Youth—Adult Partnerships in an Out-of-School-Time Program: An Exploration of Power, Safety, and Respect

Abstract

Today’s youth are not being effectively prepared to navigate school, work, and life as adults (e.g., Symonds, Schwartz, & Ferguson, 2011). Where schools have fallen short in their preparatory capacities, out-of-school-time programs (OSTPs) have shown promise in helping equip young people for adult life (e.g., Larson, Hansen, & Walker, 2005). Moreover, within OSTPs, youth—adult partnerships (YAPs) have demonstrated the potential to serve as a transformative developmental model for youth (e.g., Zeldin & Collura, 2010). Building on existing research on OSTPs and YAPs, and using a mixed-methods approach, I examined the experiences youth and adults had in an OSTP that was identified as a model of YAPs. Interviews, observations, and survey responses yielded findings related to power, psychological safety, adults serving youth, and the specialness of the OSTP. Both youth and adults exerted power, though adults had more than the literature would have predicted. The environment where youth and adults engaged in YAPs was psychologically-safe, which played an important role in the overall experiences of youth and adults. Despite anticipating a thoroughly egalitarian environment, I came to understand how adults served youth in a range of ways and how relentlessly adults strived to yield power to youth. Ultimately, youth and adults described how the OSTP was special and unique, especially compared to school. Together, these results imply that the existing conceptualization of YAPs needs to be more adequately grounded in the practical realities of OSTPs and that subsequent research should be conducted to more deeply understand the dynamism of youth—adult relations, in general, and YAPs, in particular.