Framing Youth Development for Public Support. New Directions for Youth Development, Number 124

Take an in depth look at how emotions relate to adolescents’ decision making, reasoning, and behavior in morally relevant situations. It provides a summary of current research on emotions, morality, and adaptive behaviors. Furthermore, it discusses new approaches to research on emotions, morality, and socially adaptive behavior in adolescence. By doing so, the articles provide new insights into adolescents’ emotional and moral development and show how emotions contribute to the way adolescents negotiate, resolve, and adapt to the moral and social conflicts that inevitably occur in their everyday lives. By integrating innovative perspectives from developmental, educational, and clinical research, this volume has much to offer for researchers, youth practitioners, and educators. This is the 136th volume of New Directions for Youth Development, the Jossey-Bass quarterly report series dedicated to bringing together everyone concerned with helping young people, including scholars, practitioners, and people from different disciplines and professions.

Bullying is a hot topic at schools across the nation. Chronic involvement in bullying is associated with many intrapersonal, interpersonal, and academic problems, and even sporadic experiences of bullying are harmful. During the last two decades, several prevention and intervention programs have been developed by research teams all over the world. Many of these programs have been adopted in the United States. This volume introduces five evidence-based anti-bullying programs developed in European countries, where much of the early innovations and adaptations have occurred. Based on state-of-the-art knowledge, This volume answers: How can educators detect that bullying is going on in their school? How can educators respond competently in acute bullying situations? How can educators prevent bullying in their schools in the long run? This is the 133rd volume of New Directions for Youth Development, the Jossey-Bass quarterly report series dedicated to bringing together everyone concerned with helping young people, including scholars, practitioners, and people from different disciplines and professions.

Expanding the learning day is gaining national momentum as an important school-improvement and whole-child development strategy. This issue focuses on school-community partnerships that provide a seamless, longer learning day that best meets the academic (Expanded Learning Time or ELT) and developmental (Expanded Learning Opportunities or ELO) needs of high-poverty students in resource-poor communities. First it draws attention to the importance of ELOs and offers contours of the ELT-ELO partnerships through research evidence and policy analysis. It then covers both in practice and features a spectrum of ELT-ELO partnerships, from less to more integrated models. The issue pays close attention to: The central role ELOs play in ELT schools The changing safeguards for community-based organizations Ways in which current education policy is shaping the approach of schools and community partners to learning and development. This is the 131st volume of New Directions for Youth Development, the Jossey-Bass quarterly report series dedicated to bringing together everyone concerned with helping young people, including scholars, practitioners, and people from different disciplines and professions.

This volume brings together the findings from separate studies of community-based and school-based mentoring to unpack the common response to the question of what makes youth mentoring work. A debate that was alive in 2002, when the first New Directions for Youth Development volume on mentoring, edited by Jean Rhodes, was published, centers on whether goal-oriented or relationship-focused interactions (conversations and activities) prove to be more essential for effective youth mentoring. The consensus appeared then to be that the mentoring context defined the answer: in workplace mentoring with teens, an instrumental relationship was deemed essential and resulted in larger impacts, while in the community setting, the developmental relationship was the key ingredient of change. Recent large-scale studies of school-based mentoring have raised this question once again and suggest that understanding how developmental and instrumental relationship styles manifest through goal-directed and relational interactions is essential to effective practice. Because the contexts in which youth mentoring occurs (in the community, in school during the day, or in a structured program after school) affect what happens in the mentor-mentee pair, our goal was to bring together a diverse group of researchers to describe the focus, purpose, and authorship of the mentoring interactions that happen in these contexts in order to help mentors and program staff better understand how youth mentoring relationships can be effective. This is the 126th issue of New Directions for Youth Development the Jossey-Bass quarterly report series dedicated to bringing together everyone concerned with helping young people, including scholars, practitioners, and people from different disciplines and professions. The result is a unique resource presenting thoughtful, multi-faceted approaches to helping our youth develop into responsible, stable, well-rounded citizens.

Across education, out-of-school-time programming, and workforce development, researchers and practitioners are seeking ways to bolster the career readiness of our nation’s youth, particularly low-income youth. This issue brings together information from a variety of disciplines and fields to help researchers, practitioners, and policymakers understand what we know and need to learn to provide youth with effective, engaging career-related programming. The articles highlight key findings about how youth learn about careers and develop a vocational identity, whether adolescent employment is beneficial for youth, and how to align our various systems to promote positive youth development. Models of career programming from education, afterschool, and workforce development are highlighted, as are strategies for collaborating with businesses. The volume emphasizes the practical implications of research findings, keeping the focus on how to develop evidence-based practices to support career development for youth. This is the 134th volume of New Directions for Youth Development, the Jossey-Bass quarterly report series dedicated to bringing together everyone concerned with helping young people, including scholars, practitioners, and people from different disciplines and professions.

Explore the complexity of teacher-student relationships in secondary school settings and learn how these largely unscripted relationships function for students and teachers in their learning and socioemotional development. For teachers, the relationships provide a foundation for pedagogical and curricular endeavors and lead to their increased investment in students’ growth, development, and academic success. Students who have such relationships feel more comfortable in their learning environments, interested in the material, and motivated to perform well. We discuss what these relationships look like from the perspectives of teacher and student. Topics include: Drawing appropriate boundaries School-provided guidelines and guidance Formats for supporting teachers A whole school approach to working on students’ emotional challenges Relationships in after-school programs. The voices of teachers and students in this volume show how much young people want to feel known and engage with teachers and how much teachers feel rewarded and invigorated by taking the step to connect with students on this level. This is the 137th volume of New Directions for Youth Development, the Jossey-Bass quarterly report series dedicated to bringing together everyone concerned with helping young people, including scholars, practitioners, and people from different disciplines and professions.

Take a cutting edge look at the civic engagement of young people. Increasingly recognized as an important feature of democratic functioning in communities, it has also become clear that the civic domain is indispensable as a context for understanding human development processes. This volume proposes the following central theses in relation to youth civic development: It is rooted in the realities of young people’s everyday lives. It is collectively constructed. It raises questions about the principles, values, and relationships that bind people together in societies. It raises questions about power and justice. Youth civic development pushes the field to focus on the social issues with which younger generations are grappling and the identities they are constructing—issues that also are shaped by structural inequalities and by the collective actions of youth. The volume builds on themes of agency and assets from the field of positive youth development and points to ways that the critical analysis and engagement of young people in their society can contribute to social change. This is the 134th volume in this series. Its mission is to provide scientific and scholarly presentations on cutting edge issues and concepts in child and adolescent development. Each volume focuses on a specific new direction or research topic and is edited by experts on that topic.

It's not all «fun and games.» A growing body of research suggests that recreation activities can be powerful development contexts when they are properly framed and intentionally designed. This volume highlights much of that research, and the articles that follow provide ample evidence that well-framed recreation activities and contexts can provide a range of positive developmental outcomes. Editors Lawrence R. Allen and Robert J. Barcelona draw on their own work in human and youth development and have assembled contributing authors who explore the important of meaningful recreation and leisure experiences in the lives of youth and the value of recreation from a developmental perspective. Chapters focus on the developmental potential of specific recreation contexts and settings and provide research and evidence-based strategies outlining the activities that best promote positive youth development. Finally, the volume demonstrates how recreation is being used to strengthen individual and community assets and its role as a contributor in addressing pressing social issues. This is the 130th volume of New Directions for Youth Development, the Jossey-Bass quarterly report series dedicated to bringing together everyone concerned with helping young people, including scholars, practitioners, and people from different disciplines and professions. The result is a unique resource presenting thoughtful, multi-faceted approaches to helping our youth develop into responsible, stable, well-rounded citizens.

The evidence base of the impact and effectiveness of healthy eating and physical activity interventions in the out-of-school setting is continuing to emerge. By sponsoring this special issue, the National AfterSchool Association provides a platform for the sharing of a range of research studies that can inform and shape current discussion of best policies and practices to support child and youth wellness. The body of work presented in this issue adds considerably to our knowledge of healthy eating and physical activity interventions in out-of-school programs, and highlights the substantial contribution towards childhood obesity prevention that we envision from our field. This is the 143rd volume of New Directions for Youth Development, the Jossey-Bass quarterly report series dedicated to bringing together everyone concerned with helping young people, including scholars, practitioners, and people from different disciplines and professions.

In this volume, African scholars engaged in research on the continent reflect on their recent and ongoing empirical studies. They discuss the strengths and limitations of research methods, theories, and interventions designed outside Africa to spur innovative research on the continent. And they explore how insights from African philosophical, theoretical, and empirical work can be combined with exogenous forms of knowledge to generate understanding of the processes of African children’s development in ways that are responsive to local contexts and meaningful for indigenous stakeholders. A new field of African child development research is emerging in African societies, focusing on children as valued and vulnerable members of society and potential civic leaders of the future. Systematic inquiries are now designed to enhance our understanding of how African children think, to discover effective ways of communicating with them, and to inform successful strategies of promoting their health, education, and preparation for adult responsibilities in society. This is the 146th volume in this Jossey-Bass series New Directions for Child and Adolescent Development. Its mission is to provide scientific and scholarly presentations on cutting edge issues and concepts in this subject area. Each volume focuses on a specific new direction or research topic and is edited by experts from that field.