across the U.S.  It concludes with a call for a realignment of the youth work field and investment in professional education premised on the values of social justice and democracy.