The purpose of this phenomenological study was to examine how the application of the community cultural wealth model can help raise the capacity of first-generation Latino at-promise youth towards finding greater educational success in a secondary school setting. Participants included first generation Latino at-promise students and their parents…

We present a case study that examined the role of teacher belief change and agency development through enactment of an innovative student-centered STEM program in three public urban secondary schools. In the program, 9th grade STEM classrooms were restructured to incorporate daily small group instruction facilitated by 10th grade near-peers. We…

Language learning has become one of the needs of humans to maintain communication in the globalized world. However, it is not an isolated process and confined to linguistic skills. It gets affected by a lot of affective factors and learners' beliefs. One of these elements is undoubtedly academic motivation, which makes language learning a more…

This study explores the association between school-level poverty rates and young peoples' perceptions of student empowerment, drawing on survey and administrative data from a large urban district. Participants included 29,318 diverse youth in grades 6-12 from 211 schools. We used multilevel linear regression models to estimate the relationships…

The barriers to school attendance that affect young Aboriginal people in Australia are diverse, immense and well documented; however, except for a handful of studies, Aboriginal students' voices receive no platform for policy makers to hear them. In this paper, we present results from yarning circles about barriers to school attendance conducted…

The purpose of this study was to explore, using the voices of diverse high school students, the classroom factors that are important for promoting classroom belonging and engagement. Thirty-one semi-structured interviews were conducted with tenth grade students about classroom belonging and behavioral engagement in their favorite and least…

This article examines the power of composing images as students construct identities and shape their own worlds. It illustrates student empowerment through agency, intellectual engagement, and community investment and suggests that composing with images forms a bridge back to alphabetic-centric composing.

Community asset mapping is an approach that school counselors can use to locate resources to meet the needs of families, schools, and communities. This article provides step-by-step instructions on how school counselors might use community asset mapping to address the needs of their population(s), illustrated with an example of implementation in a…

The purpose of this single community qualitative case study was to determine how the voice of the student was present in the IEP process, documentation paperwork, and curricular and diagnostic decisions, among a group of seven students, grades 9 through 12, placed in a self-contained program for students with emotional disabilities in a suburban…

The contribution of nonfamily adults to young people's well-being was explored using both a cross-sectional national sample of 614 12- to 17-year-olds and a longitudinal sample of 370 students followed from 6th-8th grades through 10th-12th grades. Both variable- and person-centered analyses were employed. Young people's involvement in…