This study sought to understand the 4-H STEM Career Pathway Model program, a three-year initiative to expose youth to college readiness skills, career readiness skills, STEM skills, and careers associated with high-demand STEM jobs such as computer scientists and engineers. The qualitative study described here used document reviews, observations,…

Social and emotional learning (SEL) has proven to be an effective conduit to improved attendance scores, grades, and graduation rates; to adaptive behaviors and gainful employment in adulthood; and to a wide variety of other measurable factors spanning the spectrum of human adaptiveness and wellness (Aspen Institute, 2018). Although SEL has been…

Afterschool educators sometimes encourage program participants to write heartfelt stories that make them feel better about the work they are doing. They want to feel they are making a difference, that they are empowering young people to speak truth to power and win. In some cases, they might be. But they must respect each young person's journey…

Sprouting Entrepreneurs is a three-year teaching programme for rural primary and secondary schools that focuses on entrepreneurship in agriculture. It addresses the South African real-life challenges of food insecurity, youth unemployment and rural poverty from a classroom perspective, by linking agriculture, food and entrepreneurship as main…

Convention refugees are individuals who have fled their home countries due to a substantiated fear of persecution. As a consequence, many young Convention refugees are disconnected from their environment as they enter schools and communities and are often misunderstood in their new country due to cultural barriers. Given the universality of human…

The aim of this study is to determine moral decision making attitudes of youth athletes and sportspersonship behavior levels of their coaches; and to test them in terms of certain variables. The study is in a descriptive research model; the sample group consists of 294 certified athletes playing in youth sports teams; the ages range between 11 and…

This paper draws on positive youth development theory to highlight the significance of Horizon Youth Service (HYS) participants' hip-hop music production, focusing on three HYS organizational features that supported participants' growth. The author's findings lead to recommendations for out-of-school time (OST) programs that combine creativity…

By recognising young athletes as active socialising agents in their own right and how they experience parents' behaviour, the article contributes knowledge about parent-created educational practices and conditions for players' political socialisation in competitive youth games in grassroots soccer. Parents play an important role in the creation of…

Community Orientated and Opportunity Learning (COOL) Music was a 12-month collaborative project between researchers at Glasgow Caledonian University and practitioners at the Edinburgh-based social enterprise Heavy Sound. The project began in October 2017 and involved 16 sessions of participatory music making with 32 'hard-to-reach' young people…

This personal perspective piece examines the researcher's positionality through the stance of humanizing research in multiethnic youth communities. Drawing on Paris and Paris and Winn's notions on humanizing research, this article reexamines positionality by revisiting two subjectivities in a three-year qualitative case study with African…

Gray for a Day is an interactive educational curriculum that centers on use of an empathic model to improve knowledge, skills, and attitudes related to sensory and functional aging, empathy toward older adults, and one's own health behaviors. The program has been disseminated by Extension educators with varied audiences and evaluated with 2,440…

The third edition of "A Career with Meaning" offers new perspectives on the field and updates on trends and research related to each career area. Of note is the renewed emphasis in our field and thus on understanding the role recreation and leisure play in promoting health and wellness, sustainability, and social justice. The book uses…

The youth population bulge in Kenya comes with so many challenges such as poverty, gender inequalities, political inequities, the absence of adequate health and medical resources, low educational attainment, homelessness, increased involvement in violence, drugs, and alcohol, poor physical and mental health, a lack of key life skills, premature…

This study asked the participants of place-based educational programs in Micronesia and the Philippines between 1992 and 2017 how past learning experiences impact them now and how the learning changed over time. The responses of 128 program participants, mostly Japanese, were examined using a mixed-methods approach with an emphasis on qualitative…

SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19) has proliferated across the United States, and in the process, it has disrupted all sense of normalcy. Because adolescents are in a critical period for growth and development, youth are particularly susceptible to negative impacts of disruption from COVID-19. Therefore, sustaining youth development programs is essential to…