Toward Positive Youth Development: Transforming Schools and Community Programs

by Marybeth Shinn (Editor), Hirokazu Yoshikawa (Editor)

Overview

Social settings have enormous power to promote or hinder positive youth development. Researchers and practitioners know a great deal about features of schools and programs for youth that affect development, but much less about how to transform settings to bring about these desirable features. This book shows how to harness the power of settings. It shifts the debate from simply enhancing youth outcomes at the individual level to improving the settings of youths' daily lives. The book offers researchers and practitioners blueprints for creating and changing influential settings including classrooms, schools, universities, out-of-school time programs, ethnic systems of supplementary education, and other community-based programs. Leading scholars in psychology, education, human development, sociology, anthropology, economics, law, and public policy discuss a wide array of social change strategies, and describe how to measure key features of settings as a target and guide for change. The authors also demonstrate how larger social structures - such as school districts, community coalitions, community data resources - can support change. Many of the chapters describe ways to make settings work for all youth, including those marginalized by reason of race, ethnicity, social class, or sexual orientation. Toward Positive Youth Development will guide researchers, educators, administrators and policy makers to improve schools and youth programs for all of America's youth.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780199716593
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	04/10/2008
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Marybeth Shinn is Professor of Applied Psychology and Public Policy at New York University. She received her Ph.D. in social and community psychology from the University of Michigan. Shinn studies how social contexts, including social settings, neighborhoods, socioeconomic circumstances, and social policies, affect individual well-being. With anthropologist Kim Hopper, she is using capability theory to understand questions about environments that foster capabilities for homeless and mentally ill adults, which parallel questions in the current book about settings that promote youth development. Other work focuses on causes, consequences, and prevention of homelessness for families and individuals. Shinn was a fellow at the Russell Sage Foundation. She has served as president of the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues and the Society for Community Research and Action and received awards for Distinguished Contributions to Theory and Research and Ethnic Minority Mentoring from the latter group. Hirokazu Yoshikawa is Professor of Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. He studies the effects of welfare and anti-poverty policies on children; the influence of low-wage work dynamics and conditions on family processes and children; the development of young children in immigrant families; and whole-grade approaches to music education. He has participated in multiple Congressional briefings on child and family policy and human development. He has received three early career awards from the American Psychological Association (the Louise Kidder Award from the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues, the Boyd McCandless Award for contributions to developmental psychology, and the Minority Fellowship Program's early career award), as well as the Ethnic Minority Mentorship award from the Society for Community Research and Action (Division 27 of the APA). He was recently a member of the National Academy of Sciences Committee on Family and Work Policies. In 2004 he was awarded a fellowship from the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. He is editor (with Thomas Weisner and Edward Lowe) of Making It Work: Low-Wage Employment, Family Life, and Child Development (Russell Sage Foundation, 2006).

Table of Contents

Introduction   Marybeth Shinn   Hirokazu Yoshikawa     3
Changing Classrooms
Building Capacity for Positive Youth Development in Secondary School Classrooms: Changing Teachers' Interactions With Students   Robert C. Pianta   Joseph P. Allen     21
Changing Classroom Social Settings Through Attention to Norms   David B. Henry     40
Classroom Settings as Targets of Intervention and Research   Stephanie M. Jones   Joshua L. Brown   J. Lawrence Aber     58
Changing Schools
Schools That Actualize High Expectations for All Youth: Theory for Setting Change and Setting Creation   Rhona S. Weinstein     81
An Intervention in Progress: Pursuing Precision in School Race Talk   Mica Pollock     102
Enhancing Representation, Retention, and Achievement of Minority Students in Higher Education: A Social Transformation Theory of Change   Kenneth I. Maton   Freeman A. Hrabowski   Metin Ozdemir   Harriette Wimms     115
The School Climate for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender (LGBT) Students   Stephen T. Russell   Jenifer K. McGuire     133
Whole-School Change   Laura M. Desimone     150
Changing Community Organizations
Building the Capacity of Small Community-Based Organizations to BetterServe Youth   Robin Lin Miller   Shannon K. E. Kobes   Jason C. Forney     173
Quality Accountability: Improving Fidelity of Broad Developmentally Focused Interventions   Charles Smith   Tom Akiva     192
Altering Patterns of Relationship and Participation: Youth Organizing as a Setting-Level Intervention   Paul W. Speer     213
The Ethnic System of Supplementary Education: Nonprofit and For-Profit Institutions in Los Angeles' Chinese Immigrant Community   Min Zhou     229
Changing Larger Social Structures
Socioeconomic School Integration   Richard D. Kahlenberg     255
The Co-Construction of Educational Reform: The Intersection of Federal, State, and Local Contexts   Amanda Datnow     271
Using Community Epidemiologic Data to Improve Social Settings: The Communities That Care Prevention System   Abigail A. Fagan   J. David Hawkins   Richard F. Catalano     292
The Youth Data Archive: Integrating Data to Assess Social Settings in a Societal Sector Framework   Milbrey McLaughlin   Margaret O'Brien-Strain     313
Cross-Cutting Themes: Strategies for Measurement and Intervention
Measuring and Improving Program Quality: Reliability and Statistical Power   Andres Martinez   Stephen W. Raudenbush     333
Improving Youth-Serving Social Settings: Intervention Goals and Strategies for Schools, Youth Programs, and Communities   Hirokazu Yoshikawa   Marybeth Shinn     350
Contributors     364
Index     375

Editorial Reviews

The 2010 recipient of the Social Policy Edited Book Award as awarded by The Society for Research on Adolescence!

"...a collection of well-written, inspiring scholarly contributions which build an evidence base for setting-level interventions to improve youth outcomes. While focused on macro level change (settings), the book maintains an awareness of micro level goals (positive youth outcomes). This unique, integrated focus should be of interest to a wide range of practitioners, researchers, funders, and policy makers—those dedicated to improving the lives of youth and those interested in organizational development and change."—Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare

From the Publisher