Means-Tested Public Assistance Programs and Adolescent Political Socialization

In recent years, scholars have pointed to the politically demobilizing effects of means-tested assistance programs on recipients. In this study, we bridge the insights from policy feedback literature and adolescent political socialization research to examine how receiving means-tested programs shapes parent influence on adolescent political participation. We argue that there are differences in pathways to political participation through parent political socialization and youth internal efficacy beliefs for adolescents from households that do or do not receive means-tested assistance. Using data from a nationally representative sample of 536 Black, Latino, and White adolescents (50.8% female), we find that adolescents from means-tested assistance households report less parent political socialization and political participation. For all youth, parent political socialization predicts adolescent political participation. Internal political efficacy is a stronger predictor of political participation for youth from a non-means-tested assistance household than it is for youth from a household receiving means-tested assistance. These findings provide some evidence of differential paths to youth political participation via exposure to means-tested programs.     

Youth Work in Croatia: Collecting Pieces for a Mosaic

This article explores the historical development of youth work in Croatia. By drawing from available data and personal experience, we describe three key phases of youth work development in a post-conflict country: (a) the period of the early 1990s as a “direct peace building" youth work; (b) the rise of nonformal education during the mid and late 1990s; and (c) the growth of a networked youth sector and its focus on youth policy advocacy starting in 2000. In addition, we refer to today's context, particularly because of its project-management orientation. Such categorization highlights various practices that we consider to represent youth work in a specific and contested national framework. Work with young people with fewer opportunities is being presented as a case, building on our observation that contemporary youth work continues to be embedded in civil society development and nonformal education, facing challenges of funding-driven discourse and unsystematic support.     

Why University Education Matters: Youth Work and the Australian Experience

In many countries youth work education in the university confronts a precarious future. Paradoxically, this takes place as the labor market is unable to meet demands for qualified practitioners. This article makes a case for further investment in university-based youth work education. While presenting labor demand and supply arguments, we also suggest that a good university education is important for producing graduates capable of becoming experts and good practitioners in the Aristotelian sense of the word. This entails the provision of learning opportunities to attain specialist knowledge, technical expertise and ethical capacities of the kind that distinguish youth work practice from other approaches to work with young people. Such an education also promotes the prospect that practitioners are able to develop a professional habitus that advances youth work as a discrete field of professional practice. While the material used in this article is Australian, we suggest there are sufficient commonalities between the Australian experience and many other countries for the arguments, findings and recommendations made here to have more general applicability.     

Working for Change: Projectified Politics and Gender Equality

In this article I argue that the project, a governmental technology that is now widespread and accepted throughout the public sector, is not a neutral tool for implementing policy and conducting politics. Rather, my argument is that this form is intrinsically political in so far as it produces disruptions and sets boundaries for how any given task is to be performed. By mobilizing a set of optical metaphors from feminist theory of difference, I examine organizations that work for gender equality in Swedish regional development and illustrate how the governmental technology of the project reflects, refracts, and diffracts the practices associated with this work. Thus, I argue that if one wishes to understand contemporary gender-equality work, it is reasonable to consider the specific effects that are produced as it passes through the project form. The short empirical illustrations given here indicate, among other things, how the project form functions in some respects as a mirror, and reflects aspects of gender-equality work that are commonly experienced regardless of form or setting, such as encountering resistance. In other respects, the project form refracts gender-equality work, bending it into new directions so that, for instance, securing funds and coming up with new innovative project plans takes precedence over the actual work that respondents feel they should be doing. Finally, the intersection of gender-equality work and the project form also produces diffraction effects, such as the emergence of hybrid consultants. These multi-faceted figures function as evaluators, controllers, activists, and disseminators of knowledge, which makes them simultaneously important to and disdained by the respondents in this study. Thus, it is concluded that the disruptive effects of the project form should be recognized as political and studied more extensively in the future.     

Improving Community-Based Youth Work: Evaluation of an Action Research Approach

Few formal post-secondary educational programs in the United States focus on youth work, thus youth workers often enter the field with diverse backgrounds and varying levels of experience working with youth. Drawing on mounting evidence that quality youth service requires skilled staff, professional-development opportunities have received increasing support by agencies and funders. Typically, youth work professional development supports propositional (theory) knowledge learning to develop a more skilled workforce. This article describes an approach to youth work professional development that supports professional-craft knowledge learning (practice wisdom). Based on action research methodology, the approach has been developed over the last three years with groups of youth workers in a public organization. Using program evaluation data over the last two years and university-facilitator reflections, the authors describe what have been found to be the critical components of this approach. Also discussed are implications of using such an approach in day-to-day youth work practice.     

My Stomach Fell Through the Floor: The Moment of Not-Knowing What to Do

Youth workers routinely experience moments in their professional practice with young people when, despite their experience and training, they are simply at a loss for what to do, how to respond, and how to be helpful to the youth. These experiences of not-knowing are seldom shared with other youth workers, which contributes to a climate of shame and humiliation. Professional supervision seldom attends to how youth workers experience these moments and their personal and vocational costs. This study presents a phenomenological investigation of how youth workers experience moments of not knowing what to do, identifies five central themes of the experience, and makes recommendations for improved youth work practice and supervision. This chapter presents the research question and its significance to the field of American youth work.     

The Importance and Benefits of Supervision in Youth Work Practice

This article explores the concept of supervision and its implementation within a youth work context. The article describes and explores a process of staff development facilitated by the author which involved providing supervision training to a group of youth work practitioners at Cork YMCA in Ireland and continuing to meet them on a monthly basis over a period of a year in a mentoring capacity. These sessions provided a supportive space for supervisors and aimed to facilitate a reflective process in relation to their own supervisory practice. This article explores the opportunities and challenges of the supervision process, advocates the importance of supervision in ensuring effective youth work practice, and identifies the beneficial impact of this at a number of levels.     

Connecting research and practice: Perspectives on the role of manualized programs in youth work

While there is a strong movement in favor of the use of manual-based programs in the arena of social care, there is a view that such programs are not applicable in the more fluid setting of youth work, which operates informally, using dynamic and organic methods. A critical pedagogical approach to youth work engages young people by encouraging them to become inquisitive, to question why things are the way they are and to pose problems through which they can learn. For some, manualized or evidence-based programs are not seen as having a role in such contexts. However, to date, the international debate in relation to this issue has been limited by an absence of published studies focusing specifically on strategies to implement evidence-informed practice in youth work contexts. This article aims to address this gap in the literature. The Irish national youth organization Foróige, which works with more than 56,000 young people in Ireland on an annual basis, has developed a range of manualized evidence-informed resources to support its youth work over recent years. Drawing on research findings from a range of studies conducted with youth workers focusing on implementation of these resources, the article explores the benefits and tensions associated with the use of program manuals in a youth work context. The findings suggest that such resources have a valuable role to play in youth work if designed in collaboration with youth workers, showing respect for core youth work values and allowing for flexibility and adaptability in implementation.     

Creating Settings for Youth Empowerment and Leadership: An Ecological Perspective

Youth development programs are increasingly focusing on youth empowerment and leadership, a shift which often requires adult staff to adopt new roles and practices. This article explores staff practice in the context of a multisite initiative designed to engage marginalized youth in social change through youth-led grants. Interviews with youth workers and managers revealed practices at multiple ecological levels. Individual-level practices supported youths’ capacities to participate. Group-level practices fostered social interactions and activities that actualized the youth-led approach. Setting-level practices created structures that supported and protected group activities while organization-level practices promoted a favorable environment for youth leadership. Analyzed from an ecological and activity settings perspective, these results contribute to understanding the multifaceted and complex nature of youth work in power-sharing practice models. Practice implications include identifying training needs to help practitioners navigate across multiple ecological levels and suggesting reflection questions for practitioners.     

The Transition from Student to Practitioner in Children and Youth Care

The transition from child and youth care student to child and youth care professional can be an anxiety producing experience. The purpose of this chapter is to identify the challenges regularly encountered by beginning practitioners in order to provide a frame of reference for entry into this type of work. Anticipating and preparing for these events may facilitate an easier transition into the world of work. This chapter addresses the following areas: finding work, readiness to practice, defining the child care role, supervision, agency structures and suggestions for the beginning practitioner.     

“We Don't Want a Teacher”: Using the Past to Offer Fresh Eyes to Contemporary Practice

Much historical and contemporary writing lauds the Citizenship Schools of the Civil Rights Movement, and the Highlander Folk School that supported them, as major players in the struggle to educate Black people across the South as citizens and voters. However, little scholarly literature explores the pedagogical and programmatic elements of these community-driven schools or the ways these schools provided an infrastructure to the movement. Drawing from archival research, this article examines these schools and connects their educational methods to the successes of the Civil Rights Movement. It names ways these methods influenced present practice in youth work for social change while also identifying the ways that many of the practices of these schools have been ignored or lost in contemporary youth work. It concludes by identifying from this work 9 questions youth workers can pose to orient their youth work toward social and racial justice.     

Invited Commentary: Exploring the Promises,Intricacies, and Challenges to Positive Youth Development

We highlight the need for and critical importance of the program of research reported in this Special Issue. We emphasize that a focus on positive youth development is sorely overdue. The impressive project covering one decade, 42 states and 7,000 participants demonstrates critical contributors to positive youth development. The two identified themes emerging from the set of papers are that contexts and the nature of assets matter for youth. Collectively, the papers explored a variety of positive youth development relevant questions and utilized combinations of annual assessments and data sources from an extraordinary data base. The core methodological and conceptual flaw across papers was the under-representation of minorities in the data set, which limited the generalizability of findings. While the major shortcoming was acknowledged at the onset and recognized as a failing in each paper, nevertheless, merely conceding the flaw was seen as insufficient given the policy, practice, and research implications. The inadequate sampling and follow-up of youth from families which continue to face persistent social inequality and having the most to gain from a positive youth development conceptual strategy and was a major shortcoming; it prevented within group analyses. The co-authors note that although research decisions made limited the generalizability of the positive youth development research strategy for non-white American youth, the intended goals for inclusiveness are evident and, accordingly, suggest a level of hopefulness.     

青年本质属性对思想政治教育建设的启示

新时期青年的特殊本质属性是“急剧变化”的自然性,“逐步完善”的实践性,“日益成熟”的社会性三者的有机统一。鉴于青年的本质属性,要求在思想政治教育过程中树立“以人为本”的教育理念,尊重青年,理解青年,关心青年,包容青年,尊重与应对青年突变的自然性;增强青年的实践自主意识,培养青年的实践探索精神,开发青年的实践动手能力,激励并促进青年实践性的逐步完善;培养青年角色能力,帮助青年确立理性生活目标,学习生产生活技能,掌握社会规范,引导与推动青年社会性的日益成熟,促进青年平稳地过渡成为符合社会要求的社会成员。     

naming and defining ‘domestic violence’: lessons from research with violent men

In this paper we draw on data from in-depth interviews with men who have used violence and abuse within intimate partner relationships to provide a new lens through which to view the conceptual debates on naming, defining and understanding ‘domestic violence’, as well as the policy and practice implications that flow from them. We argue that the reduction of domestic violence to discrete ‘incidents’ supports and maintains how men themselves talk about their use of violence, and that this in turn overlaps with contentions about the appropriate interventions and responses to domestic violence perpetrators. We revisit Hearn’s 1998 work The Violences of Men, connecting it to Stark’s later concept of coercive control, in order to develop and extend understandings of violence through analysis of the words of those who use it. We conclude by exploring the implications of these findings for recent legal reform in England and Wales and for policies on how we deal with perpetrators.     

Using core competency frameworks to explore the needs of Kenyan youth workers

Since youth work is a relatively new career path, there is debate regarding the competencies necessary to advance overall professional practice. This debate is particularly relevant in African countries, such as Kenya, with a growing number of youth in need of assistance. The purpose of this study was to identify the competencies needed to meet the goals and challenges of Kenyan youth workers, and assess whether these competencies align with prominent youth development competency frameworks. Data were collected from Kenyan youth workers related to the challenges, goals, and barriers they faced. These data were matched to two competency frameworks. Four themes emerged: (1) programs management competencies are most important; (2) holistically developed youth is a primary goal; (3) differences exist in how competency frameworks map to Kenyan youth workers; and (4) all competencies are not equal in the view of youth workers. Implications for program and system development are discussed.     

The Psychological World of the Gay Teenager:Social Change,Narrative, and “Normality”

This paper examines the application of concepts of normal adolescence pioneered by Offer and colleagues to the study of gay and lesbian youth. Adolescent development among this population demonstrates remarkable historical variability along the lines of generation-cohort, revealing the utility of a life-course approach to the study of normal adolescence. Concepts of normal adolescence appear to shift with changing narratives of identity for sexual minority youth. We contrast two narratives of gay youth identity development that have emerged since the inception of substantive research programs on gay adolescence: (1) the narrative of struggle and success that came to dominate the literature in the 1980s and 1990s and (2) the narrative of emancipation that has emerged from the work of Savin-Williams and others who argue for a recognition of the diversity of adolescent development for this population. In relating this contrast to Offer’s seminal contributions to the study of adolescence, we suggest that the most normative feature of human development, particularly during adolescence, is its connection to discourses of identity through the formation of personal narratives that anchor the life course and provide meaning to conceptions of self-development. The example of shifting narratives of gay youth identity development is meant to exemplify this characteristic feature of human development. William Rainey Harper Professor of Social Sciences, The College, the Departments of Comparative Human Development, Psychology, Psychiatry and the Committee on Interdisciplinary Studies in the Humanities, The University of Chicago. For nearly two decades he collaborated with Dan Offer as the director of the University’s component of the Adolescence Training grant shared jointly with Michael Reese Hospital and Directed by Dan Offer. His recent work focuses on the interplay of history and social change in the study of lives over time. Advanced doctoral student in the Department of Comparative Human Development. His work examines the cultural psychology of adolescence and emerging adulthood, with a focus on identity and narrative. His earlier work with former student of Dan Offer, Maryse Richards, focused on the study of ethnicity, context, and normal adolescence. Most recently, he has been studying culture and normal adolescent development among Israeli and Palestinian youth. In 2007 he will be appointed an Assistant Professor of Psychology at the University of California-Santa Cruz.     

Teaching Citizens: The Role of Open Classroom Climate in Fostering Critical Consciousness Among Youth

Building on previous research on critical consciousness and civic development among youth, the current study examined the extent to which an open climate for discussion—one in which controversial issues are openly discussed with respect for all opinions—relates to youth’s critical consciousness and whether this association differs for youth from racial/ethnic majority versus minority backgrounds. Critical consciousness consisted of three components: the ability to critically read social conditions (critical reflection), feelings of efficacy to effect change (sociopolitical efficacy) and actual participation in these efforts (critical action), in both the educational and political/community domains. Open classroom climate was operationalized at the classroom rather than individual student level to more accurately draw links to educational policy and practice. Multilevel analyses of the 1999 IEA Civic Education Study, a nationally-representative sample of 2,774 US ninth-graders (50 % female; 58 % white), revealed that an open classroom climate predicted some, but not all, components of critical consciousness. Specifically, open classroom climate was positively related to sociopolitical efficacy in both the educational and political domains and to critical action in the community domain, but was not related to critical reflection. Few differences in these associations were found for youth from racial/ethnic majority versus minority backgrounds. The exception was sociopolitical efficacy in the educational domain: open classroom climate was particularly predictive of sociopolitical efficacy for minority youth. The findings are discussed in regard to previous research on open classroom climate and youth critical consciousness; and implications for future research and educational practice are drawn.     

Use of Self in the Context of Youth Work

Used in the education of counselors, nurses, occupational therapists and social workers, “use of self” is a way of understanding how practitioners bring about human change. In this article, the author discusses how use of self can be applied to youth work and is related to “developmentally responsive practice” thereby providing a deep theoretical construct for understanding youth work as relational. The author concludes by presenting the barriers to the use of self paradigm in the current climate of assessment and accountability, designed to measure static inputs and outputs rather than dynamic systems or ecologies and presents a challenge to the field for designing methodologies that are equally dynamic, responsive and relational.     

IMPRACTICAL RECONCILIATION

This article examines the events and texts of the Huggins–Bell debate, in view of the revival of Bell's ‘everyone's business’ position in the current context of the Northern Territory Intervention. I argue that while there are disjunctures between the position Bell espoused and the measures taken in the Intervention, the Intervention's policy approach of ‘practical reconciliation’ shares the signature features of Bell's position. As in Bell's work, the discourses supporting the Intervention use an ideology/practice binary to defend the morality of intervention, refuse to treat issues of lateral violence and racism intersectionally, and claim to bolster the authority of Indigenous women while in practice undermining that authority.