This piece is an auto-biographical reflection on my year-long experience creating a new course called Oral Interpretations and Expressions. Teaching the course allowed me to find an authenticity and identity in my work, which had been eluding me as I conformed to administrative norms in education. Through the practice of story-telling in spoken…

Positive Youth Development (PYD) model is a strength-based perspective of transition to adulthood derived from developmental systems theory. Developmental assets (DAs) framework describes the individual and contextual resources that may promote PYD. This work aims to analyze the associations between internal and external DAs and PYD, as well as…

The degree to which students think, feel, and act engaged in school plays a vital role in their chances for academic and life success, yet levels of student engagement remain low. In this article, we focus specifically on how engagement works in the classroom, namely as a function of the interactions between students, teachers, and the class…

This participatory action research project worked with four street-life-oriented black men to document how a community sample of street-life-oriented black adolescents between the ages of sixteen and nineteen frame street life as a site of resiliency inside schools based on 156 surveys, 10 individual interviews, and 1 group interview. Data…

This essay analyzes the growth of associational identity and ethical community encouraged by Gay-Straight Alliances, using queer theory to analyze their ideas and practices. Following an analysis of the Equal Access Act, which has provided space and time to extracurricular public school groups, the author turns to accounts of students involved in…

Written by a prominent array of scholars and practitioners, this book elucidates the complexities, contradictions, and confusion surrounding adolescence in American culture and education. For too long, harmful public myths and lies have portrayed teenagers as a principal cause of our nation's social ills. Similar unfair charges have been lodged…

The purpose of this paper is to present an argument for understanding the factors that support or constrain the development of Chicana/o students' academic identities and consequently, their academic resiliency in high school. The article draws on a larger study investigating ways that schooling structures and teacher mind-sets can sustain…