On an exceeding hot summer day Tamika, a high school junior, and Bill, her new boss at an urban youth organization, were rehearsing a presentation for a large technology conference. Tamika1 sat at her computer reading her PowerPoint slides out loud, glancing at Bill as she spoke. Although by far his junior, she had been at their technology-oriented organization for two and a half years and was in charge of several younger youth. Bill, on the other hand, had been the Mapping Program Director for only 10 days, and he had less experience with some of the technology than did Tamika. As the two of them worked on her presentation their rehearsal went far beyond repetition of a script. Instead, it became an opportunity for them both to examine Tamika's role and to construct a fluid expert/novice relation through the very adult practices of mapmaking and conference preparation.
That they were engaged in a rehearsal for a public presentation was characteristic of Hope works, the Camden, New Jersey, organization at which both worked. In the after-school program youth ages 14-18 were learning the digital technologies of web design and Geographical Information Systems mapping. (GIS, widely used by a wide variety of government and community organizations, is a sophisticated tool for producing maps with nearly infinite layers of data.) Hope works hires the youth who complete their training to produce and present maps to community and national clients. Their jobs also frequently include presentations at adult conferences, community events, and on the radio. During the time I observed them, rehearsals for all of such events went beyond "learning lines," instead becoming opportunities for both the youth and the adults to analyze their roles. As McLaughlin and Heath, Cole, and others have noted, such opportunities for youth to try on adult roles can have a powerful impact on youth learning. Youth learning is also enhanced when adult communities include youth perspectives, avoiding reliance on one-way learning in which newcomers adopt new roles unquestioningly. Rehearsals for events in adult worlds can thus become important sites for the higher-order thinking that is a lever into new frameworks of participation in adult communities.
1. Theoretical framework
1.1. The contexts of youth development
Urban youth organizations are frequently formed as ad hoc responses to local concerns; their missions are both multifarious and well documented. Among their missions are leadership, community connection, safety, literacy improvement, technology, arts, and sports. Many organizations have singular focuses such as recreation, literacy, or technology in which youth remain in their student roles. Other organizations with a more developmental bent encourage youth to take on new roles and adopt new kinds of thinking. In part the variations in mission and structure are a consequence of the historical development of youth organizations in the United States.
1.2. Expertise, activity, multiliteracies, and situated cognition
Community/youth partnerships assume that youth will construct and use new knowledge -- that they will gain expertise. Expertise is widely understood as a three-stage phenomenon in which learners first become acclimated to a knowledge base or activity -- that is, they gain superficial understanding. When they have a basic working knowledge and can think with some depth about a task, they have arrived at the second stage, competence. Finally, with proficiency learners can see larger patterns and ask searching questions. As Hatano and Oura argue, however, it is important to avoid seeing proficiency as perfect performance of a task, noting the example of music students who perform just for a teacher's approval and thus remain novices. Only when they are able to imagine the point of view of a real audience are they able to negotiate changes in their values and identities that are the hallmarks of real expertise. A Hope works youth who memorizes a presentation but goes no further may deliver the presentation competently but without understanding what an audience will make of it or the possible activity that could ensue in a question and answer session. Responding to audience questions requires the youth to have awareness of their roles as speakers, the importance of the presentation, and its possible meaning to an audience. It is easy to see adaptive expertise in such presentations since they are "socially mediated" processes that require problem solving. This adaptive expertise is quite different from the interpretation of proficiency as an individualistic and perfected performance.
2. Methods
Hopeworks is a business with a goal of youth college attendance and leadership. It provides services to other businesses, indexing the language and practices of business. There are other organizations for youth that are more frankly oriented to training youth to become business people (e.g., Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship); and even Youth Radio articulates "leaders[hip] in the multimedia industry" (along with mentoring and community involvement) as a goal. The business focus in these organizations returns us to the ambivalence about youth, work, and formal learning with which this section began. On the one hand, Hope works youth are paid for work that is frequently more interesting than the minimum wage jobs they might be able to find in Camden or the nearby suburbs. Many are the sole supporters in their families, and their jobs at Hopeworks also have the benefits of college counseling and other supports. In learning new ways of thinking and interacting with adults in the community the youth are able to take on a "meta" view of how communities work. But training youth in business practices can also be equivocal and unsettling. As Gee, Hull, and Lankshear argue, the New Capitalism is nicely aligned with learning research that privileges collaboration and expertise. Seeing social interaction as non-consumerist can be difficult, they argue, especially in situations where knowledge remains tacit and is gained through subtle immersion in community practices. The uncertainty about who benefits from youth expertise is, perhaps, a question of authority, which is achieved when learners can account for the responses of audiences with multiple points of view; it thus depends in part on youths' ability to parse the "larger social structures".
2.1. Setting and participants
A joint effort of two Lutheran and one Catholic parish, Hope works was 8 years old at the time of this writing. It runs two nonprofit businesses and emphasizes school completion, technology, and "learning to learn." In addition to its GIS entry point there is a Web Design program in which youth also may be employed after training. Both programs have apprenticeship structures in which the youth take on increasing responsibility as tour-givers, in client work, and as presenters at conferences and other public venues. Around a hundred youth per year, aged 11-23, enter the Hope Through School (for youth in middle or high school) or Day Training programs, the latter for older youth who have left school.
All youth take the Test of Adult Basic Education upon entering; the older youth use the Literacy Program supports in both math and English to prepare for the entrance exam for Camden County College and then to begin the application process. High school youth work on SAT preparation. The self-paced GIS curriculum is geared to adults, but it also is school-like. Literacy activities thus vary from the technological to the school-based, and the youth move not from grade to grade but rather from role to role, with increasingly central participation in the community.
2.2. Data collection and analysis
The data in this study were collected over 6 years beginning in 2003. On my first day I noticed two high school youth leading teams of other youth in GIS data collection and mapping, and my research question quickly became how they had achieved their status as team leaders using this quite complex technological mapping process. After my initial 3-month long observation I visited occasionally over the next year and collaborated with Father Jeff and one of the youth in two international conference presentations. I began to see the multiple roles that the youth played, and when I returned in February 2005 I began to look at how participation structures encouraged, and sometimes discouraged, transitions into new and challenging roles. From then until September 2005 I was onsite approximately 5-6 h a day 3-5 days a week; for the following 4 months I attended 1 day per week. I visited occasionally over the next year and returned again in January 2007. For the next 2 years I continued to collect data one afternoon per week.
Because the rehearsals are ubiquitous they are opportunities for both less skilled and more knowledgeable youth to take on new roles. Amir's observations to his peers, for example, demonstrated his readiness to assume the role of more-expert peer. Lakesha and Alejandro's contest for status required them both to assess the rehearsal process itself and then allowed them to use their own knowledge about the Camden schools. Tamika's rehearsal allowed all participants not only to construct a commentary on her role within the presentation, but also actually to construct her role. Tamika accomplished this first through an analytical discussion of what she did as a GIS trainer, and second, in the developing relation as partners that she and her boss established as they talked. In these kinds of practices it is possible to see the interweaving of technological tool (PowerPoint), several social languages, role, and reflection. Together Tamika and Bill use mouse clicks, commentary, and the keyboard to construct a representation of who Tamika is at Hopeworks and who she can become to other professionals.
3. Results
3.1. The larger pattern of rehearsal
Hope works practices are saturated with rehearsal. In this section I look briefly at examples to define the larger pattern that exists throughout the organization. The general format of these rehearsals consists of a run-through of "lines" followed by a series of assessments. Some are brief and occasionally even impromptu: for example, a board member who was a local businessman happened to be in the building while a team of youth made appointments to sell ads for a new map. A quick rehearsal with the board member helped them understand the kinds of questions that they would encounter in their appointments with local businesses, and they answered well enough that the board member became their first customer. More formal brief rehearsals include learning to give tours, which even new youth are expected to be able to do for visitors, and preparing for internship interviews. There are also digital storytelling workshops each semester, and as youth prepare to record the personal narratives with which they will later coordinate images they often mention their status as Camden residents. One very subdued reader who rushed through her script remarked that no one expected much from Camden girls anyway.
5. Conclusion
Rehearsals are usually seen as pro forma activities, as paths to the more "real" activity of performance, and are infrequently examined. As the examples in this paper demonstrate, however, they are elastic spaces that can accommodate multiple kinds interaction, problem solving, and assessment, all of them linked to youth participation in professional activities. The rehearsal activities that saturate Hope works require the youth to begin to think like presenters and designers. They use multiple literacies with multiple attached professional languages -- a variety of semiotic domains -- to construct their presentations. Because of its multiple emphases on school, business, and youth development, Hope works practices continually ask youth to examine what they are doing from the points of view of many different communities; its participation structures have both an internal focus and an external one that situates the problem solving and creating that the youth do in the practices of adult work. As Engestrom, Bransford et al., Hatano and Oura and others argue, participation with both internal and external focuses promotes changes in learning, values, and identity that bespeak real development. It is thus important that these rehearsals be linked to real world performance rather than only performance for staff or teacher approval. For urban youth whose schools are unable to connect them to adult worlds in meaningful ways this situated learning environment is crucial, both in its multiplicity and in linking youth worlds of school, college, community, and work together.