Toward Positive Youth Development: Transforming Schools and Community Programs

This book examines how to improve social settings in order to foster positive youth development. Each chapter describes a theory of intervention and specific exemplars of strategies to transform settings where youth live, learn, work, and play, as a route to individual change. Chapters consider settings such as classrooms, schools, universities, out-of-school-time programs, community-based programs focused on health or youth-empowerment, programs for supplementary education for immigrant youth, and youth-organizing efforts. Other chapters examine how broader contexts such as school districts, community coalitions, and networks of youth-serving organizations can guide and support or hinder change. Because measurement of settings is critical to motivate and direct change efforts and guide social policy, chapters also describe ways of assessing key features of setting. Many chapters consider how setting can increase the representation of youth who are marginalized for reasons of race, ethnicity, immigration status, or sexual orientation and how it can improve the quality of the youth's experiences. Because changing settings requires many forms of expertise, the book's authors come from multiple disciplinary backgrounds.