This article explores how a secondary ethnic studies course leveraged immigrant families' literacies rooted in the Mexican spiritual ritual of Las Posadas for in-school literacy instruction and to engage in community-responsive grassroots processions as social protest. Using ethnographic and participatory design research, the authors--one a…

Youth engagement is the meaningful and sustained involvement of young people in efforts to create positive social change. This approach requires youth-serving organizations to rebalance traditional power dynamics between adults and young people, allowing youths to take on decision-making responsibilities. Collective impact initiatives such as…

Drawing from a nine-month critical teacher inquiry investigation, this article examines the experiences of eleventh and twelfth grade students who participated in a year-long Chicana/o-Latina/o Studies course in California shortly after the passing of Arizona House Bill 2281 (HB 2281). Through a borderlands analysis, I explore how these students…

This article explores the relationship between critical literacy practice, digital media production, and civic agency in the Council of Youth Research, a youth participatory action research program in which Los Angeles high school students conduct research and create dynamic, multimedia presentations as leaders of a growing youth movement for…

This case study explored how adolescents were empowered through afterschool media production activities and, in the process, re-imagined themselves as active and engaged citizens within their community. Through analyzing interviews, participant observations, and media artifacts of 14 participants (aged 15-19) over a period of 18 months, three main…

Having a purpose is a form of intrapersonal giftedness. An even rarer giftedness is motivation to positively change society or culture. This exploratory chi-square and ANOVA study reports the prevalence, age distribution, stability over time, and characteristics of two change oriented aims in American adolescents. In a sample of 270, 12%, who tend…

The Center for the Digital Future at the University of Southern California surveys 2,000 households each year to find out how online technology affects Internet users. Findings in the latest report show social networks are increasing and a majority of users report feeling as strongly about their communities online as their real-world communities.…

Literature in leadership studies is devoid of knowledge about the unique ways that Latina/Chicana educators engage as leaders, activists, and agents for change. Women's studies, ethnic studies, and Chicana feminist studies alert us to the complex role that social context and the intersectionality of gender, ethnicity/race, and class play in the…

In the past 50 years researchers have identified a number of demographic shifts occurring within industrialized societies that have resulted in changes in the nature of the developmental processes occurring in young adults. Arnett (2000) labels this new, socially constructed time period, between the ages of 18 and 25 years, as emerging adulthood.…

This article examines the work of three urban youths as they designed and taught a social justice class at an urban continuation high school in California, USA. Drawing from a two-year ethnographic study of the project, it shows that youth participants constructed a set of imagined binaries to frame teachers, schoolwork and coercion "in…

This postcard compares youth resistance across classroom contexts. It draws from a two-year ethnography of the East Oakland Step to College (Step) program, which prepared underserved African-American and Latina/o youth to enroll in four-year universities, while nurturing students' sensibilities to fight for social justice. Students were highly…

Students who make adequate yearly progress in grade-level mathematics courses should expect to pass the mathematics portion of their high school exit exam on the first attempt. Expectation theory states that teachers' beliefs about their own students are an important factor in students' success. The purpose of this nonexperimental study was to…

In the field of positive youth development programs, "empowerment" is used interchangeably with youth activism, leadership, civic participation and self-efficacy. However, few studies have captured what empowerment means to young people in diverse contexts. This article explores how youth define and experience empowerment in youth-led…

Creating paths for the active engagement of Californians serves as a unifying theme for The James Irvine foundation as it pursues its mission of expanding opportunity for the people of California. Through the foundation's grantmaking programs in arts, California Democracy and Youth, it aspires to a California where opportunities to participate…

While the major urban centers around the country were flooded by millions of protesters demanding immigrant rights in March 2006, the San Francisco Bay Area remained relatively quiet. A coalition of organizers, including Centro Legal de la Raza, Deporten A La Migra, and the Bay Area Immigrant Rights Coalition mobilized a one-week hunger strike,…