This article provides a brief overview of the Teen Interactive Theater Education (TITE) curriculum, the theory behind its inception, and the expected outcomes. TITE is an innovative positive youth development program that engages young people in the consideration of pertinent topics in today's society through the use of experiential activities…

World Youth Day, a youth-focused Catholic celebration, is the largest recurring youth event in the world. The 10th International World Youth Day (WYD) was held from 15-20 July 2008, in Sydney, Australia and attenders participated in a week-long series of religious events and activities. Little research in English has been conducted on WYD…

The college sector has many examples where low learner success in specific subject areas has been identified and tackled successfully. In several colleges, programmes receiving attention through special measures based on careful self-evaluation often make marked improvements in a short period, with significant improvements in outcomes for…

Soccer, or football as it is called in the rest of the world, is the most popular and fastest-growing global sport, with an estimated 240 million people regularly playing what Brazilian star Pele called "the beautiful game." Millions, worldwide, watch it on television. In 2006, the average viewership for each match of the month-long World Cup was…

Modern learning psychology places an emphasis on the ability of teachers to promote their students' social and emotional learning (SEL) and living a good life. Research on precisely how teachers promote SEL and well-being among their students, however, remains scarce. This study focused on evaluating the Lions Quest teaching workshop (LQ), which…

The afterschool community has long embraced the arts as part of the constellation of services offered to youth during nonschool hours. However, there has been much less comprehensive research in, and support for, the arts outside of school. Despite the fact that the United States has many local, regional, and state examples of excellent…

Over the course of three summers, Sierra Health Foundation hosted a weeklong summer youth development camp for REACH coalitions at its Grizzly Creek Ranch retreat facilities in Portola, California. Located 130 miles east of Sacramento, Grizzly Creek Ranch is set in the mountains of Plumas County and encompasses 1,500 acres of forests, streams and…

Social support is needed by everyone, but particularly by vulnerable populations at times of transition. This study utilizes data collected from 96 former foster youth regarding supports they received during the transition from care. The report addresses three questions: (1) What types of supportive relationships did the sample report? (2) What…

In this piece, we put forth a Deweyian framework for youth development activities in outdoor and adventure education programs, and we show how such a framework may be exemplified by activities in sail training and sailing instruction. The paper begins with a discussion of the theoretical features of Deweyian educational experiences and makes…

This qualitative research article explores how youth create multimodal rhetoric during a service-learning course at a local Youth Media Organization. The study takes a detailed look at how the youth want to gain access to the Discourse of the documentary making process but struggle with the confines of conventions of film as is represented by the…

This paper compares the status of young naturalist after-school programs in three post-Soviet republics: Russia, Ukraine and Kazakhstan. In the past, the region's environmental teachers, leaders and activists have emerged from such youth programs. Thus, the health of these programs is a leading indicator for the long-term viability of broader…

This article explores the evidence base for Positive Peer Culture (PPC) which is a total system for developing positive youth cultures in youth serving organizations. It challenges a popular belief among some researchers that group programs which bring together troubled youth are inherently negative.

Research suggests that the quality of out-of-school time (OST) programs is related to positive youth outcomes and skilled staff are a critical component of high quality programming. This descriptive case study of competency frameworks for youth workers in the OST field demonstrates how experts and practitioners characterize a skilled youth worker.…

This paper proposes a new model for understanding education through "responsible leadership"--a term which draws on the models of distributed and authentic leadership and on a dialogic understanding of responsible action. It defines "dispositions for learning" as different forms of the single quality of "openness to…

This study focused on the buffering effects of Adults in the Making (AIM), a family-centered preventive intervention, on the link between life stress and increases in risk behaviors among 347 rural, southern African Americans as they left high school. Of the families, 174 were assigned to the prevention condition and 173 to a control condition.…