ABSTRACT
The disproportionate number of children living in poverty in the United States is a constant reminder of the social inequities that loom large in this country. “Nationally, one-in-five children grow up poor, 9.2 million children currently lack health insurance, 3.9 million people are homeless (a number projected to increase 5% each year) and 1.3 million (or 39%) of them are children” (Leistyna, 2009, p. 52). Beyond the myriad of challenges that youth face in urban communities of poverty, many attend public schools caught in the cross hairs of a neoliberal assault, where escalating pressures for accountability, privatized reforms, and a growing emphasis on high-stakes testing predominate (Darling-Hammond, 2010; Kumashiro, 2012; Lipman, 2011). A heightened focus on techno-rational forms of instruction fail to provide youth with the knowledge and skills to understand and ultimately challenge profound social and economic inequalities that shape their daily lives (Giroux, 2009). These changes, along with others, are part of the neoliberal shift of the last several decades. “[N]eoliberal academic discourses and ideologies … substitute cultural explanations of poverty for structural causes, pathologize people of color, and promote individual responsibility and market solutions” (Lipman, 2011, p. 89). In this context, the narrowing of school curriculum creates a space for the proliferation of programs of the types discussed herein. These initiatives are reliant on short-term funding acquired through market competition, thereby creating precarious conditions for their work and giving more power to funding sources to shape agendas. Increasingly targeted for societal and educational disinvestment, youth on the class and race periphery are marginalized and cast as social problems (Books, 2007). Despite notions of public schooling existing for and in the interests of all students (Smyth, 2012, p. 76), youth from urban communities of poverty find themselves academically disconnected and slowly disappear into the ravages of growing poverty in the United States (Darling-Hammond, 2010; Fine et al., 2004; Lipman, 2004). There are, nonetheless, a variety of ways in which youth are involved in taking charge of and reshaping their lives. Typical of these opportunities in school settings are school governance and service learning courses, and, outside of school, there are programs within community-based organizations, church groups, and civic organizations, among others. Some ways of engaging, such as volunteering and community service, are either ancillary to or required by schools. A third space consists of after-school programs, which generally fall into two main camps:
childcare programs for school-aged youth, focused on providing a safe environment for youth to participate in unstructured activities, and youth development programs oriented toward the development of academic and socio-emotional competencies, skills, and commitments (Kahne et al., 2001; Riggs and Greenberg, 2004). In the main, this space acts as a bridge between school and community, serving the academic and social needs of low-income youth by minimizing or altogether eliminating the risks presented by unsupervised time while also providing opportunities to enhance youth development once the official school day is over (Borden and Serido, 2009; Dryfoos, 1999; Halpern, 2000, 2002; Halpern et al., 2000; Little et al., 2008; Mahoney et al., 2009; Witt, 2004). In this chapter, we examine three common approaches that seek to engage youth as active participants in their own development and broader social change.1 We focus on strategies that use the terminology of “youth leadership,” “student voice,” and “civic engagement.” While these are only three of many kinds of initiatives (for example, empowerment, community service, youth organizing, and social entrepreneurship), we selected these three to examine given growing attention to them in both scholarship and programming and their explicit focus on engaging youth in social change processes. They can occur in school programs and after-school programs, or outside of school, although many are situated in after-school contexts. In this review of research, we look closely at how urban youth are understood and contextualized in each of these approaches, with explicit attention to youth in conditions of poverty.
