The purpose of this study was to investigate the intervention program Graduate on Time as related to the number of high school dropouts in a rural northeast Tennessee high school. Graduation rates and dropout rates were gathered from Report Card information from the Tennessee Department of Education website. Archival data for the students in this study were obtained from the STAR student management data system. Former students in the Graduate on Time program were surveyed for their perceptions about the program. The population for this study consisted of 96 students who were enrolled in the Graduate on Time program from the 2007-2008 school year through the 2010-2011 school year at Johnson County High School in Mountain City, TN. Participants in the program were made up of 56 males and 40 females. The ethnic breakdown of the participants in the program consisted of 97% White, 2% Hispanic, and 1% African American. Over 85%, or approximately 82 students, qualified for free- and reduced-price meals and were considered low socioeconomic students in this study. This quantitative study was guided by 5 quantitative research questions, with 1 qualitative research question consisting of a participant survey on perceptions of the Graduate on Time program. In Chapter 3 each quantitative research question had 1 null hypothesis. Two research questions were analyzed by using the Chi-Square test for independence and 3 research questions were analyzed by using a single sample t-test. The qualitative part of this study examined student's perceptions of the Graduate on Time program. The results of the Chi-Square test showed there was no significant difference in the graduation rate or the dropout rate of those students who participated in the Johnson County High School Graduate on Time program and the graduation rate or the dropout rate of nonparticipants. However, there was a statistically significant difference between the retention rate ofGraduate on Time participants and the retention rate of nonparticipants. From the results of this study, it was revealed that the students' perceptions did affect their success rate in the Johnson County High School Graduate on Time program.

The relationship between gender identity and psychological adjustment has long been investigated, but it is only in the 21st century that gender identity has been examined as a multi-faceted construct. According to Egan and Perry (2001), there are five dimensions comprising a person’s gender identity and they have demonstrated a significant relationship between these dimensions and youth’s psychological adjustment. Three of their gender identity constructs are pertinent to this study: gender typicality, gender contentedness, and felt pressure. While subsequent studies have had similar significant results (Carver, Yunger, & Perry, 2003; Yunger, Carver, & Perry, 2004), one study found that felt pressure was not negatively correlated with adjustment in minority youth, including Latinos, as it was with majority White samples from the previous studies (Corby, Hodges, & Perry, 2007). Minority youth face more pressure to conform to gender stereotypes (Corby et al., 2007) and Latinos in particular face more rigid gender stereotypes than European American cultures (Corona, Gonzalez, Cohen, Edwards, & Edmonds, 2009). While having a strong ethnic identity has been significantly correlated with self-esteem in Latinos (Umaña-Taylor, 2004), the relationship between ethnic identity, gender identity, and self-esteem in Latino youth have been underrepresented in the literature (Mora, 2012). Since Latino male youth in particular are at-risk for low-self esteem (Twenge & Crocker, 2000) and self-esteem is a protective factor in adolescents (Hosogi, Okada, Fujii, Noguchi, & Watanabe, 2012), it is important to pinpoint variables that are related to high self-esteem. The purpose of this study is to explore the relationship between ethnic identity, gender identity, and self-esteem in an understudied population in the literature. The sample consisted of 55 males, aged 10-14, who are members of a school-based intervention program for boys at-risk of gang membership. The majority of boys were of Latino heritage. It was hypothesized that gender typicality and gender contentedness would be significantly correlated with self-esteem, and that ethnic identity would mediate the relationship between felt pressure and self-esteem. Statistical analysis yielded partial support for the hypothesis. Implications and future directions are discussed.

At the Northwest Regional Learning Center (NRLC), an alternative high school in Arlington, Washington serving only at-risk youth, a new ethics course was conducted to assist students with their social-emotional learning development (SEL) and provide NRLC staff with greater insight into the lived experiences of students. Through semi-structured interviews, longitudinal ethical position surveys, and in-class observational ethnographic notes, this study presents shifts in student ethical positions over time as students engaged in this new course. By drawing from the knowledge at-risk students bring to school and focusing on behaviorism, progressive teaching theory, and constructivism, this course promoted open, student-led discussion that helped establish and build critical thinking skills, learn about perspectives in relation to others, and analyze various ethical positions. Through learning more about the lived experiences of their students, teachers at NRLC were able to contextualize and accommodate individual student behaviors, needs, and beliefs over their high-school experience. Drawing from student beliefs and experiences, the new course content was largely created by the students, providing at-risk youth an environment to openly share their beliefs while directly relating course content to their lives outside of school. As a representation of the power that social connection, redistribution of power dynamics in the classroom, and the wealth of knowledge students bring to school with them every day has, this study promotes the use of an ethics course in both general and alternative high schools as a more formalized and effective approach to teaching SEL.

This dissertation examines the fiscal and ideological deployments of community in publicly-funded yet independent nonprofit social service and healthcare provision. As at-risk youth leave families-of-origin in two American cities, they encounter a network of nonprofit providers conducting tailored and targeted outreach and managing access to benefits, services, and housing. Clients and outreach workers describe the ways they are monetized in an interconnected system of welfare and service provision and point to an expanding, entrapping, and extractive public health, housing, and benefits structure where community-building is the nonprofit profit mechanism. Following recent work on the “grow and hide” model of the American health care state (Grogan 2023), this fieldwork investigates on-the-ground impacts of hidden public funding and financing routed through private industry for nonprofit hospitals, clinics, community-based outreach arms, and public health-funded housing that has increased out of sight and without accountability to the public. Through fieldwork inside hospital-based clinics, nonprofit-adjacent “grassroots” campaigns, trade associations, and interviews with agency officials, bankers, nonprofit consultants, executives, and providers, this research untangles a skein of legislation and benefits policies that traps clients in proliferating categories of vulnerability. The material and psychological consequences of these policies for clients and their providers unspool inside nonprofit hospitals and clinics and their outreach arms—the site of public health intervention research, benefits navigation, and primary care provision in youth public health programs across the country. Within funding eddies enabled by municipal, state, and federal agency contracts with nonprofit service providers across healthcare and housing, a certain kind of client-subject is made who must either perform community or embrace mercenariness in policy-related underground economies. The municipal Community-Based Organization (CBO) and not the family (Cooper 2017) emerges as the unit propped up in the late devolutionary structure of welfare and service provision. State-funded independent nonprofits and their trade associations emerge as key architects from below of an expansive, hidden, and extractive healthcare-welfare state.

This arts-based research study is an examination of the influence of drama education on the development of high school students. Five recent graduates were interviewed (including the researcher) about their high school drama experiences. All participants had been selected for this study because they have been impacted as a result of their time in/with drama. Culminating in a script, the research takes the form of an arts-based playwriting inquiry, shaped by A/r/tography and rhizomatic influences, making use of Barone and Eisner’s five phase creative process. Adhering to an Aristotelean story arc outlined by Martini, metaphor in the four-scene play is used to explore and subsequently communicate concepts. In so doing, the researcher offers an expanded audience a renewed perspective on the impact that drama education has on the development of high school learners and invites viewers to consider drama’s impact on adolescent learners. Four main concepts were examined in the analysis: initiation, transition, habits of mind and, interdependency and it was found that these are central to all participants’ development. It was also found that learning contained within these four concepts, as experienced through drama education, has the potential to impact and equip students for life beyond high school. The process based, holistic learning central to drama education allowed participants to recognize and succinctly denote areas in their lives that were, and continue to be impacted by the dramatic experiences they took part in. / May 2017

Even though the Youth Opportunities Unlimited program has been in effect for ten years, there exists no current, comprehensive, effectiveness research on YOU. Such analysis is needed to determine the value of the YOU program. The purpose of this study is to evaluate the effectiveness of the YOU program. Both quantitative and qualitative research methods are used in this study. Quantitative analysis is provided through factual data collected through an alumni survey. Qualitative analysis is provided through personal opinion information obtained from YOU alumni through the survey and by personal interview. The YOU program at UNT is a successful compensatory education program that helps improve the education and the lives of America's at-risk students.

Teachers need interventions to improve at-risk students' self-efficacy, which may improve their academic performance in school. The purpose of this qualitative case study was to explore the perceptions of elementary school teachers at a Texas public middle school as to what research-based interventions they felt would improve the self-efficacy of these students. Bandura's social cognitive theory, which framed the study, indicates that self-efficacy beliefs affect the courses of action that people seek and the choices people make. Many at-risk students who experience a lack of academic success have low self-efficacy, which may affect their school performance. The research questions that guided the study focused on teachers' perceptions of whether a school-based mentoring program, counseling services, or an afterschool program would best help at-risk students improve their self-efficacy. Semi-structured interviews were conducted to collect data from 6 teacher participants who were purposely selected from different grade levels at the school. The data were transcribed and analyzed using hand-coding procedures to determine categories and themes from the transcripts. The findings revealed that teachers thought that a school-based mentoring program would have the most positive impact in improving the self-efficacy of at-risk students. The results prompted the development of a training program for mentors. Positive social change may result when at-risk students benefit from mentors who are properly trained on ways to meaningfully impact them.

This narrative inquiry explores how the �Songs of the Spirit� Native American Flute curriculum, a culturally-responsive curriculum which involves learning to make and play a PVC version of the Native American Flute while learning the cultures and histories of this First Nations instrument, impacted spiritual and emotional aspects of the learning and lives of Aboriginal students, their families, their parents, and their school community. My research took place at an urban Aboriginal high school in Saskatchewan from January to March, 2006. I conducted recorded conversations with three students, two parents, two teachers, two administrators, two Elders, a former principal, a former school caretaker, an artistic director, and the young woman who inspired the Heart of the City Piano Program, a volunteer driven community piano program, in the fall of 1995. Aboriginal individuals, who have too often been silenced in education and in society (Giroux, 1997; Freire, 1989; Fine, 1987; Greene, 1995 & 1998; Grumet, 1999), were provided with a voice in this research.<p>Because of the voices of my research participants, I chose to use the Medicine Wheel and Tipi Teachings (Lee, 2006; Kind, Irwin, Grauer, & de Cosson, 2005) as a lens (Greene, 1995) rather than situating my research in a traditional Eurocentric body of literature. Along this journey, I reflected inwards and outwards, backwards and forwards on how my past storied experiences (Clandinin & Connelly, 2000) shaped my teaching practices and way of being in the world today. To better understand the hurt I observed and which was described by research participants as present in the lived lives and circumstances of many Aboriginal people, I moved backward in time as I reviewed the literature on the Residential School experience and gained a deeper sense of the impact of colonialism on generations of Aboriginal people. This inquiry foregrounded how hearing and playing the Northern Spirit Flute impacted the emotional and spiritual aspects of students� being, and contributed to a process of healing. When participants heard the music, �it [sounded] so eloquent and so spiritual. It [was] almost like the flute [was] weeping,� (Onawa Gaho, Recorded conversation, March 17, 2006, p. 5) bringing about �a calmness to the anger that some [Aboriginal students] have� (Sakima Qaletaqa, Recorded conversation, March 15, 2006, pp. 25-26). <p>The research findings indicate that the �Songs of the Spirit� curriculum, in honoring the holistic nature of traditional First Nations cultures and teachings, invites Aboriginal students functioning in �vigilance mode� to attend to their emotional and spiritual needs. They speak to a need for rethinking curricula in culturally-responsive ways, for attending to the importance of the arts in education, and for reforming teacher education. Sound files of the Northern Spirit Flute and selected research conversations have been embedded within the electronic version of this thesis to allow the reader to walk alongside me and share in my research journey.

This narrative inquiry explores how the �Songs of the Spirit� Native American Flute curriculum, a culturally-responsive curriculum which involves learning to make and play a PVC version of the Native American Flute while learning the cultures and histories of this First Nations instrument, impacted spiritual and emotional aspects of the learning and lives of Aboriginal students, their families, their parents, and their school community. My research took place at an urban Aboriginal high school in Saskatchewan from January to March, 2006. I conducted recorded conversations with three students, two parents, two teachers, two administrators, two Elders, a former principal, a former school caretaker, an artistic director, and the young woman who inspired the Heart of the City Piano Program, a volunteer driven community piano program, in the fall of 1995. Aboriginal individuals, who have too often been silenced in education and in society (Giroux, 1997; Freire, 1989; Fine, 1987; Greene, 1995 & 1998; Grumet, 1999), were provided with a voice in this research.<p>Because of the voices of my research participants, I chose to use the Medicine Wheel and Tipi Teachings (Lee, 2006; Kind, Irwin, Grauer, & de Cosson, 2005) as a lens (Greene, 1995) rather than situating my research in a traditional Eurocentric body of literature. Along this journey, I reflected inwards and outwards, backwards and forwards on how my past storied experiences (Clandinin & Connelly, 2000) shaped my teaching practices and way of being in the world today. To better understand the hurt I observed and which was described by research participants as present in the lived lives and circumstances of many Aboriginal people, I moved backward in time as I reviewed the literature on the Residential School experience and gained a deeper sense of the impact of colonialism on generations of Aboriginal people. This inquiry foregrounded how hearing and playing the Northern Spirit Flute impacted the emotional and spiritual aspects of students� being, and contributed to a process of healing. When participants heard the music, �it [sounded] so eloquent and so spiritual. It [was] almost like the flute [was] weeping,� (Onawa Gaho, Recorded conversation, March 17, 2006, p. 5) bringing about �a calmness to the anger that some [Aboriginal students] have� (Sakima Qaletaqa, Recorded conversation, March 15, 2006, pp. 25-26). <p>The research findings indicate that the �Songs of the Spirit� curriculum, in honoring the holistic nature of traditional First Nations cultures and teachings, invites Aboriginal students functioning in �vigilance mode� to attend to their emotional and spiritual needs. They speak to a need for rethinking curricula in culturally-responsive ways, for attending to the importance of the arts in education, and for reforming teacher education. Sound files of the Northern Spirit Flute and selected research conversations have been embedded within the electronic version of this thesis to allow the reader to walk alongside me and share in my research journey.

Inom institutionsvård för ungdomar har det visat sig finnas flera faktorer som är avgörande för ett positivt behandlingsresultat. En av dessa är personalgruppens samstämmighet. I föreliggande studie har syftet varit att undersöka vilka teorier och metoder som finns och tillämpas på HVB-hemmet Multigruppen, om det finns en förtrogenhet om, samt samstämmighet kring dessa hos personalgruppen, samt på vilket sätt ledarskapet på verksamheten bedrivs och om strategier för att främja en samstämmighet finns. Studien har en kvantitativ och kvalitativ metodansats. En enkätundersökning med verksamhetens personalgrupp och fem stycken intervjuer genomfördes. Intervjuerna genomfördes med tre anställda ur personalgruppen och två ur ledningen. Studiens resultat visar att det råder vissa brister kring det praktiska tillämpandet av verksamhetens teorier och metoder. Studien visar också att personalgruppen har en del svårigheter med att upprätthålla ett gemensamt förhållningssätt – trots detta anser de flesta att de arbetar mot gemensamma mål. Ledarskapet som bedrivs på Multigruppen är i stort lyhörda mot sin personal, ställer krav och ger positiv feedback. Trots detta visar studien att majoriteten av personalgruppen inte är trygga med den ledning som finns. I studien diskuteras bland annat vad som kan tänkas vara de bidragande orsakerna till det resultat som framkommit samt studiens svagheter och styrkor. / Within institutional care for at-risk youth it has been shown that several factors are crucial for a positive outcome. One of these factors is the unanimity of the staff. In the present study, the aim has been to examine the theories and methods practiced at Multigruppen, an institution for at-risk youth. The study looks at the staffs’ familiarity as well as consensus with these theories and methods, the leadership system and the leaderships’ strategies to promote a consensus. The study was based on quantitative and qualitative methods. A survey and five interviews with staff members were conducted, two of which were in leadership roles. The results show inconsistencies between the theoretical and the in fact practiced methods in the treatment process. The study also shows that the staff have difficulty maintaining a common approach, however that most believe they are working toward common goals despite this. The leadership at Multigruppen is generally receptive of staff input and gives positive feedback as demanding high standards. Despite this, the study shows that the majority of the staff group have insecurities in regards to the leaderships’ capability. The study includes a discussion of possible contributing factors to the results obtained as well as the study’s’ strengths and weaknesses.