Public policy debates about urban crime and the fate of America's crumbling inner cities suggest a need to consider solutions that create conditions for sustainable community development—where youths join with caring adults in intergenerational coalitions at the grassroots. Using a field-based approach, the author reviews over two dozen youth development projects in non-school and after-school settings. The analyses of these programs examines how young people might achieve a level of economic and political self-determination and community control, as well as personal fulfillment coupled with healthy adolescent growth. Once empowered with critical insights, young people can exhibit positive, real-life displays of their visions, dreams, and ambitions.

The Arts and Emergent Bilingual Youth offers a critical sociopolitical perspective on working with emerging bilingual youth at the intersection of the arts and language learning. Utilizing research from both arts and language education to explore the ways they work in tandem to contribute to emergent bilingual students’ language and academic development, the book analyzes model arts projects to raise questions about “best practices” for and with marginalized bilingual young people, in terms of relevance to their languages, cultures, and communities as they envision better worlds. A central assumption is that the arts can be especially valuable for contributing to English learning by enabling learners to experience ideas, patterns, and relationship (form) in ways that lead to new knowledge (content). Each chapter features vignettes showcasing current projects with ELL populations both in and out of school and visual art pieces and poems, to prompt reflection on key issues and relevant concepts and theories in the arts and language learning. Taking a stance about language and culture in English learners’ lives, this book shows the intimate connections among art, narrative, and resistance for addressing topics of social injustice.

While the women's liberation movement produced dynamic changes in society's assumptions about girls' roles, little has changed about our attitude toward the role of boys. Yet the cycle of violence and oppression will not stop until boys are raised to become part of the struggle to end it. Boys will Be Men is for all parents who have a vision of a society where peace and justice exist; for parents raising their sons in economically disadvantaged communities; for feminists who feel confused about raising their sons, and for parents of color who need to add their sons' strength to their communities.

Youth participatory evaluation (YPE) combines action research and participatory evaluation's commitment to stakeholder empowerment with the new philosophy of positive youth development, which emphasizes young people as community assets and resources rather than as a source of social problems. This volume illustrates a broad range of approaches YPE advocates have used to enrich evaluation practice and strength programs for youth by involving young people as researchers and evaluators. Kim Sabo begins by arguing that youth-led evaluation by it's very nature promotes youth development, because these evaluations constitute Vygotskian zones of proximal development, situations where developmental learning through performance can take place. Les Voakes uses a case study of a conference organized by Town Youth Participation Strategies to illustrate how involving youth in the planning, operational decision-making, and evaluation of programs that directly affect them can benefit both the young participants and the programs themselves. Jonathan K. London, Kristen Zimmerman and Nancy Erbstein provide case studies of evaluation methods that link community and youth development practices. Genevieve Lau, Nancy H. Netherland and Mary Haywood show how YPE can be used as a training process for youth workers, one that enables them to better understand the needs and desires of youth and therefore design better programs for them. Roger A. Hart and Jasmine Rajbhandary examine Nepal's "children's clubs", and Save the Children's YPE-inspired evaluation of these clubs, to show how children can be encouraged to develop their own programs and largely evaluate them by themselves. Bonny L. Gildin describes the All Stars Talent Show Network, an innovative program that unites youth, program funders and adult volunteers in program development and evaluation. Finally, David Fetterman sums up and reflects on the lessons learned by the contributors to this volume. This is the 98th issue of the quarterly journal New Directions for Evaluation.