Isn’t It Time for Youth Services Instruction to Grow Up? From Superstition to Scholarship

The overarching assessment of youth services rendered by Leslie Edmonds in 1987 remains largely true today: that its most influential force remains not research, or evidence, or constant professional improvement or addressing field-based challenges, but “superstition.” Research in youth services pedagogy, likewise, offers a perpetually weak response to the field’s many and growing challenges. Professional associations advance long and undifferentiated lists of aspirations uninformed by evidence-based research. And course syllabi do not sufficiently differentiate conventional practice from the delivery of evidence-based and measurable definitions of success. Taken together, the teaching of youth services librarianship remains mired essentially in superstition, without a practice rooted in defensible evidence and lacking a clearly understandable, unique, and measurable indicator of success.