What is my role? Establishing teacher and youth worker responsibilities in social action projects

Abstract

In this research, I analyze the roles of teachers and youth workers from a community-based organization in the context of two high school social action projects. Both the teachers and the youth workers assumed distinct roles while working together during the civic project enactments. The teachers were largely positioned as responsible for structure and accountability, as they prioritized monitoring student behavior toward clear expectations. The youth workers assumed a different responsibility of promoting student voice by encouraging students to be social and pursue questions that were important to them. I identified these roles, explored at the heart of this article, through a study of teachers and youth workers’ interview transcripts, observations of their practice, and document analysis. The qualitative data contained numerous examples of their defined roles that enforced narrow scripts for themselves and each other. The teachers and youth workers’ role distinctions illustrate a type of roadblock that can hinder them from assuming multifaceted and flexible teaching roles. I draw attention to the division to raise questions of how teachers and youth workers’ roles can be expanded and how educators might take up varying responsibilities so to promote youth civic engagement.

Keywords:

• teacher role
• teacher responsibility
• social action
• partnerships in education

Notes

1. The organization’s name, Urban Youth, is a pseudonym. Additionally, the names of all people and schools in this paper are pseudonyms so to protect the participants’ identities.

2. In USA schools, ninth graders are generally 14 years of age. In the Leadership Academy’s advisory class, students and teachers sought to develop the students’ personal characteristics and goals. It did not bring attention to any one content-area and instead, lessons were oriented around the students’ personal academic and social needs.

3. The key questions for the teachers and facilitators (the focus of this paper) were as follows: Describe the social action project. Why did/are you implement/ing this project? What happened/is happening during this project? Why do you think these learning outcomes occurred/are occurring?