“It’s All Connected”: Critical Bifocality and the Liminal Practice of Youth Work

Abstract

Efforts to transform educational systems advocate for shifting and expanding the voices of those who generate research. This study was part of a project that brought together mathematics teachers, youth workers, and researchers to create equity-centered noticing frameworks for mathematics instruction. We explore youth workers’ understandings of the relationship between local educational equity problems and larger structural forces. By applying the framework of critical bifocality, we explore how youth workers demonstrate praxis where their pedagogical responses are animated by an understanding of the inherent linkages between broad social, economic, and political forces and educational equity issues in the local community.

Keywords:

• Youth work
• critical bifocality
• noticing
• out-of-school time