2 pp. / This is a series of 6 fact sheets related to identifying high quality youth programs from several perspectives: middle/high school youth, parents, youth development professionals and identifying resources in the community. It also includes a check list that will be included with each of the fact sheets.

2 pp. / This is a series of 6 fact sheets related to identifying high quality youth programs from several perspectives: middle/high school youth, parents, youth development professionals and identifying resources in the community. It also includes a check list that will be included with each of the fact sheets.

4 pp. / This is a series of 6 fact sheets related to identifying high quality youth programs from several perspectives: middle/high school youth, parents, youth development professionals and identifying resources in the community. It also includes a check list that will be included with each of the fact sheets.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of North Carolina at Greensboro, 2005. / Title from PDF title page screen. Includes bibliographical references (p. 201-234)

No description available.

Digitized by Kansas State University Libraries

Master of Arts / Department of Economics / William F. Blankenau / This paper describes the socioeconomic determinants of school dropout for Vietnamese children aged 11-18. It seeks to answer the following two questions: 1) What is the magnitude of the dropout rate for children between the ages of 11-18 and how does this figure change over time? 2) What are the determinants that affect the decision to drop out of school? This paper is based largely on the two Vietnam Living Standard Surveys (VLSS) conducted in 2004 and 2006. A probit model is used to ascertain the major determinants affecting the probability to drop out of school. The decision to drop out of school is affected by key factors including the child’s demographic characteristics (such as age, gender, ethnicity, and regions where they are living) and the child’s household’s situation (such as income per capita, cost of schooling, household size, and parental education). In particular, age and household size have significantly positive effects on the dropout probability. The dropout rate is also shown to vary between girls and boys, but this gender gap has narrowed substantially. Minority girls face more obstacles in staying school than minority boys. The school dropout rate is also very sensitive to changes in the household’s income and cost of schooling. However, the cost of schooling has different impacts on families in different quintiles. Region is another determinant affecting child’s decision to drop out of school. Vietnam’s population is unequally distributed in 8 regions with different socio-economic conditions, and hence the dropout situation is also regionally specific. Moreover, the parents’ perception of the value of education may increase the child’s probability of school retention. Since it is difficult to measure parental attitude to schooling, the paper uses parents’ education level instead, assuming that parents who have more education will appreciate education more.

Digitized by Kansas Correctional Industries

My dissertation, “‘It’s like I can be myself here’: Adolescent identity and agency in an arts-based out-of-school program” is a three-year post-critical ethnographic study (Noblit, Flores, and Murillo, 2004) of YouthArts, a free, out-of-school arts program for adolescents who self-identify as having a low socio-economic status. YouthArts, under the auspices of a non-profit art space, offers participants both a range of activities, such as field trips, artist-led workshops, and critique sessions, and materials, such as supplies and an electronic portfolio, to help foster artistic identity development. The program design demonstrates the complexity of artistic endeavors beyond technical prowess and highlights the role of collaboration, communication, inquiry, and curiosity in the process of art creation and consideration. I employ participant-observation methods, semi-structured interviews, and artifact collection, as well as narrative analysis and content analysis, to create a dynamic representation of how adolescents engage in this program. My theoretical approach to this project brings together social production theories, such as figured worlds (Holland et al., 1998), social and cultural capital (Bourdieu and Passeron, 1977), community cultural wealth (Yosso, 2006), situated learning (Lave, 1990; Lave and Wenger, 1991) and the field of youth studies (James, Jenks, and Prout, 1998; Best, 2007) to explore learning, identity, and agency. I provide a thick description of the program’s professionalizing activities and offer detailed case studies of four focal participants in order to demonstrate the ways that the program helps participants transition from high school to post-secondary paths and from being students in high-school art classes to becoming practicing artists. I privilege youth voices to highlight the ways they see their identities as being informed by multiple communities, including their out-of-school activities, their schools, their families, and their friends and through intersecting classed, raced, gendered, and sexualized discourses, as well as to consider the ways that they enact agency in these multiple contexts. I highlight the need for more studies that research out-of-school learning from a place of positive youth development and explore the role of relationship building in learning environments. / text

Current sociocultural educational research is reconceptualising literacy and learning. For example, New Literacy theorists (e.g., Kress, 2003; Lankshear & Knobel, 2003; Leander, 2007; Jewitt, 2008) propose that literacy is no longer just about mastering traditional forms of reading and writing, but it also involves acquiring communicative functionality using multiple modes and across increasingly diverse and rapidly changing cultural and linguistic contexts. Street (2001) and the New London Group (1996) calls for research that qualitatively identifies and investigates the significance of this cultural and linguistic diversity, and the development of instructional models and practices that will help educators shape curriculum to be more relevant to students’ current and future lived worlds. Grounded in sociocultural learning theory, this ethnographic study responds to Street’s call by investigating the patterns and principles of learning and teaching demonstrated by 5-year-old children while using new Information Communication Technologies (ICTs) in their homes. Questions posed are: (a) what home teaching/learning contexts exist for 5-year-olds learning to use new ICTs? (b) who is teaching 5-year-olds how to use new home-based ICTs?; and (c) what learning and/or teaching principles do subjects demonstrate in the interactions between family members, friends and 5-year-old learners as they directly or indirectly teach the 5-year old to use new ICTs in the home setting?? Data revealed that 5-year-olds accessed an average of 14 different types of new ICTs in their homes; and they learned to use new ICTs from parents, siblings, peers, and, to a degree, from the new ICTs themselves. Additionally, the analysis of data found that participants’ social interactions could be qualitatively described as aligning with 16 (at least) unique teaching and learning principles. These principles were grouped into four general categories, and discussed in relation to the literature reviewed. It was found that participants learned to use new ICTs through: (a) just-in-time mentoring which corroborated learning theory by Lave and Wegner (1991) and Vygotsky (1978); (b) student centered instruction that was unstructured, playful, and encouraged participants’ independence; (c) multiple communication modes (Kress, 2003); and (d) instruction that developed children’s ability to be flexible and adapt to change. Teaching and learning models reflective of the observed interactions were developed, and a socially distributed model of teaching and learning for young children was presented. Implications for educators, curriculum designers, parents, and theory were discussed. It is suggested that teachers, administrators and curriculum designers incorporate as many of the participants’ 16 teaching and learning principles as possible into their primary classroom curriculum. It was also argued that Vygotskian learning theory be re/conceptualized to incorporate a more pluralistic exploration and explanation of the relationship between thought and the multiple meaning making modes exhibited by the 5-year-olds in this study. Moreover, it was suggested that the incorporation of these principles not be done in a manner that co-opted young children’s out-of-school ICT-mediated discourse practices, but instead encouraged young children to develop skills, information and understandings that could be distributed and applied across larger sets of networked discourses. / Graduate