Integrating Cultural and Critical Perspectives in Positive Youth Development: A Framework for Out-of-School Time Programs

The field of positive youth development (PYD) has its origins in community-based organizations designed to support youth development. Recently, PYD scholars and leaders have increasingly called for approaches that foreground social justice, culture, and attention to the discriminatory contexts of growth and development. This article reviews culturally informed and critical community youth programs designed to foster PYD outcomes that expand beyond academic and behavioral indicators typically explored to include those that might be particularly salient for minoritized youth such as racial-ethnic identity, culture, and their interplay with other aspects of socioemotional development. We also highlight liberatory approaches that partner with youth in cocreating programs that empower inquiry and action. Building on this literature, we propose a conceptual framework that distinguishes four approaches to integrating cultural and critical perspectives within out-of-school time programming: culturally supportive, informed, grounded, and engaged. These approaches reflect increasing attention to youths’ identities and lived experiences, from providing high-quality and affirming developmental settings to adapting programming to cultural contexts, centering community knowledge and practices in program design, and intentionally cultivating critical consciousness and youth agency. We describe and exemplify these distinct approaches and explore what critical and liberatory conceptualizations mean for future research and practice.