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2 Nov 2020
Q & A

A Quick Word with Jill Young on the Readiness Projects

Youth live, learn, work, play, and make meaning in many different settings and systems. Recent cross-disciplinary research in neuroscience, psychology, sociology, and other fields offers insights into what it takes for youth to thrive.

The Readiness Projects—a partnership of the Forum for Youth Investment, the National Urban League, and AIR—advances work informed by science and grounded in practice. In this Q&A, Jill Young, senior researcher at AIR, discusses how the Readiness Projects can support equitable opportunities for youth.
 

Q: What are the Readiness Projects, and how do they aim to help young people?

Young: The goal of the Readiness Projects is to support youth thriving by upending inequities, embracing science-informed strategies, and accelerating the progress of existing initiatives.

We focus on helping practitioners put into action what the science of learning and development tells us about how young people learn, develop, and thrive. For example, we are working with several national youth development organizations, such as the Boys & Girls Club of America, to develop illustrative examples of how they integrate principles of whole child design into their organizational and program practices.

We are also developing a Youth Fields Workforce Survey. The survey will provide reliable information for policy, practice, and research efforts to understand, strengthen, and support those who work in youth fields. These individuals—such as youth workers, child care providers, and museum educators—are an essential component in supporting young people.
 

Readiness Project Priorities
  • Advance accessible and memorable (“sticky”) narratives about how science and research on learning and development can be used to advance equity and thriving.
  • Amplify the voices of youth and community leaders and ask how a more robust approach to equity and thriving can support and refine their agendas.
  • Emphasize that all adults are an essential component to learning in all settings.
  • Work toward establishing a “thriving youth” field, as a way to align work across systems and support, connect services, challenge harmful policies, and transform systems.

Q: How do the Readiness Projects define thriving, equity, and learning and development?

Young: The Readiness Projects coordinating partners wrote and released a paper to connect and provide expanded definitions of thriving, equity, and learning.

  • Thriving includes not only well-being (how you’re doing in life) but also grounding (knowing who you are) and agency (having the skills, knowledge, and beliefs to tackle life’s challenges).
  • Instead of simple equity, we encourage those working in youth fields to move toward robust equity. This requires intentional action to counter inequality, institutionalized privilege and prejudice, and systemic deficits.
  • Transformative learning and development goes beyond the idea of learning as processing and acknowledges the skills required to translate specific experiences and content into generalizable knowledge, competencies, and perspectives.

In our paper, we consider these three expanded concepts together as a formula, in which we declare a goal and strategy for achieving it: Transformative Learning & Development X Robust Equity = Thriving Youth. In this formula, relationships and experiences are the multipliers (i.e., the X). We hope that this formula helps educators and practitioners understand what helps youth thrive. All youth have the potential to thrive when we design and support equitable learning environments. Context matters: experiences, relationships, and environments deeply shape how young people learn and develop. We all play a role, as systems and individuals, in designing and supporting equitable learning environments for young people.
 

Q: How do you envision the paper informing the field?

Young: We consider this paper a starting point for youth-serving systems and adults within those systems to reflect on current research, policies, and practices. We hope they will not only recognize but also embrace the power we all have to influence youth thriving and success. We also hope that by presenting the research, we will spur researchers, policymakers, and practitioners into taking action to create opportunities for transformative learning and development that are equitable and support thriving and success among young people.

Related Projects

Project

The Readiness Projects: Leveraging Science to Support the Readiness of Youth, Adults, Systems, and Communities

Emerging findings from neuroscience, psychology, sociology illuminate the optimal human development periods—early childhood and adolescence—when we must act with intention and care. The Readiness Projects will bolster projects that support the readiness of youth, adults, systems, and community leaders by finding ways to test the utility of the learning sciences findings, to inform efforts to improve quality, to increase engagement, and to advance equity.

Related Work

1 Oct 2020
Blog Post

Bread and Roses Too

COVID-19 has amplified inequities and mental health needs, with disproportionate effects on marginalized people and communities. All humans deserve to thrive—socially, emotionally, cognitively, physically, economically, and spiritually. In this blog post, David Osher and Jill Young propose a more robust conceptualization of equity—one that incorporates thriving and addresses human learning and development across all life spaces and over the life course.
Topic: 
Education, Equity in Education, Social and Emotional Learning

Further Reading

  • Spotlight on the Science of Learning and Development
  • Science of Learning and Development in Practice
  • The Readiness Projects: Leveraging Science to Support the Readiness of Youth, Adults, Systems, and Communities
  • Resources to Go Beyond the Basics and Support the Whole Child
  • S. D. Bechtel, Jr. Foundation National Character Initiative Retrospective
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Image of Jill Young

Jill Young

Senior Researcher

Topic

Education
Early Childhood and Child Development
Equity in Education
Youth Development
Youth-Serving Systems

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