Organizational development is based in part on knowledge development, both formal, scientifically proven and also nonscientific practice wisdom. This article brings together all of the lessons learned over our six years of work with Saint Paul Parks and Recreation, and suggests the practice utility of these.
7 From lessons learned to emerging practices Michael Baizerman, Ross VeLure Roholt, Kathy Korum, Sheetal Rana In short, the American community—cities, towns, and corporate entities enjoying local self-government—is today falling far short of meeting the needs of its young people. The situation calls for organized local action, not in a few scattered cities and towns, but in a very substantial proportion of all American communities. American Youth Commission (1939)
there is some consensus emerging across disciplines and professions in the definitions of the lay term best practices and promising practices, but there is no standard definition or fully acceptable methodology for proving that a practice is one or the other. The concepts in this field are still fluid, with new terms and distinctions presented and contested. Among the terms now used are emerging practices, research-validated and field-tested best practices, and, of course, lessons learned.1 NEW DIRECTIONS FOR YOUTH DEVELOPMENT, NO. 139, FALL 2013 © WILEY PERIODICALS, INC. Published online in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com) • DOI: 10.1002/yd.20073
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That all of this debate is not simply semantic is made clear by Ashcroft alone and with colleagues who provide epistemological grounds for accepting and challenging this knowledge-buildingto-action strategy, based, for them, on testable propositional medical knowledge.2 These epistemological and methodological concerns are relevant to all of the practices that comprise community-based healthy youth development.3 We set these aside for a minute and begin with lessons learned over our six years of work, examine each, and decide which meets the tests to be treated as a best, promising, or emergent practice and which remains in the epistemological and empirical status of a (lowly) lesson learned. What have we learned over the past six years about how organization change to support healthy youth development can be initiated, accomplished, and sustained? What are “emerging practices,” “promising practice,” “best practices,” and “lessons learned”? What are generalizations, principles and guiding aphorisms, and metaphors? How best to present these? Our initial answer is as aphorisms or as Asian fortune cookie fillers: short one-line truths with no elaboration. Why this? Because we have been doing the work long enough to know that almost every positive change is contingent and in effect temporary, and that to grasp what this means requires learning how to contextualize the work over and over again over time. Over time, what seemed solid could melt, what seemed loose can tighten, and each and both could reverse, and more than once. This is our reality of positive organization changing to support healthy youth development. We sequence time as work initiated, accomplished, and sustained because over time, much of what we intentionally initiated was achieved, but then P&R youth work as a practice regressed, slipped, or was again poor, intermittent, immoral, unethical, or simply lousy. Obviously if we worked at P&R for a shorter time, we might have left with a longer list of accomplishments and a longer list of which of these were sustained. That this is not the case is a direct consequence of being involved over a long period of time and watching how a moment becomes a week, then longer. new directions for youth development • DOI: 10.1002/yd
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Over that time, organizations are continuously changing somewhat and unevenly across and down structure and practice because of sociopolitical and economic changes in their near to far environments, including their interorganizational networks. This may be true more for public agencies, those funded with public funds, such as the municipal P&R and Saint Paul Library. Not least among these external factors are municipal and state elections, changes in political leadership, public budgets, youth moral panics, constantly shifting youth policy priorities, issues of public governance, citizen politics, and the like. Often, to some P&R insiders and outsiders, although differently to each, nothing at P&R seems to change. Yet much changes constantly within P&R and between and among it and other municipal voluntary youth agencies and community groups. In effect, P&R is like a pot always boiling somewhere—among managers, staff, and their relationship; between leaders and managers; between neighborhood groups and local centers; between city council members, neighborhood groups, and local centers; and so on. It is in part a matter of perspective. Although none of this is unusual, it all is real and consequential for the work, for individuals, and for how they understand, make sense of, and explain what they tried to do, how they did the work, what they think and can demonstrate worked, and how they explain this. All of this includes disciplines and analytical frames, methods, language, and the like. While this is not ethnography, we all have learned that frames, methods, and language shape the experienced reality; reporting it rhetorically is surely not living it, as war reporters have always taught. Bringing these introductory points together into a lesson, we have learned the difficulties, the ease, the transitory wins and losses, and the never-ending work needed to transform a municipal youth agency’s structure, programs and services, youth workers and youth work to sustained, quality, ethical, inclusive, just, and participatory positive youth development. Most of the lessons learned do not fully meet a test for treatment as an emerging practice: “Continually incorporates lessons new directions for youth development • DOI: 10.1002/yd
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learned, feedback, and analysis to lead toward improvement or positive outcomes.”4 If we use these public health and other human services methodologies, our efforts fail here on incorporating lessons learned and pushing toward positive outcomes. We did continually work with front-line and management staff over multiple years and provided lessons learned, feedback, and analysis, but mostly these were not incorporated into the work nor did many staff think about and begin to work toward improvement and positive outcomes. Tradition and organization culture was typically strong enough to prevent and when implemented dismantle any program or practice innovation and improvement. If we use epistemological criteria, we again fail because we do not meet the test of empirical evidence to substantiate propositional action.5 However, if we argue that the type of knowledge that guides our practice is not yet at the stage of development where such propositions are widely known or used, then it is reasonable to not hold us to that standard and instead hold us to another. What other standard? Our contribution to knowledge development is at an early stage: the doing of practice, the naming of that practice, and the mining and excavation of the practice for possible generalizations. It is these that can move work like ours toward emerging and promising practices. From practice comes lessons learned, then other generalizations, then principles, and then it moves toward emerging practice. Lessons learned is the first level of generalization from the concrete, particular, and unique practice step, and principle moves a step toward a more universal proposition, with propositional practice knowledge (Figure 7.1).
Figure 7.1. Ideal-type degree of evidence continuum
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Other useful knowledge: Practice wisdom, rules of thumb, folk wisdom, craft knowledge, and more Practitioners at all levels and in all work areas of an organization come to have a variety of types of knowledge that complement, supplement, and even subvert the formal or official knowledge. Rules of thumb, mother’s wit, and aphorisms are three types, and practice wisdom is a fourth. It is “knowing how things work around here” and “knowing how to get things done.” It is often what older, more experienced workers know about and know how to do. This is not a softer knowledge; although it likely is not scientifically confirmed, it is how much of the world works. In fact, it may not be recognized, accepted, legitimized, or studied for what it is: knowledge about “the way this world works and the ways of making stuff happen, around here, now.” In our group’s collective history of over one hundred years of practice experience in working to improve youth services through organizational changing, each of us has a more or less coherent practice philosophy and practice wisdom tested every day on the frontlines of agency managing work, direct youth work, or technical assistance and consulting with youth agencies and programs. Among other useful knowledge, almost none of which has been subjected to rigorous empirical testing and hence does not meet criteria as a formal practice and a practice empirically assessed, are: • • • • • • • •
Common (sense) knowledge Tacit knowledge Mother’s wit Cookbook knowledge Recipe knowledge Horse sense Nuts-and-bolts knowledge Everyday knowledge
All are in a normative science netherland, yet are animated all the time and have to meet reality tests each time. Expert practice new directions for youth development • DOI: 10.1002/yd
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Figure 7.2. Confidence continuum
in everyday life means knowing these too. At best, these can fit within a paradigm at phronetic science and practice, where the scientifically true and the technically correct are joined in the morally good and ethically right. Figure 7.2 shows graphically these types of knowledge and forms of practice knowing.6 Using this knowledge frame, we offer four examples of lessons learned: • Include part-time workers. Part-time workers, especially when they hold other jobs, can bring a comparative perspective to their work, often enriching documentation, analysis, discussion, and the envisioning of possible futures. They are often differently invested in the agency and its practices and procedures, and this gives them a different perspective from that of full-time employees. Their personal motivation for their work may differ too from full-time workers, again contributing to alternate views. • Recruit and organize based on vocational call. Those called to the work or the job likely have a qualitatively different commitment to both than do those for whom the work and the job are more than “just a job,” a paycheck. Those vocationally called may be new directions for youth development • DOI: 10.1002/yd
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the strongest and best advocates for quality and meaningful work and job, and may be more willing to work toward those processes and goals. • Learn local mundane ways. Constantly invite workers who are close to the youth they serve and to others in their own community and in the nearby areas to tell about the everyday lives, interests, wants, and needs of these young people. Use these to invite young people to cocreate agency response to them. • Ask to be taught. Constantly check in, ask, and invite local communities to teach agency staff about the neighborhood, school, street, places of worship, and the rest. In this way, staff can truly say they know the community—its people, their everyday lives— and that this knowledge is regularly and systematically used in policy, planning, services, and evaluation. Workers and agencies must be sensitive to the proximate social environmental and responsive to it and local populations. Next we look article by article at lessons learned over our six years of work changing P&R to better foster the healthy development of young people through more effective organizational programs and services.
Lessons learned assessed Here we assess each of the lessons learned set out in articles 2 through 6. We have confidence in the following as principles of practice. From article 2 • Professional development can engage participants meaningfully and over the long term when the curriculum is not imposed on the participants and instead, the participants are invited to cocreate their own learning agenda and curriculum. This is certainly practice wisdom, a type of no-scientific, practitioner knowledge, in several fields.7 • Meaningful, engaging, and effective professional development emphasize practice principles, philosophies, and an ethos of professional new directions for youth development • DOI: 10.1002/yd
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development and youth work practice. In an organization in which a particular profession has no tradition, professional development is best when both the manifest and hidden curricula provide conceptual language that can be used for the development or enhancement of a personal professional identity, along with the substance of that profession’s particular gaze, stance, craft orientation, knowledge practices, and skills.8 • Professional development can facilitate in building a community of practice, where the participants engage in learning as doing, becoming, experience, and belonging. In organizations in which a particular profession has no tradition and workers in that tradition have no or few colleagues and where the work is a space wherein several types of practices can contribute, a community of practice can emerge.9 When emergent professional development can create opportunities for exploring and then joining personal development to professional development, both can feed organizational change and development. • Race and ethnic differences need to be accounted for and discussed openly. Race had consequences for how the workers were seen, as well as how they saw their world and did their work. In the context of a multiracial and multicultural agency staff working with the same or different clients, youth patrons, citizens, and community, race and ethnicity are omnipresent topics, always with the potential of becoming issues or problems. These must be engaged. The test of whether the professional development process is working is the experience and perceived safety, if not comfort, workers have in facing these realities in themselves, colleagues, and those whom they do and should serve. This is a moral principle of practice, whether or not it meets other empirical tests. This also meets the test of practitioner authority.10 • Organizational change leaders at the top, as well as at the frontline, are crucial for organizationwide diffusion of learning and practice. It is propositional knowledge that changes in an entire organization, and its elements—its structure, social organization, culture, and practice—can happen and be sustained only when there is buy-in from workers at all organizational levels, from frontline new directions for youth development • DOI: 10.1002/yd
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to executive. This meets several practitioner tests of confidence, including rule of thumb, practice wisdom, and common knowledge. • Change leaders need to be continually supported and guided to address resistance to organizational change. Organizations, through staff using social, cultural, and political means, can resist changes in all of these, as well as in who is (or is not) served, how, and the like. Organizations are said to have defenses, as do individuals, and one group’s positive change obviously can be another group’s awful idea. Resistance is a reasonable response (although we prefer ongoing dialogue and negotiation). Those advocating for change must be supported (practice wisdom) in engaging resistance and guided in how to continue to do this with minimal negative consequences for the idea, staff, and young people. It is aphoristic, likely a priori knowledge, and also propositional knowledge that organization change is always practiced as a process–changing the work from organizational change to organization changing; it is never finished. So too is resistance typically not a one-time event or reaction; it is ongoing as practice wisdom and propositional knowledge edge toward emerging practices. • Effective facilitators work in the meetings as well as outside the meetings with group members and others in their networks to help address the participants’ concerns and questions and to strategize for change. There are always more that two games going on when changing a public nonprofit organization to enhance community youth development: the visible and the other. Meetings are the public space, and a good meeting typically follows lots of out-of-sight work with individuals on group topics, life itself, and their life (practice wisdom). In a political frame, what happens in the meeting should not surprise the change(ing) activist, while in a dialogical frame, much should be emergent and true to the moment. One always works in the moment, and there is always a history to that moment that the activist can work to shape. Work with individuals between meetings provides data to the activist, maintains continuity of topic, keeps the other in front of new directions for youth development • DOI: 10.1002/yd
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oneself, allows for lobbying, and the like. All of this is practitioner knowledge and emerging practice knowledge. • There are infinite possibilities for personal, professional, and organizational development. New ideas and strategies for learning and development continually evolve. There is effective practice using a professionally developed curriculum, and there is effective practice when curriculum is cocreated with participants. These differences are based on different pedagogies that themselves are grounded in different philosophies of education and learning and, in turn, on different philosophical, educational, and political anthropologies. Best practice for youth practitioners is to follow John Dewey and “begin where the child/person is,” but at base that is a value as much as a strategy. In a community-based municipal agency serving youth, it is aphoristic that the activist/ facilitators of professional development want to show their conception of youth work and how it should be practiced by doing so with the professional development group. Experienced leaders of professional development groups can link almost any topic to central themes or issues the group has been working on. Remember (practice wisdom) that one can read anything a group member says as data, a teaching, a door opened to trying. • A trusting partnership between facilitators and upper-level staff of the host organization is necessary for a long-term, open-ended professional development. Every hour of professional development group costs one to three hours of outside work with group members (proposition). Crucial are relationships with upper-level agency management and leadership because they too must legitimize the work if it is to succeed (proposition), and it is they who must join in the challenge brought by “resistance” and organizational defense. From article 3 Research can be useful in changing organizations. This is aphoristic and true. Crucial is the negotiated political and programmatic contract between faculty and agency, beginning with the agency’s practice wisdom and its research question. Crucial too is partnernew directions for youth development • DOI: 10.1002/yd
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ship and commitment with upper to middle management to develop, implement, and use the study in the service of youth development and relationships with frontline staff that made data collection possible, safe, effective, and efficient. It is important for students to meet and be taught by both upper and middle management and hands-on youth workers so as to experience this enterprise as real and consequential for youth, themselves, and for the agency. This summary of lessons learned is all on this level of practice wisdom and is best practice (practitioner authority). • Life takes three to five times longer than it takes when doing this work in this way. Student field research on real community and agency issues and problems can be seductive to students in that field of practice. It is commonsensical and true that the real seduces. • Teaching this course is like facilitating a youth group. Students are youth (even when they are students) and faculty can teach as a youth worker, modeling youth work, teaching, and youthworker-as-researcher. It is commonsensical and practice wisdom and good practice. • Field research for a municipal agency can be win-win-win-win-win. Most like it when everyone wins, but some do not. Anti-intellectualism, and antiuniversity, and anti–youth work feelings and comments continue to be made, especially when research findings were used for P&R policy, program, worker, and recreation center assessment, and training. Sometimes, some in the real world punch back! Most, however, took their win and wanted to play together again. From article 4 • Shift from opinion giving to informed idea. Practice wisdom directs that hands-on youth work with young people in a frame of healthy youth development always has a moral good joined to the technical right knowledge and skill. The moral interpretive is to be open, direct, clear, transparent, just, equitable, inclusive, and safe. Pedagogically informed, hands-on direct practice with youth moves from the less to the more complex and from the new directions for youth development • DOI: 10.1002/yd
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easy to the more difficult. Opinions are easier to state for most (practice wisdom) than are informed ideas shaped by knowledge analysis, reflection, discussion, and expression. Moving from opinion to informed idea is to parallel individual developmental processes with a group of youth and is wise, if not best, practice. • Focus on giving advice, and work to ensure that advice gets used. Advice is (not) solicited, (not) responded to, and is (not) used.11 This is the advice structure.12 Advice might not be used for a variety of reasons, including because it is “faulty, poor, wrong” or the decision maker simply has other ideas and prefers those. On the individual level, it is aphoristic that offering (un)solicited advice has embedded in it the hope of use; youth, especially youth on advisory groups, like all the rest of us, want their ideas to be used, to count, and to make a difference. Collectively, as an advisory group, they want the same (commonsense knowledge). The continued involvement of some of them is contingent on whether they believe that they have been heard and what they said mattered, that is, had value and consequence. This is what keeps them involved to enhance their citizen work.13 In every way (except for quantitative data), this is a promising practice. • Authentic youth advisory structures meet a moral test. Direct youth work is real work—when it is true and consequential for youth and worker—when the space is safe, inclusive, just, and the like. It is authentic when it is done in good faith, with every effort made to ensure it is meaningful and consequential for youth, worker, and others and is done ethically. There is a moral test in all youth work, here too, and that is common knowledge and practice wisdom. How this is done is the nuts-and-bolts knowledge of youth work expertise. • Young people deserve a place at the table in addition to doing the work. To solicit peer opinions and ideas, to research, analyze, and reflect, to formulate one’s opinions and construct informed ideas is work and is a practice, and to do so as a group member is citizen work.14 Citizen (public) work on a formal advisory group should earn the group or its representatives a place at the table new directions for youth development • DOI: 10.1002/yd
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when meaningful and consequential issues are discussed and decided. This is a moral test joined to a political test, with both joined to a best moral practice. From article 5 • Partnerships tend to develop a culture of their own that occasionally clashes with the cultures in each partner agency. This is more problematic if issues affect public safety. The higher the issue is on a moral panic scale, the more complex the partnership becomes, requiring significant work from partner agencies, often with conflicting missions. This is commonsense knowledge and practice wisdom, with consequences in the shorter to longer term: this can be positive, in part because it is new, fresh, and innovative, say, and for that may be negative because these may not be what some want their agency or series or styles to be. It is important to remember this obvious point and work to keep the definition of the situation usable for positive change in how the partnership’s participating agencies and the partnership itself work to lead to communitybased healthy youth development through better, more responsive, more present and accessible, higher-quality, effective services, programs, and youth work. • We learned that in order for any work to begin, partnerships have to be recognized as spaces of negotiation. If individual agents from the partner organizations do not have the authority, are not willing, are not skilled, or do not see the value of negotiating, joint work is difficult. Organization change in our view is organization changing and ongoing. The same is true for negotiation, which for us is (ongoing) negotiating, whether dialogical, political, or other mode and style. This is a priori so in our frame, and is an unsubstantiated best practice, making it a principle of good practice that edges close to an emerging practice. To management consultants and gurus, this is a best practice.15 The idea of space in this context of youth work is used well by VeLure Roholt and Baizerman in their work on youth engagement and civic youth work.16 • Partnerships create new meanings in the collective work and can provide resources when work is not going so well within one’s own organinew directions for youth development • DOI: 10.1002/yd
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zation. It is true by definition that a partnership as a new space is likely a new meaning world and also potentially a world of different resources. It can be a place of respite and sustenance, and it could be less a space or a place than a way of being or working differently: this can rejuvenate. This is practice wisdom, mother’s wit, and several more forms of normative knowledge about “how the world really works.” This is less a principle or a practice than a truism. • Partnerships created between individuals at lower positional levels in organizations require synaptic connections with leaders who can create and keep open space for the partnership to flourish and be sustained. • Partnerships require senior management level buy-in, legitimacy, and active support to help ensure their shorter- to longerterm viability and utility for the joint work on behalf of youth and for what is gained by each participatory organization. This is practice wisdom and likely a promising to best practice in public administration and human services management, as well as in business. • Partnerships have a life cycle. It takes a lot of time and effort to create and work at sustaining them. Developing and maintaining trust, assessing the space within which you do and could work, negotiating priorities, and committing and agreeing on resources require skilled negotiation. Things begin and end and over time may show a literal or metaphoric life cycle. Reading a partnership in this poetic frame can encourage active attentiveness to life phases and developmental stages, reminding parties that the new, organized relationship of partnership, like other life forms, needs different attention, sustenance, and action at different times. It is practice wisdom that parties must attend continuously and work at the sustentation of their common space regularly, differently at times, and endlessly. From article 6 • Systems transformation requires synergy among those working on the grassroots and grass-tops levels. It is aphoristic, practice wisdom, and likely an as-yet-unproven promising practice that ongoing new directions for youth development • DOI: 10.1002/yd
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organizational changing requires alliances and coalitions and other power arrangements, between and among organizational change interests inside, outside, and between these groupings. This is likely increasingly true the more formal, large, and complex the organization, possibly too the older it is, and even more likely the more its work is decentralized into community-based offices and services. These later notions can be framed propositionally, and we suspect, will prove to be promising practices. • Do not discount the value of seasoned youth workers—regardless of their professional credentials—who are steeped in the everyday reality of the target population. “Old-timers” embody organizational history and often its practices, and with enough distance, they can be necessary and helpful informants about the social structure, practices, and cultural meanings of the organization. As survivors of the place, they are well placed to tell stories about it, including about the politics—the ways that decisions are made, power and authority and its (mis)uses, and the like. This may be true also for these workers’ grasp of “the street”—where programs and services touch the road. At best, they know how those in the agency are trying to reach their everyday lives and the meanings they give to these ways of living.17 Using and working with these people is good research, good politics, and surely practice wisdom. It is wise practice that likely could rise to the level of principle or even to emerging practice. • Hang out with prospective grantees in order to learn, assess their openness to observation, and collect other relevant data about the organization—its ethos, practices, and practice. It is best practice to know as much as necessary and more about a potential grantee. Words sent by them about themselves are insufficient. Needed is the smell and feel of the place—your take on it, what pulls you out of your chair, or hits you between your eyes. Such data are best collected through field observation, one form of which is hanging out. This is surely a best practice too, however difficult to substantiate. • Include youth (and adults) in the review and due diligence process who have lived experience in the neighborhoods or programs you seek to new directions for youth development • DOI: 10.1002/yd
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fund. Youth-oriented service programs should include young people in providing and evaluating the work. Youth program funders should also include young people in setting funding priorities and selecting what programs to fund, and in evaluating the funded work. Especially for community-based work, having young informants is smart—a principle, an emerging practice, and a moral practice. • Seek to identify individuals and teams whose interest in the work is more vocational than fiscal. It is not about the money! Those who are called to the work are likely to have a different commitment to it than those who seem to be there primarily for the check. This is practice wisdom. It may be that these are the workers who convince the funder; at minimum, seek them out and listen to them. While they may not be disinterested informants or especially passionate, they may have somewhat purer motives and may more likely speak truth to power. This is a wobbly generalization, but practice wisdom suggests trying this. • Having the courage to think creatively, engage untraditional partners, and take risks are key ingredients for system transformation. This is well-known aphoristic knowledge, and true for all practical purposes. System transformation or, as we prefer, transforming, is helped at different times by the traditional and at other times by the unique, possibly the exotic, and surely by outlier ideas and practices. It helps to get stuff unstuck and to move in an unanticipated direction. This one is hard to prove and worth considering on practice authority.
Extracting the potentially useful: Reading for borrowing and adapting research and practice for use? It is not self-evident how to read research and use it in one’s own work. There are guides to this and commonsense and practice wisdom too, but the process and the practice are not simple, and none of these gets fully at the complexities or the practical. Here we sketch some of both as tentative guides to the process and the new directions for youth development • DOI: 10.1002/yd
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practice. Our position is a radical, nonpositivist one; it is a view far beyond the margins and one that is useful. Use is a basic word. It is found in American usage as user, useful, or useless. A study can also be usable and may have for a particular decision or other use, usability, useableness, and usably. Presumably these conditions can be assessed for a study’s utility. Or this usage is a reification—an abstraction treated as a concrete particular, which it is not. Playing with utility, the core term is utile, and from this root come utilizable, utilize(r), and utilization. All of these words imply that the study (or its findings) has something to offer and can be helpful and practical (and not theoretical). These imply that the study can be applied and is relevant. All of these are statuses of the study or of the person who will take the study and use it. Or better, they will read the study, find or make sense of it in a practical context of relevance, and transform the study (its findings and data) into advice—policy ideas or directions or suggestions or recommendations for programmatic or other action. Much of this on use is presented as if it were self-evident, as if the metaphor, “What do the data say?” can be extended to include both “what the data suggest or recommend” and “how this advice should or must be put into action” to bring about programmatic and social betterment. It is as if this process of moving from data to change in the material world is more than self-evident; it does itself. That is, there is no sentient agent present who is doing this work. Rather, this transformative work must be carried out by an actor; it is an expertise.
The process of use We think it is self-evident that using research, evaluation, or a program narrative is an intentional process of transforming for use elements or aspects or ideas or conceptions or approaches or methods and then using these for program improvement, for example. We think of this process in this way. new directions for youth development • DOI: 10.1002/yd
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Begin with an actor who does or does not have a specific issue at hand or problem at hand he must respond to. Think of this actor as socially, organizationally, or programmatically embedded, and of these as giving context to the problem or issue requiring some engagement (i.e., prevention or solution). If the actor has a specific issue at hand, then he may choose to read the study in a use situation—a phenomenological situation and stance in which his reading of the study is framed by his need, want, or purpose at hand. This is in contrast to another actor who is not in a use situation and is reading for other purposes: employment, general learning, or looking at a colleague’s work, for example. These are two different and obvious reading stances. It is here that use begins: with a purpose in hand. The actor with a purpose in hand becomes a reader with a purpose: to find something to help him think about, understand, or do something about the issue. It is this (and these) that give form to his work and other actions and in a phenomenological sense structure his consciousness: what he looks for to read, how he reads, what sense he makes of what he is reading, and how he moves from a printed page or computer screen to action in the material or virtual world. In practical terms, the actor with a purpose in hand has a mental set—a frame within which he approaches the text or study in order to use it. The problem or issue can work to set a relevance frame for the reader who is searching for help for his problem or issue. This frame may be relatively open, closed, or narrow in relation to the problem or issue to be engaged. That is, the reader can more or less openly scan the evaluation report for insight or fact that he can read as advice for dealing with his problem or issue. This can be done with self-awareness or not, as a more or less conscious process within a frame of more or less intentionality. All of this is real, is manipulatable, and is teachable. Where in a research report or other text do readers look for actionable advice? Normatively, they are directed to the sections called “findings,” “conclusions,” and “recommendations” if they are reading research. By convention, this is where the new directions for youth development • DOI: 10.1002/yd
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researcher-writer puts what she thinks are the study findings along with her conclusions and recommendations. But this is a narrow search. The reader looking for inspiration, understanding, advice, and data could find these anywhere in the geography and topography of the study and report. The reader looking for where the researcher-writer puts her advice goes to those sections. The reader who is the one with a concrete, particular, specific, and unique problem can choose to scan the whole report so as to stimulate his expertise and choose not to be bound by the researcher-writer. It is a type of expertise to be inspired, stimulated, brought to new awareness by what one reads; it is an aesthetic, phenomenological process, a creative act. This act is typically written about in the evaluation literature in flat prose, as if the reader only has to go to the correct section of the evaluation report, take or excavate the findings, or then simply and without complications apply them, that is, put these into practice (i.e., into the world), and then “things will get better.” We all know that this process does not work in that way, even abstractly. Ceteris paribus means “all things being equal.” Are they ever? The reader of a research report is a hermeneutic worker, a meaning giver and hence a transformer who takes what he sees in the report and, by giving it meaning for possible use, brings it new and different relevance in meaning and purpose and brings it to a place of possible use. That space is at first imaginative, a mental geography, a place of “What if?” and “Could it?” and “If I tried?” This is a space for rehearsal, for mentally trying out, for imagining use and utility, and for testing fit. This making-sense work by the reader-practitioner who wants to make things better is difficult because he must choose relevance frames within which to interpret, make sense of, transform, and give meaning to what he reads. Reader-practitioners have different stores and stocks of relevant knowledge at hand: theories, work experiences, similar work situations and moments, and the like. These can be drawn to make sense and assess the potential of the research report for their problem or issue. new directions for youth development • DOI: 10.1002/yd
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Also implicated in this use situation is the aesthetic and literal form of the material, that is, the research report, with its words and numbers. Different reader-practitioners read, interpret, and transform some types of text more easily than others. Page layout matters, as does writing style, even paragraphing, and surely tables and charts. There are guides in the United States for preparing a research report, and these are sensitive to what makes it easier for readers to comprehend. The best focus on the usability of the report, while here our attention is on the reader-practitioner reading for (non)purposive use: assessing the text versus selfreflective reading and transforming for use. Surely both are necessary.
Action hypothesis So far, all of this work is mental; it is the worker-practitioners reading, thinking about and thinking how to more or less consciously and more or less intentionally. It is their “thinking how to” that brings us closer to the world. The bridge to there from the reader-practitioner’s mind is an action hypothesis—a hunch or more formal statement that some content from the evaluation report might be useful, helpful, or suggestive of what he could or should do because it could make a difference to his problem. The reader-practitioner can frame the action hypothesis in a logic model or plan. From these, he must imagine and then figure out how to transform it into action by deciding who must do what to whom and how (and why) in order to make it likely that the problem can be engaged effectively, and then to evaluate this—first with a process evaluation and then with an outcome evaluation, for example. This brief description of a Weberian ideal type of process fits within any model of research, evaluation, and program narrative use we know because none of those focus on the existential, phenomenological, cognitive, and hermeneutical processes of use. new directions for youth development • DOI: 10.1002/yd
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Change agent roles In this and the following section on language, we offer nonpropositional knowledge and learning from our six years of work at Saint Paul Parks and Recreation. These are presented to stimulate reflection on the practice of changing organizations to foster healthy youth development and as an invitation to study and work about ways of thinking, doing, and talking. The voluminous literature on social and organization change, more than 1 million articles, presents multiple change models using a variety of terms to name the change agent, both insider, outsider, and partnerships between both. Here we clarify roles they play in the six-year effort to enhance the amount, kind, and quality of community-based youth services and youth work at P&R: • Explicator. Included here is clarifier, that is, making visible in phenomenological and other ways and suggesting analyses and connections between practices, realities, and ideas. • Translator. Included here is a multicultural stance to name, interpret, and suggest meanings across organizations, cultures, ideas, and practices, crossing language worlds and life ways. • Instigator. Included here is gentle to stronger provocation to encourage examination, analysis, dialogue, and other practices using the role of marginal and outsider. • Connoisseur. Included here is legitimizing value, making distinctions, and arguing for the best-quality work. • Curator. Included here is encouraging and facilitating the valuing of the ordinary, the exotic, the different, and the invisible so as to understand these.18
Useful constructs and concepts for self and group reflection Over the years, each of us in reflection on our work and together in different combinations has developed a vocabulary of ideas and terms that prove useful: new directions for youth development • DOI: 10.1002/yd
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Discursive spaces. Places to talk and spaces within which to explore, analyze, plan, and organize are crucial when these are not elements or practices or structures within an organization. Empathic gaze. A way of looking and seeing in which those who seem to be “idiots” or bad can be given the benefit of the doubt; a political or moral way of perceiving and sense making. Imaginary landscapes. Invitation to imagine how things could be different is crucial and can be done within or outside normative and newly formed discursive spaces. Imagining ideals, the possibilities, and the likely is more than thinking, talking about this, and acting on it; it can be transformative for the individual, small group, and organization when the landscapes become new meanings and these are discussed. Organizational change is also change in what is meaningful and valued. Incompletability/incomplete. Incapable of being completed, as in organizations change—hence, organization changing. Models of organization. It is crucial for individuals who want to or do change their agency to make explicit their individual and collective models of organizational structure, practices, and processes and to subject these to discussion, analysis, and planning. Organizational metaphors are useful for this.19 Multicultural. Here, a worker who either is or gets what it is to be from worlds different from his or her own: neighborhoods, cultures, families, and the rest. The best youth work knows that multiple youth and adult worlds are polylingual and use all types of knowing to make worlds work for young people. Mystery. Contrasting mystery to problem, the former is not amenable solely to rational, analytical understanding. Mystery, consciously created and used, can give partial legitimacy to how the work of changing an agency is perceived and understood. And at times, it is a fine and useful way to name what is (or is not) going on in the organization or to categorize others’ decisions. Negotiation. This is the belief that most of life with others can be negotiated and that negotiating is a core skill in organizational new directions for youth development • DOI: 10.1002/yd
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work and youth work. It works well as a world stance, an orientation to the ongoing work of making youth agencies better at meeting youth where they are. Organization set. This scholarly idea reminds us that each organization and each unit within is usually part of a larger, organizationally interactive whole. Indeed it may be in other agencies and groups. Almost always there are others on the horizon. Polylingual. The ability to know and possibly to speak several languages, such as one’s agency, the “street,” one’s profession, and the languages of other agencies and other professions and occupations. It includes the ways youth talk: idiomatically with friends, parent talk, school talk, and the rest. The best youth workers are polylingual, and it is this in part that facilitates their gaining entry to multiple worlds (agency, city management, school, nonprofit, street, basketball court, etc.), ideally in the service of young people. Portraiture. Everything is a picture, and it itself can be a narrative— a story about what is, what could be, and even how what came to be. It is a way of summarizing and generalizing that can facilitate telling. Street savvy. This reminds us that the “street” can be anywhere and anyplace: an office, a recreation center, an agency. Knowing what is going on, knowing one’s way around, and knowing how to know and who to know, and what and how to use all of this is “savvy.” Sufficient time. Working to change a large, highly formalized bureaucracy, especially a public agency, takes lots of time (except when there are budget cuts and similar crises)—time for individuals to become group members, trust one another, trust outsiders (facilitators, consultants, technical advisors), and create the possibility of outsiders to be marginals, and thus arguably more effective with a group working at organizational revitalization or change. The obvious practical point is that most outsiders will not hang around long, whether new directions for youth development • DOI: 10.1002/yd
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for pay or not, and most organizations do not want them around that long because they become “almost workers,” almost “part of the family/organization.” Time is a crucial basic element in every promising practice, and must be understood, analyzed, and used as such. Words. In this last section are words, which we found useful in imagining, analyzing, reflecting, and doing the ongoing work of changing a municipal recreation agency from unintentional to intentional work doing community-based, healthy youth development.
Conclusion This article is read best in sequence, last, because it uses the earlier articles to tease out from lessons learned those that met the test for emerging, promising, or best practices: none fully meets the test for emerging practice. This does not mean that these lessons are without merit or utility in everyday practice. It could mean that there are not enough of the correct types of data to pass a particular test; it may also mean that the test itself is inappropriate for this type of practice experience and data and that other more appropriate tests should be used or developed. There are methodological and deeper epistemological issues here, and these are not for us here. These deeper and valid issues aside, we are left with work that is increasingly effective. Saint Paul Parks and Recreation at the highest managerial level is now publicly committed to quality youth work in all its centers and by its staff. As we know, that sentence, which is true, is deceptively simple and its subject the locus of extensive thought and debate in a highly contested space: quality youth work. All of these topics are practical and consequential in everyday practice to enhance healthy development in community-based organizations, public and nonprofit. All address us as practitioners and scholars, as citizens, parents, and youth. How we respond will define who we are. new directions for youth development • DOI: 10.1002/yd
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Notes 1. Learning For Action. (2011). Defining levels of evidence: Evidence-based practices, promising practices, and emerging practices. Retrieved from http:// www.napavintners.com/account/anv_grants/2012_Level_of_Evidence_ Matrix.pdf; Wikipedia. (2013). Best practice. Retrieved from http://en .wikipedia.org/wiki/Best_practice; Compassion Capital Fund. (n.d.). Identifying and promoting promising practices. Retrieved from http://www.acf .hhs.gov/programs/ocs/resource/identifying-and-promoting-effective -practices-0 2. Ashcroft, R. E. (2004). Current epistemological problems in evidence based medicine. Journal of Medical Ethics, 30(2), 131–135; Djulbegovic, B., Guyatt, G. H., & Ashcroft, R. E. (2009). Epistemologic inquiries in evidencebased medicine. Cancer Control, 16(2), 158–168. 3. Emerging, promising, and best practices definitions. Retrieved from http:// chfs.ky.gov/NR/rdonlyres/49670601-F568–4962–974F-8B76A1D771D3/0/ Emerging_Promising_Best_Practices.pdf; Bretschneider, S., Marc-Aurele, F. J., & Wu, J. (2005). “Best practices” research: A methodological guide for the perplexed. Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, 15(2), 307–323; Compassion Capital Fund. (n.d.); Gambrill, E. (1999). Evidence-based practice: An alternative to authority-based practice. Families in Society, 80, 341– 350; Hinojosa, J. (2013). The evidence-based paradox. American Journal of Occupational Therapy, 67(2), e18–e23; Learning for Action. (2011). Martin, M. R. (2010). Epistemology: Beginner’s guide. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press; Wikipedia. (2013). 4. Association of Maternal and Child Health Program. (n.d.). Best practice categories and criteria. Retrieved from http://www.amchp.org/programsandtopics/BestPractices/Pages/BestPracticeTerms.aspx 5. Ashcroft, R. E. (2004). Current epistemological problems in evidence based medicine. Journal of Medical Ethics, 30(2), 131–135; Djulbegovic et al. (2009). 6. Van Manen, M. (1977). Linking ways of knowing with ways of being practical. Curriculum Inquiry, 6(3), 205–228. 7. VeLure Roholt, R., & Baizerman, M. L. (Eds.). (2012). Evaluation advisory groups. New Directions for Evaluation, no. 136. San Francisco, CA: JosseyBass; Schein, E. H. (2004). Organizational culture and leadership. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. 8. VeLure Roholt & Baizerman. (2012). 9. Wenger, E. (1999). Communities of practice: Learning, meaning, and identity. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. 10. Rehman, L. A. (2002). Recognizing the significance of culture and ethnicity: Exploring hidden assumptions of homogeneity. Leisure Sciences, 24(1), 43–57. 11. VeLure Roholt & Baizerman. (2012). 12. VeLure Roholt & Baizerman. (2012). 13. VeLure Roholt & Baizerman. (2012). 14. VeLure Roholt & Baizerman. (2012). new directions for youth development • DOI: 10.1002/yd
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15. Compton, D. W., Baizerman, M., & VeLure Roholt, R. (2011). Managing evaluation: Responding to common problems with a 10-step process. Canadian Journal of Program Evaluation, 25(2), 103–123. 16. VeLure Roholt & Baizerman. (2012). 17. Anderson, R., & Cissna, K. N. (n.d.). Martin Buber: Bearing witness to an experience. Retrieved from http://communication.usf.edu/faculty/cissna/ Anderson-Cissna.pdf 18. O’Neill, P. (2012). The culture of curating and the curating of culture(s). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press; McEvilley, T. (1992). Art & otherness: Crisis in cultural identity. New York, NY: McPherson. 19. Morgan, G. (2006). Images of organization. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
michael baizerman is professor in the School of Social Work, Youth Studies, University of Minnesota. ross velure roholt is associate professor in the School of Social Work, Youth Studies, University of Minnesota. kathy korum is the deputy director for Saint Paul Parks and Recreation. sheetal rana is a recent graduate of the School of Social Work, University of Minnesota.
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7 From lessons learned to emerging practices Michael Baizerman, Ross VeLure Roholt, Kathy Korum, Sheetal Rana In short, the American community—cities, towns, and corporate entities enjoying local self-government—is today falling far short of meeting the needs of its young people. The situation calls for organized local action, not in a few scattered cities and towns, but in a very substantial proportion of all American communities. American Youth Commission (1939)
there is some consensus emerging across disciplines and professions in the definitions of the lay term best practices and promising practices, but there is no standard definition or fully acceptable methodology for proving that a practice is one or the other. The concepts in this field are still fluid, with new terms and distinctions presented and contested. Among the terms now used are emerging practices, research-validated and field-tested best practices, and, of course, lessons learned.1 NEW DIRECTIONS FOR YOUTH DEVELOPMENT, NO. 139, FALL 2013 © WILEY PERIODICALS, INC. Published online in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com) • DOI: 10.1002/yd.20073
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That all of this debate is not simply semantic is made clear by Ashcroft alone and with colleagues who provide epistemological grounds for accepting and challenging this knowledge-buildingto-action strategy, based, for them, on testable propositional medical knowledge.2 These epistemological and methodological concerns are relevant to all of the practices that comprise community-based healthy youth development.3 We set these aside for a minute and begin with lessons learned over our six years of work, examine each, and decide which meets the tests to be treated as a best, promising, or emergent practice and which remains in the epistemological and empirical status of a (lowly) lesson learned. What have we learned over the past six years about how organization change to support healthy youth development can be initiated, accomplished, and sustained? What are “emerging practices,” “promising practice,” “best practices,” and “lessons learned”? What are generalizations, principles and guiding aphorisms, and metaphors? How best to present these? Our initial answer is as aphorisms or as Asian fortune cookie fillers: short one-line truths with no elaboration. Why this? Because we have been doing the work long enough to know that almost every positive change is contingent and in effect temporary, and that to grasp what this means requires learning how to contextualize the work over and over again over time. Over time, what seemed solid could melt, what seemed loose can tighten, and each and both could reverse, and more than once. This is our reality of positive organization changing to support healthy youth development. We sequence time as work initiated, accomplished, and sustained because over time, much of what we intentionally initiated was achieved, but then P&R youth work as a practice regressed, slipped, or was again poor, intermittent, immoral, unethical, or simply lousy. Obviously if we worked at P&R for a shorter time, we might have left with a longer list of accomplishments and a longer list of which of these were sustained. That this is not the case is a direct consequence of being involved over a long period of time and watching how a moment becomes a week, then longer. new directions for youth development • DOI: 10.1002/yd
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Over that time, organizations are continuously changing somewhat and unevenly across and down structure and practice because of sociopolitical and economic changes in their near to far environments, including their interorganizational networks. This may be true more for public agencies, those funded with public funds, such as the municipal P&R and Saint Paul Library. Not least among these external factors are municipal and state elections, changes in political leadership, public budgets, youth moral panics, constantly shifting youth policy priorities, issues of public governance, citizen politics, and the like. Often, to some P&R insiders and outsiders, although differently to each, nothing at P&R seems to change. Yet much changes constantly within P&R and between and among it and other municipal voluntary youth agencies and community groups. In effect, P&R is like a pot always boiling somewhere—among managers, staff, and their relationship; between leaders and managers; between neighborhood groups and local centers; between city council members, neighborhood groups, and local centers; and so on. It is in part a matter of perspective. Although none of this is unusual, it all is real and consequential for the work, for individuals, and for how they understand, make sense of, and explain what they tried to do, how they did the work, what they think and can demonstrate worked, and how they explain this. All of this includes disciplines and analytical frames, methods, language, and the like. While this is not ethnography, we all have learned that frames, methods, and language shape the experienced reality; reporting it rhetorically is surely not living it, as war reporters have always taught. Bringing these introductory points together into a lesson, we have learned the difficulties, the ease, the transitory wins and losses, and the never-ending work needed to transform a municipal youth agency’s structure, programs and services, youth workers and youth work to sustained, quality, ethical, inclusive, just, and participatory positive youth development. Most of the lessons learned do not fully meet a test for treatment as an emerging practice: “Continually incorporates lessons new directions for youth development • DOI: 10.1002/yd
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learned, feedback, and analysis to lead toward improvement or positive outcomes.”4 If we use these public health and other human services methodologies, our efforts fail here on incorporating lessons learned and pushing toward positive outcomes. We did continually work with front-line and management staff over multiple years and provided lessons learned, feedback, and analysis, but mostly these were not incorporated into the work nor did many staff think about and begin to work toward improvement and positive outcomes. Tradition and organization culture was typically strong enough to prevent and when implemented dismantle any program or practice innovation and improvement. If we use epistemological criteria, we again fail because we do not meet the test of empirical evidence to substantiate propositional action.5 However, if we argue that the type of knowledge that guides our practice is not yet at the stage of development where such propositions are widely known or used, then it is reasonable to not hold us to that standard and instead hold us to another. What other standard? Our contribution to knowledge development is at an early stage: the doing of practice, the naming of that practice, and the mining and excavation of the practice for possible generalizations. It is these that can move work like ours toward emerging and promising practices. From practice comes lessons learned, then other generalizations, then principles, and then it moves toward emerging practice. Lessons learned is the first level of generalization from the concrete, particular, and unique practice step, and principle moves a step toward a more universal proposition, with propositional practice knowledge (Figure 7.1).
Figure 7.1. Ideal-type degree of evidence continuum
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Other useful knowledge: Practice wisdom, rules of thumb, folk wisdom, craft knowledge, and more Practitioners at all levels and in all work areas of an organization come to have a variety of types of knowledge that complement, supplement, and even subvert the formal or official knowledge. Rules of thumb, mother’s wit, and aphorisms are three types, and practice wisdom is a fourth. It is “knowing how things work around here” and “knowing how to get things done.” It is often what older, more experienced workers know about and know how to do. This is not a softer knowledge; although it likely is not scientifically confirmed, it is how much of the world works. In fact, it may not be recognized, accepted, legitimized, or studied for what it is: knowledge about “the way this world works and the ways of making stuff happen, around here, now.” In our group’s collective history of over one hundred years of practice experience in working to improve youth services through organizational changing, each of us has a more or less coherent practice philosophy and practice wisdom tested every day on the frontlines of agency managing work, direct youth work, or technical assistance and consulting with youth agencies and programs. Among other useful knowledge, almost none of which has been subjected to rigorous empirical testing and hence does not meet criteria as a formal practice and a practice empirically assessed, are: • • • • • • • •
Common (sense) knowledge Tacit knowledge Mother’s wit Cookbook knowledge Recipe knowledge Horse sense Nuts-and-bolts knowledge Everyday knowledge
All are in a normative science netherland, yet are animated all the time and have to meet reality tests each time. Expert practice new directions for youth development • DOI: 10.1002/yd
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Figure 7.2. Confidence continuum
in everyday life means knowing these too. At best, these can fit within a paradigm at phronetic science and practice, where the scientifically true and the technically correct are joined in the morally good and ethically right. Figure 7.2 shows graphically these types of knowledge and forms of practice knowing.6 Using this knowledge frame, we offer four examples of lessons learned: • Include part-time workers. Part-time workers, especially when they hold other jobs, can bring a comparative perspective to their work, often enriching documentation, analysis, discussion, and the envisioning of possible futures. They are often differently invested in the agency and its practices and procedures, and this gives them a different perspective from that of full-time employees. Their personal motivation for their work may differ too from full-time workers, again contributing to alternate views. • Recruit and organize based on vocational call. Those called to the work or the job likely have a qualitatively different commitment to both than do those for whom the work and the job are more than “just a job,” a paycheck. Those vocationally called may be new directions for youth development • DOI: 10.1002/yd
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the strongest and best advocates for quality and meaningful work and job, and may be more willing to work toward those processes and goals. • Learn local mundane ways. Constantly invite workers who are close to the youth they serve and to others in their own community and in the nearby areas to tell about the everyday lives, interests, wants, and needs of these young people. Use these to invite young people to cocreate agency response to them. • Ask to be taught. Constantly check in, ask, and invite local communities to teach agency staff about the neighborhood, school, street, places of worship, and the rest. In this way, staff can truly say they know the community—its people, their everyday lives— and that this knowledge is regularly and systematically used in policy, planning, services, and evaluation. Workers and agencies must be sensitive to the proximate social environmental and responsive to it and local populations. Next we look article by article at lessons learned over our six years of work changing P&R to better foster the healthy development of young people through more effective organizational programs and services.
Lessons learned assessed Here we assess each of the lessons learned set out in articles 2 through 6. We have confidence in the following as principles of practice. From article 2 • Professional development can engage participants meaningfully and over the long term when the curriculum is not imposed on the participants and instead, the participants are invited to cocreate their own learning agenda and curriculum. This is certainly practice wisdom, a type of no-scientific, practitioner knowledge, in several fields.7 • Meaningful, engaging, and effective professional development emphasize practice principles, philosophies, and an ethos of professional new directions for youth development • DOI: 10.1002/yd
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development and youth work practice. In an organization in which a particular profession has no tradition, professional development is best when both the manifest and hidden curricula provide conceptual language that can be used for the development or enhancement of a personal professional identity, along with the substance of that profession’s particular gaze, stance, craft orientation, knowledge practices, and skills.8 • Professional development can facilitate in building a community of practice, where the participants engage in learning as doing, becoming, experience, and belonging. In organizations in which a particular profession has no tradition and workers in that tradition have no or few colleagues and where the work is a space wherein several types of practices can contribute, a community of practice can emerge.9 When emergent professional development can create opportunities for exploring and then joining personal development to professional development, both can feed organizational change and development. • Race and ethnic differences need to be accounted for and discussed openly. Race had consequences for how the workers were seen, as well as how they saw their world and did their work. In the context of a multiracial and multicultural agency staff working with the same or different clients, youth patrons, citizens, and community, race and ethnicity are omnipresent topics, always with the potential of becoming issues or problems. These must be engaged. The test of whether the professional development process is working is the experience and perceived safety, if not comfort, workers have in facing these realities in themselves, colleagues, and those whom they do and should serve. This is a moral principle of practice, whether or not it meets other empirical tests. This also meets the test of practitioner authority.10 • Organizational change leaders at the top, as well as at the frontline, are crucial for organizationwide diffusion of learning and practice. It is propositional knowledge that changes in an entire organization, and its elements—its structure, social organization, culture, and practice—can happen and be sustained only when there is buy-in from workers at all organizational levels, from frontline new directions for youth development • DOI: 10.1002/yd
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to executive. This meets several practitioner tests of confidence, including rule of thumb, practice wisdom, and common knowledge. • Change leaders need to be continually supported and guided to address resistance to organizational change. Organizations, through staff using social, cultural, and political means, can resist changes in all of these, as well as in who is (or is not) served, how, and the like. Organizations are said to have defenses, as do individuals, and one group’s positive change obviously can be another group’s awful idea. Resistance is a reasonable response (although we prefer ongoing dialogue and negotiation). Those advocating for change must be supported (practice wisdom) in engaging resistance and guided in how to continue to do this with minimal negative consequences for the idea, staff, and young people. It is aphoristic, likely a priori knowledge, and also propositional knowledge that organization change is always practiced as a process–changing the work from organizational change to organization changing; it is never finished. So too is resistance typically not a one-time event or reaction; it is ongoing as practice wisdom and propositional knowledge edge toward emerging practices. • Effective facilitators work in the meetings as well as outside the meetings with group members and others in their networks to help address the participants’ concerns and questions and to strategize for change. There are always more that two games going on when changing a public nonprofit organization to enhance community youth development: the visible and the other. Meetings are the public space, and a good meeting typically follows lots of out-of-sight work with individuals on group topics, life itself, and their life (practice wisdom). In a political frame, what happens in the meeting should not surprise the change(ing) activist, while in a dialogical frame, much should be emergent and true to the moment. One always works in the moment, and there is always a history to that moment that the activist can work to shape. Work with individuals between meetings provides data to the activist, maintains continuity of topic, keeps the other in front of new directions for youth development • DOI: 10.1002/yd
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oneself, allows for lobbying, and the like. All of this is practitioner knowledge and emerging practice knowledge. • There are infinite possibilities for personal, professional, and organizational development. New ideas and strategies for learning and development continually evolve. There is effective practice using a professionally developed curriculum, and there is effective practice when curriculum is cocreated with participants. These differences are based on different pedagogies that themselves are grounded in different philosophies of education and learning and, in turn, on different philosophical, educational, and political anthropologies. Best practice for youth practitioners is to follow John Dewey and “begin where the child/person is,” but at base that is a value as much as a strategy. In a community-based municipal agency serving youth, it is aphoristic that the activist/ facilitators of professional development want to show their conception of youth work and how it should be practiced by doing so with the professional development group. Experienced leaders of professional development groups can link almost any topic to central themes or issues the group has been working on. Remember (practice wisdom) that one can read anything a group member says as data, a teaching, a door opened to trying. • A trusting partnership between facilitators and upper-level staff of the host organization is necessary for a long-term, open-ended professional development. Every hour of professional development group costs one to three hours of outside work with group members (proposition). Crucial are relationships with upper-level agency management and leadership because they too must legitimize the work if it is to succeed (proposition), and it is they who must join in the challenge brought by “resistance” and organizational defense. From article 3 Research can be useful in changing organizations. This is aphoristic and true. Crucial is the negotiated political and programmatic contract between faculty and agency, beginning with the agency’s practice wisdom and its research question. Crucial too is partnernew directions for youth development • DOI: 10.1002/yd
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ship and commitment with upper to middle management to develop, implement, and use the study in the service of youth development and relationships with frontline staff that made data collection possible, safe, effective, and efficient. It is important for students to meet and be taught by both upper and middle management and hands-on youth workers so as to experience this enterprise as real and consequential for youth, themselves, and for the agency. This summary of lessons learned is all on this level of practice wisdom and is best practice (practitioner authority). • Life takes three to five times longer than it takes when doing this work in this way. Student field research on real community and agency issues and problems can be seductive to students in that field of practice. It is commonsensical and true that the real seduces. • Teaching this course is like facilitating a youth group. Students are youth (even when they are students) and faculty can teach as a youth worker, modeling youth work, teaching, and youthworker-as-researcher. It is commonsensical and practice wisdom and good practice. • Field research for a municipal agency can be win-win-win-win-win. Most like it when everyone wins, but some do not. Anti-intellectualism, and antiuniversity, and anti–youth work feelings and comments continue to be made, especially when research findings were used for P&R policy, program, worker, and recreation center assessment, and training. Sometimes, some in the real world punch back! Most, however, took their win and wanted to play together again. From article 4 • Shift from opinion giving to informed idea. Practice wisdom directs that hands-on youth work with young people in a frame of healthy youth development always has a moral good joined to the technical right knowledge and skill. The moral interpretive is to be open, direct, clear, transparent, just, equitable, inclusive, and safe. Pedagogically informed, hands-on direct practice with youth moves from the less to the more complex and from the new directions for youth development • DOI: 10.1002/yd
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easy to the more difficult. Opinions are easier to state for most (practice wisdom) than are informed ideas shaped by knowledge analysis, reflection, discussion, and expression. Moving from opinion to informed idea is to parallel individual developmental processes with a group of youth and is wise, if not best, practice. • Focus on giving advice, and work to ensure that advice gets used. Advice is (not) solicited, (not) responded to, and is (not) used.11 This is the advice structure.12 Advice might not be used for a variety of reasons, including because it is “faulty, poor, wrong” or the decision maker simply has other ideas and prefers those. On the individual level, it is aphoristic that offering (un)solicited advice has embedded in it the hope of use; youth, especially youth on advisory groups, like all the rest of us, want their ideas to be used, to count, and to make a difference. Collectively, as an advisory group, they want the same (commonsense knowledge). The continued involvement of some of them is contingent on whether they believe that they have been heard and what they said mattered, that is, had value and consequence. This is what keeps them involved to enhance their citizen work.13 In every way (except for quantitative data), this is a promising practice. • Authentic youth advisory structures meet a moral test. Direct youth work is real work—when it is true and consequential for youth and worker—when the space is safe, inclusive, just, and the like. It is authentic when it is done in good faith, with every effort made to ensure it is meaningful and consequential for youth, worker, and others and is done ethically. There is a moral test in all youth work, here too, and that is common knowledge and practice wisdom. How this is done is the nuts-and-bolts knowledge of youth work expertise. • Young people deserve a place at the table in addition to doing the work. To solicit peer opinions and ideas, to research, analyze, and reflect, to formulate one’s opinions and construct informed ideas is work and is a practice, and to do so as a group member is citizen work.14 Citizen (public) work on a formal advisory group should earn the group or its representatives a place at the table new directions for youth development • DOI: 10.1002/yd
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when meaningful and consequential issues are discussed and decided. This is a moral test joined to a political test, with both joined to a best moral practice. From article 5 • Partnerships tend to develop a culture of their own that occasionally clashes with the cultures in each partner agency. This is more problematic if issues affect public safety. The higher the issue is on a moral panic scale, the more complex the partnership becomes, requiring significant work from partner agencies, often with conflicting missions. This is commonsense knowledge and practice wisdom, with consequences in the shorter to longer term: this can be positive, in part because it is new, fresh, and innovative, say, and for that may be negative because these may not be what some want their agency or series or styles to be. It is important to remember this obvious point and work to keep the definition of the situation usable for positive change in how the partnership’s participating agencies and the partnership itself work to lead to communitybased healthy youth development through better, more responsive, more present and accessible, higher-quality, effective services, programs, and youth work. • We learned that in order for any work to begin, partnerships have to be recognized as spaces of negotiation. If individual agents from the partner organizations do not have the authority, are not willing, are not skilled, or do not see the value of negotiating, joint work is difficult. Organization change in our view is organization changing and ongoing. The same is true for negotiation, which for us is (ongoing) negotiating, whether dialogical, political, or other mode and style. This is a priori so in our frame, and is an unsubstantiated best practice, making it a principle of good practice that edges close to an emerging practice. To management consultants and gurus, this is a best practice.15 The idea of space in this context of youth work is used well by VeLure Roholt and Baizerman in their work on youth engagement and civic youth work.16 • Partnerships create new meanings in the collective work and can provide resources when work is not going so well within one’s own organinew directions for youth development • DOI: 10.1002/yd
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zation. It is true by definition that a partnership as a new space is likely a new meaning world and also potentially a world of different resources. It can be a place of respite and sustenance, and it could be less a space or a place than a way of being or working differently: this can rejuvenate. This is practice wisdom, mother’s wit, and several more forms of normative knowledge about “how the world really works.” This is less a principle or a practice than a truism. • Partnerships created between individuals at lower positional levels in organizations require synaptic connections with leaders who can create and keep open space for the partnership to flourish and be sustained. • Partnerships require senior management level buy-in, legitimacy, and active support to help ensure their shorter- to longerterm viability and utility for the joint work on behalf of youth and for what is gained by each participatory organization. This is practice wisdom and likely a promising to best practice in public administration and human services management, as well as in business. • Partnerships have a life cycle. It takes a lot of time and effort to create and work at sustaining them. Developing and maintaining trust, assessing the space within which you do and could work, negotiating priorities, and committing and agreeing on resources require skilled negotiation. Things begin and end and over time may show a literal or metaphoric life cycle. Reading a partnership in this poetic frame can encourage active attentiveness to life phases and developmental stages, reminding parties that the new, organized relationship of partnership, like other life forms, needs different attention, sustenance, and action at different times. It is practice wisdom that parties must attend continuously and work at the sustentation of their common space regularly, differently at times, and endlessly. From article 6 • Systems transformation requires synergy among those working on the grassroots and grass-tops levels. It is aphoristic, practice wisdom, and likely an as-yet-unproven promising practice that ongoing new directions for youth development • DOI: 10.1002/yd
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organizational changing requires alliances and coalitions and other power arrangements, between and among organizational change interests inside, outside, and between these groupings. This is likely increasingly true the more formal, large, and complex the organization, possibly too the older it is, and even more likely the more its work is decentralized into community-based offices and services. These later notions can be framed propositionally, and we suspect, will prove to be promising practices. • Do not discount the value of seasoned youth workers—regardless of their professional credentials—who are steeped in the everyday reality of the target population. “Old-timers” embody organizational history and often its practices, and with enough distance, they can be necessary and helpful informants about the social structure, practices, and cultural meanings of the organization. As survivors of the place, they are well placed to tell stories about it, including about the politics—the ways that decisions are made, power and authority and its (mis)uses, and the like. This may be true also for these workers’ grasp of “the street”—where programs and services touch the road. At best, they know how those in the agency are trying to reach their everyday lives and the meanings they give to these ways of living.17 Using and working with these people is good research, good politics, and surely practice wisdom. It is wise practice that likely could rise to the level of principle or even to emerging practice. • Hang out with prospective grantees in order to learn, assess their openness to observation, and collect other relevant data about the organization—its ethos, practices, and practice. It is best practice to know as much as necessary and more about a potential grantee. Words sent by them about themselves are insufficient. Needed is the smell and feel of the place—your take on it, what pulls you out of your chair, or hits you between your eyes. Such data are best collected through field observation, one form of which is hanging out. This is surely a best practice too, however difficult to substantiate. • Include youth (and adults) in the review and due diligence process who have lived experience in the neighborhoods or programs you seek to new directions for youth development • DOI: 10.1002/yd
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fund. Youth-oriented service programs should include young people in providing and evaluating the work. Youth program funders should also include young people in setting funding priorities and selecting what programs to fund, and in evaluating the funded work. Especially for community-based work, having young informants is smart—a principle, an emerging practice, and a moral practice. • Seek to identify individuals and teams whose interest in the work is more vocational than fiscal. It is not about the money! Those who are called to the work are likely to have a different commitment to it than those who seem to be there primarily for the check. This is practice wisdom. It may be that these are the workers who convince the funder; at minimum, seek them out and listen to them. While they may not be disinterested informants or especially passionate, they may have somewhat purer motives and may more likely speak truth to power. This is a wobbly generalization, but practice wisdom suggests trying this. • Having the courage to think creatively, engage untraditional partners, and take risks are key ingredients for system transformation. This is well-known aphoristic knowledge, and true for all practical purposes. System transformation or, as we prefer, transforming, is helped at different times by the traditional and at other times by the unique, possibly the exotic, and surely by outlier ideas and practices. It helps to get stuff unstuck and to move in an unanticipated direction. This one is hard to prove and worth considering on practice authority.
Extracting the potentially useful: Reading for borrowing and adapting research and practice for use? It is not self-evident how to read research and use it in one’s own work. There are guides to this and commonsense and practice wisdom too, but the process and the practice are not simple, and none of these gets fully at the complexities or the practical. Here we sketch some of both as tentative guides to the process and the new directions for youth development • DOI: 10.1002/yd
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practice. Our position is a radical, nonpositivist one; it is a view far beyond the margins and one that is useful. Use is a basic word. It is found in American usage as user, useful, or useless. A study can also be usable and may have for a particular decision or other use, usability, useableness, and usably. Presumably these conditions can be assessed for a study’s utility. Or this usage is a reification—an abstraction treated as a concrete particular, which it is not. Playing with utility, the core term is utile, and from this root come utilizable, utilize(r), and utilization. All of these words imply that the study (or its findings) has something to offer and can be helpful and practical (and not theoretical). These imply that the study can be applied and is relevant. All of these are statuses of the study or of the person who will take the study and use it. Or better, they will read the study, find or make sense of it in a practical context of relevance, and transform the study (its findings and data) into advice—policy ideas or directions or suggestions or recommendations for programmatic or other action. Much of this on use is presented as if it were self-evident, as if the metaphor, “What do the data say?” can be extended to include both “what the data suggest or recommend” and “how this advice should or must be put into action” to bring about programmatic and social betterment. It is as if this process of moving from data to change in the material world is more than self-evident; it does itself. That is, there is no sentient agent present who is doing this work. Rather, this transformative work must be carried out by an actor; it is an expertise.
The process of use We think it is self-evident that using research, evaluation, or a program narrative is an intentional process of transforming for use elements or aspects or ideas or conceptions or approaches or methods and then using these for program improvement, for example. We think of this process in this way. new directions for youth development • DOI: 10.1002/yd
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Begin with an actor who does or does not have a specific issue at hand or problem at hand he must respond to. Think of this actor as socially, organizationally, or programmatically embedded, and of these as giving context to the problem or issue requiring some engagement (i.e., prevention or solution). If the actor has a specific issue at hand, then he may choose to read the study in a use situation—a phenomenological situation and stance in which his reading of the study is framed by his need, want, or purpose at hand. This is in contrast to another actor who is not in a use situation and is reading for other purposes: employment, general learning, or looking at a colleague’s work, for example. These are two different and obvious reading stances. It is here that use begins: with a purpose in hand. The actor with a purpose in hand becomes a reader with a purpose: to find something to help him think about, understand, or do something about the issue. It is this (and these) that give form to his work and other actions and in a phenomenological sense structure his consciousness: what he looks for to read, how he reads, what sense he makes of what he is reading, and how he moves from a printed page or computer screen to action in the material or virtual world. In practical terms, the actor with a purpose in hand has a mental set—a frame within which he approaches the text or study in order to use it. The problem or issue can work to set a relevance frame for the reader who is searching for help for his problem or issue. This frame may be relatively open, closed, or narrow in relation to the problem or issue to be engaged. That is, the reader can more or less openly scan the evaluation report for insight or fact that he can read as advice for dealing with his problem or issue. This can be done with self-awareness or not, as a more or less conscious process within a frame of more or less intentionality. All of this is real, is manipulatable, and is teachable. Where in a research report or other text do readers look for actionable advice? Normatively, they are directed to the sections called “findings,” “conclusions,” and “recommendations” if they are reading research. By convention, this is where the new directions for youth development • DOI: 10.1002/yd
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researcher-writer puts what she thinks are the study findings along with her conclusions and recommendations. But this is a narrow search. The reader looking for inspiration, understanding, advice, and data could find these anywhere in the geography and topography of the study and report. The reader looking for where the researcher-writer puts her advice goes to those sections. The reader who is the one with a concrete, particular, specific, and unique problem can choose to scan the whole report so as to stimulate his expertise and choose not to be bound by the researcher-writer. It is a type of expertise to be inspired, stimulated, brought to new awareness by what one reads; it is an aesthetic, phenomenological process, a creative act. This act is typically written about in the evaluation literature in flat prose, as if the reader only has to go to the correct section of the evaluation report, take or excavate the findings, or then simply and without complications apply them, that is, put these into practice (i.e., into the world), and then “things will get better.” We all know that this process does not work in that way, even abstractly. Ceteris paribus means “all things being equal.” Are they ever? The reader of a research report is a hermeneutic worker, a meaning giver and hence a transformer who takes what he sees in the report and, by giving it meaning for possible use, brings it new and different relevance in meaning and purpose and brings it to a place of possible use. That space is at first imaginative, a mental geography, a place of “What if?” and “Could it?” and “If I tried?” This is a space for rehearsal, for mentally trying out, for imagining use and utility, and for testing fit. This making-sense work by the reader-practitioner who wants to make things better is difficult because he must choose relevance frames within which to interpret, make sense of, transform, and give meaning to what he reads. Reader-practitioners have different stores and stocks of relevant knowledge at hand: theories, work experiences, similar work situations and moments, and the like. These can be drawn to make sense and assess the potential of the research report for their problem or issue. new directions for youth development • DOI: 10.1002/yd
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Also implicated in this use situation is the aesthetic and literal form of the material, that is, the research report, with its words and numbers. Different reader-practitioners read, interpret, and transform some types of text more easily than others. Page layout matters, as does writing style, even paragraphing, and surely tables and charts. There are guides in the United States for preparing a research report, and these are sensitive to what makes it easier for readers to comprehend. The best focus on the usability of the report, while here our attention is on the reader-practitioner reading for (non)purposive use: assessing the text versus selfreflective reading and transforming for use. Surely both are necessary.
Action hypothesis So far, all of this work is mental; it is the worker-practitioners reading, thinking about and thinking how to more or less consciously and more or less intentionally. It is their “thinking how to” that brings us closer to the world. The bridge to there from the reader-practitioner’s mind is an action hypothesis—a hunch or more formal statement that some content from the evaluation report might be useful, helpful, or suggestive of what he could or should do because it could make a difference to his problem. The reader-practitioner can frame the action hypothesis in a logic model or plan. From these, he must imagine and then figure out how to transform it into action by deciding who must do what to whom and how (and why) in order to make it likely that the problem can be engaged effectively, and then to evaluate this—first with a process evaluation and then with an outcome evaluation, for example. This brief description of a Weberian ideal type of process fits within any model of research, evaluation, and program narrative use we know because none of those focus on the existential, phenomenological, cognitive, and hermeneutical processes of use. new directions for youth development • DOI: 10.1002/yd
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Change agent roles In this and the following section on language, we offer nonpropositional knowledge and learning from our six years of work at Saint Paul Parks and Recreation. These are presented to stimulate reflection on the practice of changing organizations to foster healthy youth development and as an invitation to study and work about ways of thinking, doing, and talking. The voluminous literature on social and organization change, more than 1 million articles, presents multiple change models using a variety of terms to name the change agent, both insider, outsider, and partnerships between both. Here we clarify roles they play in the six-year effort to enhance the amount, kind, and quality of community-based youth services and youth work at P&R: • Explicator. Included here is clarifier, that is, making visible in phenomenological and other ways and suggesting analyses and connections between practices, realities, and ideas. • Translator. Included here is a multicultural stance to name, interpret, and suggest meanings across organizations, cultures, ideas, and practices, crossing language worlds and life ways. • Instigator. Included here is gentle to stronger provocation to encourage examination, analysis, dialogue, and other practices using the role of marginal and outsider. • Connoisseur. Included here is legitimizing value, making distinctions, and arguing for the best-quality work. • Curator. Included here is encouraging and facilitating the valuing of the ordinary, the exotic, the different, and the invisible so as to understand these.18
Useful constructs and concepts for self and group reflection Over the years, each of us in reflection on our work and together in different combinations has developed a vocabulary of ideas and terms that prove useful: new directions for youth development • DOI: 10.1002/yd
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Discursive spaces. Places to talk and spaces within which to explore, analyze, plan, and organize are crucial when these are not elements or practices or structures within an organization. Empathic gaze. A way of looking and seeing in which those who seem to be “idiots” or bad can be given the benefit of the doubt; a political or moral way of perceiving and sense making. Imaginary landscapes. Invitation to imagine how things could be different is crucial and can be done within or outside normative and newly formed discursive spaces. Imagining ideals, the possibilities, and the likely is more than thinking, talking about this, and acting on it; it can be transformative for the individual, small group, and organization when the landscapes become new meanings and these are discussed. Organizational change is also change in what is meaningful and valued. Incompletability/incomplete. Incapable of being completed, as in organizations change—hence, organization changing. Models of organization. It is crucial for individuals who want to or do change their agency to make explicit their individual and collective models of organizational structure, practices, and processes and to subject these to discussion, analysis, and planning. Organizational metaphors are useful for this.19 Multicultural. Here, a worker who either is or gets what it is to be from worlds different from his or her own: neighborhoods, cultures, families, and the rest. The best youth work knows that multiple youth and adult worlds are polylingual and use all types of knowing to make worlds work for young people. Mystery. Contrasting mystery to problem, the former is not amenable solely to rational, analytical understanding. Mystery, consciously created and used, can give partial legitimacy to how the work of changing an agency is perceived and understood. And at times, it is a fine and useful way to name what is (or is not) going on in the organization or to categorize others’ decisions. Negotiation. This is the belief that most of life with others can be negotiated and that negotiating is a core skill in organizational new directions for youth development • DOI: 10.1002/yd
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work and youth work. It works well as a world stance, an orientation to the ongoing work of making youth agencies better at meeting youth where they are. Organization set. This scholarly idea reminds us that each organization and each unit within is usually part of a larger, organizationally interactive whole. Indeed it may be in other agencies and groups. Almost always there are others on the horizon. Polylingual. The ability to know and possibly to speak several languages, such as one’s agency, the “street,” one’s profession, and the languages of other agencies and other professions and occupations. It includes the ways youth talk: idiomatically with friends, parent talk, school talk, and the rest. The best youth workers are polylingual, and it is this in part that facilitates their gaining entry to multiple worlds (agency, city management, school, nonprofit, street, basketball court, etc.), ideally in the service of young people. Portraiture. Everything is a picture, and it itself can be a narrative— a story about what is, what could be, and even how what came to be. It is a way of summarizing and generalizing that can facilitate telling. Street savvy. This reminds us that the “street” can be anywhere and anyplace: an office, a recreation center, an agency. Knowing what is going on, knowing one’s way around, and knowing how to know and who to know, and what and how to use all of this is “savvy.” Sufficient time. Working to change a large, highly formalized bureaucracy, especially a public agency, takes lots of time (except when there are budget cuts and similar crises)—time for individuals to become group members, trust one another, trust outsiders (facilitators, consultants, technical advisors), and create the possibility of outsiders to be marginals, and thus arguably more effective with a group working at organizational revitalization or change. The obvious practical point is that most outsiders will not hang around long, whether new directions for youth development • DOI: 10.1002/yd
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for pay or not, and most organizations do not want them around that long because they become “almost workers,” almost “part of the family/organization.” Time is a crucial basic element in every promising practice, and must be understood, analyzed, and used as such. Words. In this last section are words, which we found useful in imagining, analyzing, reflecting, and doing the ongoing work of changing a municipal recreation agency from unintentional to intentional work doing community-based, healthy youth development.
Conclusion This article is read best in sequence, last, because it uses the earlier articles to tease out from lessons learned those that met the test for emerging, promising, or best practices: none fully meets the test for emerging practice. This does not mean that these lessons are without merit or utility in everyday practice. It could mean that there are not enough of the correct types of data to pass a particular test; it may also mean that the test itself is inappropriate for this type of practice experience and data and that other more appropriate tests should be used or developed. There are methodological and deeper epistemological issues here, and these are not for us here. These deeper and valid issues aside, we are left with work that is increasingly effective. Saint Paul Parks and Recreation at the highest managerial level is now publicly committed to quality youth work in all its centers and by its staff. As we know, that sentence, which is true, is deceptively simple and its subject the locus of extensive thought and debate in a highly contested space: quality youth work. All of these topics are practical and consequential in everyday practice to enhance healthy development in community-based organizations, public and nonprofit. All address us as practitioners and scholars, as citizens, parents, and youth. How we respond will define who we are. new directions for youth development • DOI: 10.1002/yd
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Notes 1. Learning For Action. (2011). Defining levels of evidence: Evidence-based practices, promising practices, and emerging practices. Retrieved from http:// www.napavintners.com/account/anv_grants/2012_Level_of_Evidence_ Matrix.pdf; Wikipedia. (2013). Best practice. Retrieved from http://en .wikipedia.org/wiki/Best_practice; Compassion Capital Fund. (n.d.). Identifying and promoting promising practices. Retrieved from http://www.acf .hhs.gov/programs/ocs/resource/identifying-and-promoting-effective -practices-0 2. Ashcroft, R. E. (2004). Current epistemological problems in evidence based medicine. Journal of Medical Ethics, 30(2), 131–135; Djulbegovic, B., Guyatt, G. H., & Ashcroft, R. E. (2009). Epistemologic inquiries in evidencebased medicine. Cancer Control, 16(2), 158–168. 3. Emerging, promising, and best practices definitions. Retrieved from http:// chfs.ky.gov/NR/rdonlyres/49670601-F568–4962–974F-8B76A1D771D3/0/ Emerging_Promising_Best_Practices.pdf; Bretschneider, S., Marc-Aurele, F. J., & Wu, J. (2005). “Best practices” research: A methodological guide for the perplexed. Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, 15(2), 307–323; Compassion Capital Fund. (n.d.); Gambrill, E. (1999). Evidence-based practice: An alternative to authority-based practice. Families in Society, 80, 341– 350; Hinojosa, J. (2013). The evidence-based paradox. American Journal of Occupational Therapy, 67(2), e18–e23; Learning for Action. (2011). Martin, M. R. (2010). Epistemology: Beginner’s guide. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press; Wikipedia. (2013). 4. Association of Maternal and Child Health Program. (n.d.). Best practice categories and criteria. Retrieved from http://www.amchp.org/programsandtopics/BestPractices/Pages/BestPracticeTerms.aspx 5. Ashcroft, R. E. (2004). Current epistemological problems in evidence based medicine. Journal of Medical Ethics, 30(2), 131–135; Djulbegovic et al. (2009). 6. Van Manen, M. (1977). Linking ways of knowing with ways of being practical. Curriculum Inquiry, 6(3), 205–228. 7. VeLure Roholt, R., & Baizerman, M. L. (Eds.). (2012). Evaluation advisory groups. New Directions for Evaluation, no. 136. San Francisco, CA: JosseyBass; Schein, E. H. (2004). Organizational culture and leadership. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. 8. VeLure Roholt & Baizerman. (2012). 9. Wenger, E. (1999). Communities of practice: Learning, meaning, and identity. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. 10. Rehman, L. A. (2002). Recognizing the significance of culture and ethnicity: Exploring hidden assumptions of homogeneity. Leisure Sciences, 24(1), 43–57. 11. VeLure Roholt & Baizerman. (2012). 12. VeLure Roholt & Baizerman. (2012). 13. VeLure Roholt & Baizerman. (2012). 14. VeLure Roholt & Baizerman. (2012). new directions for youth development • DOI: 10.1002/yd
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15. Compton, D. W., Baizerman, M., & VeLure Roholt, R. (2011). Managing evaluation: Responding to common problems with a 10-step process. Canadian Journal of Program Evaluation, 25(2), 103–123. 16. VeLure Roholt & Baizerman. (2012). 17. Anderson, R., & Cissna, K. N. (n.d.). Martin Buber: Bearing witness to an experience. Retrieved from http://communication.usf.edu/faculty/cissna/ Anderson-Cissna.pdf 18. O’Neill, P. (2012). The culture of curating and the curating of culture(s). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press; McEvilley, T. (1992). Art & otherness: Crisis in cultural identity. New York, NY: McPherson. 19. Morgan, G. (2006). Images of organization. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
michael baizerman is professor in the School of Social Work, Youth Studies, University of Minnesota. ross velure roholt is associate professor in the School of Social Work, Youth Studies, University of Minnesota. kathy korum is the deputy director for Saint Paul Parks and Recreation. sheetal rana is a recent graduate of the School of Social Work, University of Minnesota.
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