The second volume of this SpringerBrief presents a series of papers compiled from a conference addressing how after-school programs can promote positive youth development (PYD) hosted by Youth-Nex, the University of Virginia Center to Promote Effective Youth Development. It examines summer learning and best practices for different types of after-school programs by drawing on the experiences of researchers, program staff, and youth participants. It also presents case studies of five specialized programs and discusses their strengths, limitations, and challenges. In addition, the brief offers recommendations drawn from across the two volumes for how researchers, policy makers, and practitioners can move the field forward and maximize the potential of after-school time and programs to promote positive youth development for children and adolescents.
Featured case studies of specialized after-school programs include:
- Richmond, Virginia’s ROSMY.
- The Clubhouse: Where Technology Meets Imagination.
- The Young Women Leaders Program (YWLP).
- Whatever It Takes (WIT) Program.
- UTEC of Lowell, Massachusetts.
After-School Programs to Promote Positive Youth Development, Volume 2, is a must-have resource for policy makers and related professionals, graduate students, and researchers in child and school psychology, family studies, public health, social work, law/criminal justice, and sociology.
Nancy L. Deutsch, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor in the Curry School of Education at the University of Virginia. Her research involves how different contexts influence adolescent lives and identities, with a focus on out-of-school contexts and youth-adult relationships. Her first book,
Pride in the Projects: Teens building identities in urban contexts (NYU Press, 2008) is a qualitative study of youth experiences in an urban after-school program that explores issues of relationships, gender, race, class, and intersectionality in teens’ identity construction as it occurs in out-of-school settings. Her second book,
After School Centers and Youth Development: Case Studies of Success and Failure, co-authored with Barton Hirsch and David DuBois (2011, Cambridge University Press), won a Society for Research on Adolescence Social Policy Book Award. Her research has been funded by the William T. Grant Foundation, the U.S. Department of Education, and the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, among others. Dr. Deutsch is affiliated with Youth-Nex, the U. Va. Center to Promote Effective Youth Development.
