El surgimiento de las microempresas

appear to be high levels of proficiency

in reading and writing sophisticated

texts, even among youth identified as

“struggling” in school.

On the flip side of the challenges OST providers face, some of the advantages of launching into this area include (a) the broad and growing research base in many areas of adolescent literacy development; (b) the interest and support being given this area by federal and state policy makers, as well as school and community groups; (c) the obvious connections between what many OST programs already do in regard to youth development and current attempts to situate adolescent literacy development within meaningful social, community, and disciplinary projects of study; and (d) youth motivation and interest in OST programs.

Thus, it seems clear that the current climate is ripe for youth development and enhancement programs to include explicit attention to youth literacy development and enhancement. However, given the challenges, OST providers need to carefully consider their goals for both youth development and youth literacy development by asking the following questions:

What are our goals for youth development in this program? Specifically, are we hoping to develop skills and capacities that youth should have already developed and seemed to lack (i.e., are we about a type of remediation?)? Or do we hope to enhance youth skills that are already reasonably well developed? Are we attempting to improve youth outcomes in disciplinary learning, or are we focused more generally on a broad range of skills? Are we trying to teach youth social skills, such as better communication, civic participation, resistance to substance abuse, pregnancy prevention? Do we hope to enhance participants’ self-esteem through improved academic performance?

What are our goals for youth literacy development in this program? Specifically, what types of youth literacy challenges do we hope to address? Do we hope to remediate literacy skills that should have previously been learned, such as decoding, encoding, and basic vocabulary knowledge? Or do we hope to help youth comprehend and compose the challenging texts of the upper-level disciplines? Are we interested in comprehension, but not necessarily in discipline-specific ways? Or even more generally, are we hoping to increase participants’ enthusiasm and excitement around reading and writing? Are we interested in teaching literacy skills for use in everyday society or for

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civic participation? Do we hope to teach youth critical literacy skills to enable them to make sense of the vast amounts of unedited information available through electronic sources? Although none of these areas is mutually exclusive and each of these skills is related to the others, carefully assessing the program’s immediate goals will shape the program’s choice of text materials, teaching packages, hardware and software resources, youth participation structures, assessment strategies, and staffing decisions.

Finally, OST providers, having decided on their particular goals for youth development and youth literacy development should then ask themselves difficult questions about whether the main activities of their programs demand skills that their participants possess. When a program consists of activities that depend on high-level literacy tasks, a vast majority of youth may be inadvertently excluded from

participation in those programs. If, for example, OST providers determine that your goals revolve around civic participation and they hope to enhance basic level literacy skills to enable youth to participate in political decision making, then you must develop scaffolded tasks to support youth who may not have mastered the basic literacy skills necessary to participate in the kinds of communication, research, and representation tasks necessary for critical civic engagement.

On the other hand, if the out-of-school research in adolescent literacy is correct, literacy struggle among adolescents may be as much a matter of motivating contexts and texts as is it a matter of literacy skill (Moje, 2006). Given that possibility, it is worth considering how OST providers interested in activities that may require high levels of literacy might actively recruit and support youth whose standardized testing profiles do not demonstrate literacy beyond basic levels. Those youth may be the very youth for whom we can make the greatest literacy difference in out-of- school time.

Since the advent of federal legislation such as No Child Left Behind and Reading First titles of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), increasing attention has been paid to children’s literacy learning both in and out of school. During the last five years, there has also been greater attention paid

to the secondary aspect of the ESEA, that is, to the

literacy learning needs of adolescents. Prior to the

new millennium, adolescent literacy learning and development was not a topic of particularly great concern. In 2002, however, the National Institute of Children’s Health and Human Development (NICHD) launched a radical new research agenda focused on adolescent literacy. In its call for research proposals the NICHD (and its funding partners, the Office of Vocational Education and the Office of Special Education Research and Services) called for attention to all contexts of adolescent literacy development, including formal, school contexts; formal, non-school contexts; and informal learning contexts, such as homes, churches, and peer groups. Concurrently, there has been increasing interest in the role that out-of-school learning time programs (e.g., afterschool, community- based, and summer programs) might play in supporting young people’s academic literacy development.

This review examines out-of-school youth development programs focused on adolescents, and when we could find them, specifically on

adolescent literacy development. We are interested in documenting the nature, features, and effects of strong out-of-school youth literacy development programs. We also discuss the role of out-of-school literacy programs in relation to formal schooling.