Urban Youth Workers' Use of “Personal Knowledge” in Resolving Complex Dilemmas of Practice

Abstract

Using narrative inquiry to analyze accounts of how two experienced youth workers handled the potential for gun violence in their organizations, this article argues that youth worker expertise in part is based on personal knowledge derived from childhood neighborhood-based peer groups and participation in youth programs. Expert youth workers draw on personal and professional craft knowledge and move between the rules of youth organizations and the rules of the streets to read people and situations and address the potential for serious violence. Implications for youth worker professional development are raised.

KEYWORDS:

• expertise
• professional development
• urban
• youth worker knowledge

Notes

The names of people and the neighborhoods in which they grew up were changed to protect identities.

There are programs in the United States that already privilege the knowledge of youth workers. For example, Stein et al. (2005) and Hildreth and VeLure Roholt (2013) have discussed programs at the University of Minnesota in which youth workers “do youth work, reflect on how it went and what their efforts created, consider what they might do differently, and then bring this knowledge with them into practice” (p. 152).