The National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP) shows a civic knowledge gap similar to the achievement gap, showing urban youth struggling in particular. However, research has shown that urban youth can be civically engaged when they are involved in projects or organizing intended to improve community conditions, not simply absorbing civic…

This research explored the career beliefs of inner-city adolescents (N = 97). Results identified six types of beliefs: success is related to effort, job satisfaction, work interest and liking, flexibility/adaptability, achievement and persistence, and toleration of uncertainty. A majority of these young people believed that their success was not…

Positive youth development and youth organizing are strengths-based approaches to the lives, needs, and contributions of young people (Damon & Gregory, 2003). These approaches privilege the voices of youth as they engage with issues in their communities and challenge institutions to respond. Few studies, however, have explored the role of…

Aggressive and weapons carrying behaviors are indicative of youth violence. The theory of planned behavior is used in the current analysis to improve our understanding of violence-related behaviors. We examine the influence of perceived behavioral control (self-control and decision making) as a part of the overall framework for understanding the…

Participatory mapping attempts to engage youth in the generation of personalized maps, as a way to both harness the value of individual knowledge about geographic space, and to concurrently empower the research participants by inviting them to take an active stake in the representation and explication of their spatial environment. Engagement in…

Research Findings: The present study examined the degree to which the association between interactive peer play and academic skills was dependent upon the level of classroom quality for a representative sample of culturally and linguistically diverse urban Head Start children (N = 304 children across 53 classrooms). Peer play interactions within…

The rise of post industrial urban centers and global communication technologies has created a distinctive Urban Youth Culture (UYC) with roots in Black history and social activism. In the discourse on education and Black youth, UYC is rarely seen as a positive force promoting academic achievement and self esteem. Drawing on the voices of Black…

In this paper, we aim to contribute to ongoing work to uncover the ways in which settler colonialism is entrenched and reified in educational environments and explore lessons learned from an urban Indigenous land-based education project. In this project, we worked to re-center our perceptual habits in Indigenous cosmologies, or land-based…

In this article, the author analyses scripts written by incarcerated girls in playwriting and performance workshops conducted in regional youth detention centres and performed by formerly incarcerated girls in a programme called "Girl Time" in an urban American southeastern city. Through a close reading and analysis of characters, plots…

This study uses an interdisciplinary framework inspired by Ranciere (1991, 2009, 2010) ideas such as "intellectual equality," "redistribution of the sensible," and "aesthetic heterogenesis" to analyze the production of video-narratives of self and place within a group of Latino eight-year-olds attending public school…

While numerous quantitative studies across disciplines have investigated children's knowledge and attitudes about environmental problems, few studies examine children's feelings about environmental problems--and even fewer have focused on the child's point of view. Through 50 in-depth interviews with urban children (ages 10-12) this research aimed…

For youth to benefit from many of the developmental opportunities provided by organized programs, they need to not only attend but become psychologically engaged in program activities. This research was aimed at formulating empirically based grounded theory on the processes through which this engagement develops. Longitudinal interviews were…

This research applied social domain theory to illuminate reasoning about the perceived legitimacy and limits of group decision making (majority rule) among adolescents from urban and rural China (N = 160). Study 1 revealed that adolescents from both urban and rural China judged group decision making as acceptable for both social conventional and…

Through combining the methodology of portraiture with the epistemological stance of youth participatory action research, this article positions Latino/a youth as experts with their encounters with the school-to-prison pipeline. This article examines what it's like to live within the tight and probational spaces of criminal justice-based school…

This study examined relations between effortful control, parent-adolescent conflict, and teacher-student relationships and the concurrent and longitudinal impact of these factors on adolescent depression and misconduct. In particular, we examined whether the risks of low effortful control and parent-adolescent conflict could be buffered by…