Discovering and Supporting Successful Learning Pathways of Youth In and Out of School: Accounting for the Development of Everyday Expertise Across Settings

A fifth-grade girl, born in Haiti and adopted into a Seattle family, talked at home about how she wanted to be a chemist or a paleontologist when she grew up. For 6 months, she spent portions of her Saturdays mixing perfumes, as a chemist might, with her mother. But her public schoolteacher, who is a seasoned professional with sophisticated teaching expertise, thought the girl was lazy and was surprised to see her become highly excited and engaged about a science curriculum unit at the end of the year. A fourth-grade boy in the same school got moved to the back of the classroom because he was frequently “off task” and “resistant” to the school curriculum. He spent significant periods of his time in the back of the room mentally deconstructing the physical environment around him, “thinking in structures” as he put it. Unbeknownst to his teachers, the boy had been deepening his participation in a hobby—an elective vocation—since attending a summer design program at a local university in the third grade. Outside of school he engaged in sophisticated design, construction, and building projects with all manner of physical and technological objects. It would be 3 more years before he came to understand that there is such a field as engineering and that it might be a good match for his interests. By that point it would be much more difficult to make his way along the typical academic path. To simply say that these youth may be “at risk” for making their way along academic pathways ignores the depth of their academic-related interests and developing expertise. It skirts the evaluation and positioning of them that occurred in different contexts based on a partial understanding of who they were at the time and who they wanted to become, and it severely discounts the complexities associated with them productively pursuing and becoming who they might wish to become. We argue that we need to discover and then support the successful learning pathways of youth across social settings over developmental time so that we can promote the development of interests and expertise that may lead to both academic and personal success.