Kathrin C. Walker

Learning About the “Real World” in an Urban Arts Youth Program

To make the transition to adulthood, youth must learn to function in the complex and unpredictable “real world” of adult life. This is an intensive case study of an urban arts program that sought to provide youth with experiences that prepared them for the real world of arts careers. We conducted 75 interviews with 12 youth and their adult leader over three cycles of engagement with the real world. Analyses suggest that participants experienced a developmental process that entailed experiences of dissonance and challenge followed by active adaptive learning. The adult leaders played a critical role in supporting this developmental process through balancing to maintain an approximate fit between the challenges youth experienced and their abilities to respond to these challenges.

Youth Empowerment Evaluation: Learning Voice.

Including youth in the evaluation process can enhance the quality of the inquiry and be empowering for the participants, but it is not without challenges. In this article, several principles for youth-involved research and evaluation are outlined. These come from those who are pioneering this approach and from current research on the dilemmas of practice encountered by youth program leaders. These guidelines, along with the American Evaluation Associations Guiding Principles, are then applied to Dr. Luandas case to explore how she might proceed and to consider how she might have avoided this ethical challenge.

Positive youth development in organized programs: How teens learn to manage emotions

Organized youth programs provide opportunities for adolescents to develop life and career skills while working on real-world projects, such as planning community events or creating public service announcements. In this chapter, we focus on adolescents’ development of skills for managing emotions. We first discuss how youth learn strategies for handling emotions that arise in their work on projects, and then look at how adult program leaders facilitate youth’s learning. Key findings from our qualitative research are that youth learn about emotions through active, conscious processes of observing and analyzing their experiences; and they learn not only to regulate frustration, anger, and worry, but also to use the functional aspects of these emotions in constructive ways. Program leaders facilitate youth’s active learning process through emotion coaching – helping youth reflect on unfolding emotional episodes, consider alternative strategies, and persist in problem solving. The chapter shows how effective organized programs provide rich affordances for positive youth development.

The Multiple Roles That Youth Development Program Leaders Adopt With Youth

The roles that program leaders establish in their relationships with youth structure how leaders are able to foster youth development. This article examines the complex roles program leaders create in youth programs and investigates how they balanced multiple roles to most effectively respond to the youth they serve. Analyses of qualitative data from 12 high quality programs for high school—aged youth suggest that program leaders take on different roles. In some cases, youth experienced their program leader as a trusted friend, caring parent figure, or influential mentor. In other instances they described him or her as having the knowledge and authority of a teacher or boss. Analyses further suggest that moving across multiple roles appeared to make the program leaders more effective.

Focus on Methodology: Beyond paper and pencil: Conducting computer-assisted data collection with adolescents in group settings

Computer-assisted data collection offers advantages over traditional paper and pencil measures; however, little guidance is available regarding the logistics of conducting computer-assisted data collection with adolescents in group settings. To address this gap, we draw on our experiences conducting a multi-site longitudinal study of adolescent development. Structured questionnaires programmed on laptop computers using Audio Computer Assisted Self-Interviewing (ACASI) were administered to groups of adolescents in community-based and afterschool programs. Although implementing ACASI required additional work before entering the field, we benefited from reduced data processing time, high data quality, and high levels of youth motivation. Preliminary findings from an ethnically diverse sample of 265 youth indicate favorable perceptions of using ACASI. Using our experiences as a case study, we provide recommendations on selecting an appropriate data collection device (including hardware and software), preparing and testing the ACASI, conducting data collection in the field, and managing data.