The social, emotional, and biological health of adolescents requires their development as autonomous beings who make responsible decisions about their own health. Clinicians can assist in this development by adopting a strength-based approach to adolescent health care, which applies concepts from positive youth development to the medical office setting.

Positive youth development (PYD) frameworks that guide PYD services suggest at-risk youth need to develop resiliency attitudes and resiliency skills in order to prevent long-term failure in their adult lives. This concept is based on multiple developmental theories that suggest increased levels of resiliency make it easier to navigate challenging situations. Adjudicated youth have faced a major setback in their short lives, yet they still have an opportunity to become successful and avoid additional jail time, if they are able to display a strong sense of resilience. Many youth development programs geared toward serving adjudicated youth, lack the appropriate structure and services to ensure youth are able to develop strong resiliency attitudes and skills. The purpose of this study was to examine the effect of PYD services on the resiliency attitudes and skills of teenage girls at an all-girls Department of Juvenile Justice residential facility. Archival data from the Resiliency Attitudes and Skills Profile (RASP) were used. RASP identifies the following domains as indicators of resiliency attitudes and skills: humor, creativity, insight, initiative, independence, relationships, and values orientation. Multiple regression analysis showed that the longer residents are in the program, the better they scored on the relationships, insight, humor, and creativity domains. Since culture can have an impact on youth development, race and ethnicity were analyzed. Hispanic residents did better on the overall RASP and the values orientation, insight, initiative, and creativity domains. These findings may help youth development professionals understand the importance for troubled youth to remain in a developmental program for a longer time while engaging in activities geared toward increasing resiliency.

Youth-serving organizations, such as 4-H, place a large emphasis on positive youth development and experiential learning in order to assist youth in acquiring specific life skills. The literature suggests that residential summer camps are one of the best ways to provide positive youth development, experiential learning, and targeted life skills. This study was a mixed methods design which utilized four residential summer programs throughout the state of Mississippi in order to compare the differences between the residential 4-H summer programs that took place on a university campus to those that took place within the naturalistic environment. The results of this study indicate that on-campus residential summer programs achieved the essential elements of positive youth development more so than those that took place within the naturalistic environment. The on-campus program participants also acquired targeted life skills more so than those that participated in programs that took place within the naturalistic environment.

Southern region state FFA nominating committees utilize adults and students to elect state FFA officers. However, the role of the adult nominating committee members is up to the discretion of the state FFA nominating committee coordinators. In the nine states studied in the southern FFA region, five states utilized adults as voting members of the nominating committee, and four states utilized them as consultants. Adults completed a modified version of the Inventory of Adult Attitudes and Behaviors instrument, and the majority’s preferred style of working with students was “regarding youth as resources.” However, students had mixed feelings about working with adults. They explained they were excited to work with them, but as they began the nominating committee process, they felt their thoughts were not being heard by the adults. No statistically significant relationship existed between adult preferred styles and student character and connection.

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The Mill Cities Charter School is a public urban charter high school founded on the Essential School Philosophy (ESP). Introduced in 1984, ESP “envisions an educational system that equips students with the intellectual, emotional and social habits and skills to become powerful and informed citizens who contribute actively toward a democratic and equitable society” (Coalition of Essential Schools, 2015). However, there is a lack of empirical research exploring the implementation of ESP, as well as its impacts on students’ personal, social and academic growth. Thus, this study’s goals were to gain an interpretive understanding of student perceptions and developmental impacts; as well as the process through which school culture influences positive youth development. A qualitative phenomenological approach was utilized, based on the philosophy of critical realism, which mediates between subjective experience and objective reality. In-depth, in-person semi-structured interviews were conducted on-site with 20 members of the senior class to explore their perceptions of the school culture and its impacts on their personal, social and academic development. Findings revealed that students largely had positive perceptions of school culture experience in all explored dimensions (Safety, Relationships, Teaching and Learning, Institutional Environment) with one notable exception, the School Improvement Process dimension, in which concerns were expressed about the school’s expansion plan changing the existing culture. Students also reported positive gains in personal, social and academic development, which they directly attributed to the school culture. Further, theoretical analysis revealed students’ internalization of cultural identity as the mediating process to explain “how” school culture positively impacted development. This relationship between individual and institutional cultural identity was bi-directional, with reciprocal impacts on both students and the school culture itself. This dissertation may inform educational policy discussions concerning the relationship between school culture and positive youth development. Findings regarding the ESP’s successful implementation into an urban public charter school setting and positive perceived impacts on high risk students’ development offer insights into the transformational elements of school culture. Significantly, this study offers understanding of this transformational process as a reciprocal interactive relationship between individual internalization of cultural identity and institutional externalization of a unique, recognizable organizational identity.

The purpose of this mixed-methods dissertation study was to investigate the role of mindfulness in the process of identity development and goal-setting among emerging adults, from two different identity approaches – the identity status model and narrative identity. Of the total sample (N = 130), 119 undergraduate students completed the questionnaires and provided turning point narratives in the online survey. The results showed that the diffusion identity status was negatively associated with mindfulness, goal-setting and narrative identity, whereas more advanced identity maturity was positively associated with mindfulness, goal-setting and narrative identity. In addition, both mindfulness and identity maturity index significantly predicted goal-setting. The relationship between mindfulness and goal-setting was also fully mediated by identity maturity index. Nevertheless, no associations among narrative identity, mindfulness, and goal-setting were found. Using extreme group analysis, the qualitative findings supported the quantitative findings by showing that the narratives in the extremely high identity maturity group were likely to demonstrate participants’ engagement in exploration, acceptance of challenges, perspective changes in life and the worldview, and positive emotion states. The findings provided implications for theory and practice in terms of the importance of incorporating mindfulness-based interventions in facilitating these specific aspects of identity development and goal-setting in emerging adults. Particularly, the findings highlighted that mindfulness promotes emerging adults’ openness to new experiences and willingness to face challenges in rapidly changing occupational structures and social environments. Limitations and directions for future research were also discussed.

Thesis advisor: Thomas Groome / How should educators in faith respond to the reality of human-caused climate change and environmental destruction, especially in view of Pope Francis’ prophetic challenge for Catholics to take this reality with utmost and urgent seriousness? In particular, I address those educators in faith who work in and with communities that have borne the disproportionate costs of these realities. Indigenous peoples and those who live in communities where extractive and polluting industries such as timbering, mining, energy production from hydroelectric dams, and plastics production are paramount in my mind. However, I also address those whose imagination and communities are shaped by a consumer society that depends on the displacements and exploitation of the 2/3rds world. Drawing on the work of sociologist, Rebecca Scott, who identifies the thought patterns of the West as being grounded in a “logic of extraction,” I believe that educators in faith have an important role to play in assuring the reception of Pope Francis’ challenge among Catholic faithful to listen to the cry of Earth and the poor, particularly among most White Catholics in the West. In view of the dislocations of extractive socio-economic and cultural-political systems, this dissertation suggests that an appropriate pedagogical response begins with cultivating a deep sense of place. It is essential that each person comes to view their own being as grounded in places composed not only of human built environments but of land, water, and air. As opposed to the more common attitude of “care” or “stewardship” of Creation, the guiding vision of our relationship to Creation should be one of kinship. I give particular attention to the place of Appalachia as a case study for modelling what I call a critical Creation-centered pedagogy. To develop this pedagogy I draw upon Thomas Groome’s model of Shared Christian Praxis, bringing it into dialogue with place-based education. In my examination of place-based approaches to learning I give particular attention to the land education model developed by Indigenous educators. The choice of Appalachia is quite simply because Appalachia, particularly West Virginia, is my place. It is a place I love and know, and I hope that each reader will engage this dissertation with their own place in mind. This pedagogy is a critical pedagogy because it emphasizes the importance of identifying relationships of power that produce and maintain an extractive mentality. I give particular attention to settler colonialism, capitalism, and consumerism as extractive structural systems toward which education in faith must attend if it is to be a force of healing and justice. Young people engaged in critical Creation-centered education in faith are encouraged to think critically about the often complex and contradictory ways in which they are “placed” within these networks of power. It is Creation-centered because I regard Earth as our first and primary teacher. In dialogue with Urie Bronfenbrenner, I develop an understanding of the human person that is thoroughly relational. Human health and well-being are reciprocally related to the health and well-being of the “social ecologies” in which persons live. This requires that educators in faith attend to significant relationships and institutions as well as socio-economic and cultural-political systems with/in the lives of their students. With particular attention to adolescence, I examine the possibilities of Bronfenbrenner’s understanding of human development for faith development. For young people living in or displaced from places such as Appalachia, damaged by extractive systems, it is especially important that they are connected to empowering networks that allow them to nurture positive relationships with God, self, others, and Creation. These relationships must also empower agency from an early age. Young people should also be encouraged in developmentally appropriate ways to act as stakeholders within the significant communities and groups to which they belong. To this end, I draw upon the potential of connecting Positive Youth Development theory to education in faith, with particular attention to recent developments in this field that focus on youth-based community organizing and activism as especially salient for the positive and empowered faith development of young people displaced by oppressive systems of power. Education in faith, when grounded in place, has much to contribute to this process. However, this requires reading the Judeo-Christian tradition with place in mind. The Judeo-Christian tradition offers an alternative logic that calls for a conversion from extraction to jubilee. Covenantal values of sabbath and jubilee express a connection to the land which was central to Jesus’ ministry and preaching on the Kingdom of God. Jesus’ own experience of being placed in Galilee in the context of the extractive economies of the Roman Empire influenced his spiritual development and relationship to the Creator-liberator God. Ultimately, the Judeo-Christian God is a God of life and this includes the life of all beings and all of Creation. Jesus nurtured a movement that brought people into their own power, encouraging a new relationship to land and place. Education in faith should carry forth this mission by creating contexts for healing and justice in places damaged by extraction. Critical Creation-centered pedagogy involves all members of a community and to this extent place-based education in faith moves young people beyond the traditional classroom and challenges the traditional teacher-student relationship. Particularly for young people from oppressed communities, it is important that they discover knowledge present in their place and community. I address primary caregivers and families, classroom educators, parish communities, and the wider civic and bioregional community all of whom have a role to play within a place-based pedagogy. I also give attention to the unique role summer camp programs might play in this process. I conclude by attending to the work already being done by Catholics in Appalachia to seek a faith grounded in a healing and justice bringing relationship to Earth, testifying to the theological vision and ministerial work of the Catholic Committee of Appalachia. My own faith owes much to the ongoing witness of this remarkable movement, which I first encountered as a high school student. In part, my dissertation is an attempt to bring pedagogical focus to the theological and ministerial vision of this remarkable movement of the Spirit in the mountains. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2020. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Religious Education and Pastoral Ministry.

The purpose of this study was to examine the effectiveness of the Junior Master Wellness Volunteer (JMWV) program on select positive youth development (PYD) outcomes among program participants. These outcomes included Competence in health literacy, Connection, Contribution, Character, and Confidence. Research questions were (1) Does participation in the JMWV program improve participants’ Competency in health literacy? (2) Does participation in the JMWV program improve participants’ perceived ability to Connect with and Contribute to their community? (3) Does participation in the JMWV program improve participants' perceived Character or ability to engage in and understand their community? (4) Does participation in the JMWV program improve participants’ perceived self-efficacy (Confidence)? (5) Does participants’ delivery of the service component of the JMWV program relate to their perceived Connection, Contribution, Character, and Confidence? Secondary data from the Mississippi State University (MSU) Extension were analyzed to determine the JMWV program's effectiveness on PYD outcomes. Data included responses to matched pre-tests and post-tests (n = 93), matched pre-surveys and post-surveys (n = 108), and activity reports forms (n = 50). Paired t-tests were used to examine the differences in Competence as measured by the pre-test and post-test scores and changes in other PYD outcomes as measured by the pre-survey and post-survey. Analysis, including paired sample ttests, indicated that JMWV participants had a statistically significant improvement in all four of the PYD outcomes in this study. A correlation analysis also indicated a positive but weak relationship between the reported number of service hours completed as part of the JMWV program and perceived Connections and Contributions (r = -.340, p < .05), Character (r = -.340, p < .01), and Confidence (r = -.307, p < .05) after the program. JMWV participants improved in Competency, Connections and Contributions, Character, and Confidence. The number of hours spent engaged in community service marginally contributed to improvements to select PYD outcomes. This study adds to the evidence that the JMWV program results in PYD.

No description available.