YOST3101: Youthwork: Orientations and Approaches

Within the U.S. there is an ongoing conversation about what values, knowledge, skills, and practice are basic to the field of youth work. The occupational title, youth worker, is not widely recognized with a set of knowledge, skills, and attitudes that distinguish it from other occupations that work with young people (teacher, coach, social worker). Often youth worker is taken to signify those who “work with youth.” In recent years, there have been attempts to clarify and specify what a youth worker does, whom a youth worker should be, and how one should be educated for this type of work. These debates now occur within international and national movements to “professionalize” youth work. In this course, we enter this conversation by considering the multiple ways of becoming, being a youth worker, and doing youth work. Toward the end of the course, we will also explore how context—agency, street, and neighborhood—can have consequences on all three of these. To be knowledgeable participants in these conversations you must know the possible answers to at least four questions. Who are young people? What is youth work? Who are youth workers? Where is the location of the work? For each of these questions, we explore the diverse answers, given by scholars and practitioner, here in the United States and internationally. How one chooses to answer any one of these questions has consequences for the other three. Attention is also given to how you and I choose to answer these questions given our own experience of being a young person and our current interactions with young people. At the end of this course, you will be able to participate at a beginning level in the conversations that are of concern to youth work and enhance your direct work with, on behalf of, and/or for young people. In the process, you will have begun constructing and articulating a personal philosophy of youth work. prereq: YOST 3032

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