In 2007, I embarked on a PhD study to explore diverse students' experiences, representations and understandings of personal development and personal development planning at one British university. The timing of this project was critical because universities were charged with a responsibility to provide opportunities for students to engage with…

Are our current ways of talking about "the problem of adolescence" really that different than those of past generations? For the past decade, Act Your Age! has provided a provocative and now classic analysis of the accepted ways of viewing teens. By employing a groundbreaking "history of the present" methodology that resists traditional…

This book, aimed at the young reader, explores the life and career of the Chinese-American author, Amy Tan. It follows her childhood in Oakland, California, through her struggle to accept her Chinese heritage, through her education and marriage to a non-Chinese man, to her early work as a business writer, and finally to her great success as a…

This book explores the life of Maya Angelou, the author the autobiographical "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings." The book details her life from the beginning in Stamps, Arkansas, and relates how she has overcome many obstacles throughout her life to become the successful, educated woman she is today--author, political activist, actress,…

Following an introduction by Anthony Liddicoat on the general nature of bilingualism, three papers on the characteristics, development, and advantages of bilingualism are presented. "Psycholinguistic Aspects of Bilingualism" by Susanne Dopke, Tim Macnamara, and Terry Quinn considers the linguistic, cognitive, emotional, and educational…

This document is one of a series by the Youth Development Center at the University of Minnesota dedicated to the discussion of youth. Thirteen participants from various social science fields were asked to present a perspective on youth from the viewpoints of their profession or discipline. This dialogue, an edited and restructured version of the…

Noting the need for further development of transnational and intercultural childhood and youth research communities of discourse in response to an emerging unified Europe, this volume presents the topics raised at the international conference "Growing Up in Europe" held at the University of Halle-Wittenberg in 1994. Following two…

According to Gordon and Bridglall, the ability to learn is more of a developed human capacity than a fixed aptitude with which one is born. They argue that the emergence of academic ability is associated with exposure to specialized cultures that privilege the attitudes, knowledge, and skills that schools reward. Children who are born to and…

Noting that patterns of childrearing are highly variable across the human species, this book explores the developmental processes of infancy over a wide range of cultural and social environments. By presenting multiple alternative examples of the context of infant development, the book attempts to stimulate continued discussion on the ways in…

Using a comparative-cultural perspective, this collection of essays examines the co-constructivist nature of human development in culturally organized environments. The contributions also cover a large age span--infancy to adulthood. Chapters in part 1 cover two different directions in the study of early adult-infant interaction from a comparative…

This book describes a 30-year longitudinal study of the impact of urbanization and modernization on changing family organization, child rearing practices, and gender roles in India and their contribution to women's life satisfaction. The book is organized around a series of personal encounters recorded in field notes, focusing on the mothers,…

Polish folk high schools are modeled after schools developed in the mid-1850s in Denmark to provide general, non-credit education for young adults in rural areas. The main objectives of the folk high schools are to provide a climate for individual student development and to serve as centers where young adults can learn about their cultural…

Using a contextual-developmental-functional approach, this book seeks to discover the functional links between family dynamics and socialization within varying sociocultural contexts to human development, and to integrate theory and application in large-scale interventions promoting human well-being and societal development in the Majority World.…

This book traces the history of adult and continuing education in the United States from 1750 through 1990. The following topics are among those examined in the book's 12 chapters: literature, philosophy, and self-education in the 18th century; uses of knowledge in the antebellum period (law and learning, piety and learning, commerce and culture);…

This book contains 17 papers devoted to the following four aspects of the transition to adulthood: effects of alterations in the structure of opportunity; effects of prior experiences in the family; effects of prior experience in the workplace; and career development and marriage formation during a period of rising inequality. The following papers…