We Are Not Quite There Yet …

Abstract

This article explores the authors' critical reflections that arose while engaging in research with girls recovering from an eating disorder. The authors address issues related to media, consumerism, and identity construction. They emphasize that while there are no clear solutions to dilemmas facing girls in North American culture, researchers and practitioners can co-create space with girls where gendered issues are made explicit. Their holistic framework for working with girls does not imply a neutral approach; rather, they aim to honor the complexity of gendered narratives and critically reflect on their implications for practice.     

Escalon:

No abstract available for this article.     

Changing Images in Books for Young People

Literature for young people has changed greatly since Severzteeiztlz Suinrner and Fifreerz were published. Society has changed greatly, too, in the last few decades. Many modern books reflect society's involvement with drugs, sex, alcohol, and violence. Teenagers will read a great variety of stories and view different images of themselves and their times.     

Youth Work in Gay Straight Alliances: Curriculum,Pedagogy, and Activist Development

Critical pedagogy empowers Gay Straight Alliance (GSA) advisers facilitate reflective, activist-oriented learning. Its use in school clubs has broad implications for both teachers and youth workers. Informed by critical multiculturalism, this study draws on ethnographic fieldwork from one school year and in-depth interviews with GSA participants. Data reveal that the GSA advisor's understanding of critical pedagogy is characterized by expanding students’ knowledge, facilitating students’ activism, and encouraging students’ reflection on significant interactions with peers and family. The author concludes these pedagogical practices help create long-term GSAs, where engaged student learning and activism promote a “third space” in youth development work.     

Chapter 7. Creating and Sustaining a Culture of Group Care

Abstract

Group care centers are established to provide a range of living, learning, treatment, and supervisory opportunities for children and young people who, for a variety of reasons, need alternative, supplementary, or substitute care. It is important, therefore, that group care centres establish an organizational climate, ethos, or culture of caring that is consistent with these objectives. This is achieved through internal organizational design, administrative routines, maintaining the physical environment, and support for staff team functioning, including attention to Specific work methods.     

Chapter 10. Patterns of Career Development in Child and Youth Care

Abstract

Patterns of career development in the field of child and youth care are reexamined in relation to roles that involve working directly with children in specific settings as well as in relation to roles that involve working indirectly in support of children through working with other adults, be these parents, other caregivers or professionals. Other career roles involve working in support of human service systems that impact on the care of children and young people and influence family welfare. Finally, some career roles involve working at the macro level to formulate policies that shape the culture of caring communities to support the health and well-being of children. Each career role presents important challenges and offers valuable opportunities for influencing the lives of children, young people and their families.     

Chapter 13: Group Therapy for Birth Parents of Children in Foster Care

Psychological impairments render many biological parents of children placed in treatment foster care incompetent to meet child-rearing tasks. Service agreements identify and address critical areas of dysfunctioning but do not engage parents in a broader inventory of their parental functioning and dysfuntioning. A group method provides mutual support, exploration, and a positive child-rearing model. A clinical assessment of parenting that highlights ongoing developmental needs of nurturance and empathy, limit setting, structure, role modeling, reality testing, and separation and individuation is used to promote progress. Parents gain insight into their own overall impairments, origin of impairments, and compensatory techniques. Parents recognize broader responsibility for parenthood enhancing reunification efforts.     

Chapter 11. The Economics of Group Care Practice

Abstract

For the past two decades, economic influences have significantly impacted the provision of health and welfare services for children, young people and their families in communities around the world. The dynamic of cost has reshaped both the nature and provision of group care services, promoting de-institutionalization and transforming the nature of caring services offered in local communities. In a reappraisal of themes identified in his seminal contribution more than two decades ago, this leading authority looks back at key themes impacting on the economics of social care that shape group care services for the new millennium.     

Organizational factors that contribute to youth workers' promotion of youth voice

The term youth voice has been identified as a mechanism that helps youth who are participating in out-of-school time programs (e.g., 4-H, Boys & Girls Club, Big Brother/Big Sister) achieve successful outcomes such as improved academic and social functioning. Youth voice promotion is commonly enacted in out-of-school time programs when youth workers extend opportunities to youth to provide feedback and make key program decisions. To date, scant research has focused on organizational factors that contribute to program staff (e.g., youth workers) willingness to promote youth voice. A structural equation model using person-environment fit theory within a Positive Youth Development theory framework was constructed to test organizational factors that contribute to youth voice promotion among youth workers. Data from 569 frontline youth workers within out-of-school time programs across the United States indicated that youth workers' abilities to form positive relationships with youth, professional efficacy, and ability to make decisions in their own jobs directly predicted youth workers' endorsement of youth voice. In addition, positive relationships partially mediated the effects of professional efficacy on youth voice promotion. Implications for theory and practice are discussed.     

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.     

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.     

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.     

Competency in Establishing Positive Relationships With Program Youth: The Impact of Organization and Youth Worker Characteristics

Frontline youth workers’ ability to form strong, positive relationships with program youth is a key element in maximizing the benefits of program participation. A recent National Collaboration of Youth (2006 National Collaboration for Youth. ( 2006 ). Capturing promising practices in recruitment and retention of frontline youth workers. Retrieved from http://www.nydic.org/nydic/documents/CompletePublication.pdf  [Google Scholar]) report identified six elements associated with youth workers’ competency to complete their professional roles: compensation, training opportunities, supportive work environment, clear work roles, sense that work is valued, and networking opportunities. The current study investigated whether having these elements predicted 459 youth workers’ self-reported job competency in forming positive relationships with youth. Regression analyses revealed that job efficacy, clarity of work roles, and benefits significantly predicted competency in forming strong relationships with program youth. Findings are discussed in relation to practice implications for the youth work field.     

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.     

The Beauties of Kashmir: Nila Gupta's Representations of War from a Distance

Abstract: This essay examines Nila Gupta's literary representation of the conflict in Kashmir in her short story cycle The Sherpa and Other Fictions (2008). Born and raised in Canada, Gupta has a diasporic perspective and a feminist political stance that values women's solidarity and political involvement across borders. Her short stories explore the feminist thesis that the sexual crimes committed against girls and women at times of conflict are a direct consequence of the appropriation of women's bodies for symbolic uses within the dialectics of patriarchal nationalisms. However, her stories' restrained style and their publication in a small activist press preclude easy commodification in a global market avid for narratives of ethnic violence. By reading Gupta's creative texts in relation to academic studies of communal sexual violence and nationalism, humanitarian reports on refugees and gendered violence and journalistic accounts of the conflict, this essay attempts to assess the power of literature to offer nuanced and complex representations of violent conflict and its consequences. Special attention is paid to the representation of life in the officially designated ‘migrant camps’, to the difficult issue of the social stigmatization of rape victims and to the many ways in which women are implicated.     

The Role of Epistemic Cognition in Adolescent Identity Formation: Further Evidence

Following Boyes and Chandler (1992), it is investigated how adolescents’ epistemic understanding relates to the process of identity formation. In a cross-sectional as well as longitudinal study, identity status scores of diffusion, foreclosure, moratorium and identity achievement as assessed by the Extended Objective Measure of Ego Identity Status were analyzed as a function of adolescents’ epistemic stance, while simultaneously taking into account individual differences in identity processing styles. The cross-sectional sample was composed of 200 German adolescents from Grades 7, 9, 11, and 13 (mean age: 16.2 years, SD = 2.41). The longitudinal study consisted of 134 participants (mean age at retest: 16.5 years, SD = 1.7) and covered a time interval of 18 months. Findings confirmed the view that the development of epistemic cognition contributes to adolescent identity formation. Specifically, the development of a multiplistic epistemic stance predicted higher moratorium scores, whereas the more advanced evaluativist epistemic position contributed to identity achievement over time. These effects were not due to individual differences in identity processing style.     

The Image of Fathers in Popular Adolescent Fiction

With the number of single parent homes on the increase, many children must derive their ideas of roles and responsibilities of fathers from secondary sources, especially books. The picture of fathers that emerges from popular adolescent novels is a disturbing one, with father being commonly portrayed as ineffectual, uncaring, or absent. Significant examples from currently popular books are discussed.     

The Development of a Parent Support Group as a Means of Initiating Family Involvement in a Residential Program

SUMMARY

Working with the families of children in residential care is critical to the success of the placement. For a variety of reasons, parents of adolescents in one residential setting were not receiving adequate services during placement. A parent support and education group was designed and implemented to provide opportunities for parents to access support, learn new parenting skills and, ultimately, optimize their relationships with their children. The responses of both parents and staff to this program were favorable. The group is now a regular component of the organization's range of services, and served as a springboard to enhance family involvement in other program areas.     

The Feminist Art of Self-Education

Abstract

Sociologist Elizabeth Long has charted the emergence of women’s reading groups in nineteenth-century America. ‘The women who founded literary clubs’, Long (2004, 337) tells us, ‘were aflame with the then revolutionary desire for education and self-development, which they called “self-culture”.’ Comparable aspirations continued to fuel a drive amongst women to organize together within reading and publishing groups, usually outside of official institutions, well into the twentieth century. This ‘revolutionary desire’ for self-education has also been evident in the UK women’s art and art history movement, although it has not been addressed in thorough detail. This article therefore seeks to situate an overlooked history of artistic reading and publishing communities in relation to an established body of theory in literary and cultural studies. These theoretical materials will illuminate the importance that reading and self-education (either in person or as part of a periodical network) had in establishing solidarity, and generating debate, within a flourishing art and art history movement. The second half of this article focuses on a specific case study. FAN: Feminist Art News (1980–1993) was an independent, grassroots publication that grew out of the Women Artists’ Newsletter in London. Temporary editorial collectives published themed issues on a quarterly basis. This article contends that it is no coincidence the subject of art education formed the focus of the periodical’s first issue, as well as a subsequent issue four years later. This indicates the significance of a reflexive auto-didacticism to second-wave feminism, as well as gesturing towards the long history of ‘education and self-improvement’ that has fuelled women’s reading and study groups since the nineteenth century.