The Out-of-School Time Special Interest Group (OST SIG) is an affinity group for professionals and students interested in research on how children and youth spend their time during out-of-school hours. A primary focus of this research is teaching and learning in before- and after-school programs and summer programs, but out-of-school time also includes weekends, holidays, evenings, and other times of day characterized by discretionary opportunity, choice, and flexibility.
The purpose of the OST SIG is to provide a forum for researchers in out-of-school time teaching and learning to share resources and become each others' resources, to provide venues and opportunities to present related research, and to bring additional resources to AERA.
The OST SIG formed just prior to the 2006 annual meeting in San Francisco.
Dr. Jaynemarie Enyonam Angbah is a seasoned youth development professional with over 15 years of experience serving youth, communities and families in the out of school time sector. Over the course of her career, she has embraced a pedagogy that is rooted in empowering young people to be agents of change. Most recently, she served as the Senior Director, Teen Youth Development at Boys & Girls Clubs of America where she led the development and implementation of programs that prepared teen members to be scholars, community advocates and 21st Century leaders. In recognition of her leadership and commitment to youth, Dr. Angbah was named the 2014 Afterschool Ambassador for the State of New York and is also the 2018 recipient of Bucknell University’s Young Alumni Award. Her research focuses on exploring the knowledge, motivation and organizational factors that limit the ongoing development and retention of early career youth workers.
Dr. Bianca Baldridge is an associate professor at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. As a sociologist of education, Bianca’s scholarship explores the socio-political context of community-based youth work and afterschool education. Bianca’s research critically examines the confluence of race, class, and gender, and its impact on educational reforms that shape community-based spaces that engage Black and Latinx youth in the U.S. Bianca’s book, Reclaiming Community: Race and the Uncertain Future of Youth Work, examines how market-based reforms and whiteness, with its emphasis on privatization and accountability, undermines Black community-based organizations’ efforts to support comprehensive youth development opportunities. Her book received the 2019 American Educational Studies Association Critic’s Choice Book Award. Bianca’s experiences as a community-based youth worker in domestic and international contexts continue to inform her research in profound ways.
Dr. Deepa S. Vasudevan is currently a Visiting Lecturer at Wellesley College, where she teaches courses on the sociopolitical dynamics of schooling, education policy, and youth programs in the U.S. Her scholarship focuses on community-based youth workers’ and adolescents’ experiences in out-of-school time programs as framed by social inequality and understandings of care labor in education. Deepa’s recent research explores how experienced youth workers both construct occupational identities and persist as professionals in the face of social undervaluation, financial precarity, and workplace managerialism. She recently co-edited a volume entitled At Our Best: Building Youth-Adult Partnerships in Out-of-School Time Settings, which features academic, practitioner, and youth perspectives on the promises and tensions of intergenerational collaboration, and has work published in books such as The Changing Landscape of Youth Work: Theory and Practice for an Evolving Field and Toward a Positive Psychology of Relationships: New Directions in Theory and Research. Deepa has served as an editorial board member for the Harvard Educational Review and the Current Issues in Out-of-School Time Information Age Publishing book series. Her research interests are motivated by her previous work and service in Philadelphia –– as a research coordinator at the Out-of-School Time Resource Center, a program assistant at Parkway Peace High School, and a board member of the Seybert Foundation and the Philadelphia Wooden Boat Factory. She completed her Ed.D. in Culture, Communities, and Education and Ed.M. in Educational Policy and Management at Harvard Graduate School of Education. She received her B.A. from Haverford College with an English major and Cultural Anthropology minor.
Dr. Marlo Reeves is a Senior Research & Evaluation Associate at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee whose current work is two-fold. She specializes in culturally responsive evaluation of K12 spaces, particularly those connected to nonprofit organizations. She also researches the influences of strategic philanthropy on grassroots organizing in community-based youth organizations. In 2020, she earned a doctorate in Educational Policy Studies from the University of Wisconsin-Madison with her dissertation, Tighten Up & Whiten Up?: Understanding the influences of racialized strategic philanthropy on community-based youth organizations.
Laura Peña-Telfer is a Doctoral Student in Teaching and Learning with a Science Concentration at Georgia State University. Her work is centered on bringing authentic STEM learning experiences to Black and Latina girls in urban contexts by leveraging the rich funds of knowledge already present within families and the community. Laura is currently a STEM Program Specialist and Science Instructional Coach at a public all-girls 6-12 school in Atlanta, Georgia. She holds a Bachelor of Science from the University of Florida and a Master of Science in Education and Social Change from the University of Miami.
Moisés Contreras is a PhD student in the Educational Policy Studies department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is interested in the ways community-based educational spaces and educational nonprofit organizations with progressive missions may unwittingly forsake their goals of working towards equity due to the demands of neoliberal ideology and education reform. Drawing on sociological theories, his current project aims to examine the relationships between marginalized youth and youth workers and the window they provide to reimagining education and educational spaces.
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The name of this Special Interest Group (“SIG”) is the Out-of-School Time SIG, (hereinafter, the “SIG”).