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This review has been accessed times since November 1, 2006
Pajares, Frank and Urdan, Tim. (Eds.), (2004). Educating Adolescents: Challenges and Strategies. Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing, Inc.
Pp. xi + 295
$65.95 (hardcover) ISBN 1-59311-154-1
$34.95 (papercover) ISBN 1-59311-153-3Reviewed by Jennifer Wen-Shya Lee
University of CalgaryNovember 1, 2006
This volume brings together contributions from various perspectives with respect to the challenges facing adolescents and their teachers and strategies that have been adopted in the school setting to address these challenges. This American-focused book is a helpful resource for educators and those who are concerned with young people’s intellectual and psychological development in the United States. First, it describes the psychological and contextual problems that adolescents often experience, yet are under-represented within academic literature such as depression, harassment, sexual experiences, and weapon use. Second, a situated and ecological point of view on adolescent development is taken to discuss issues related to adolescents and education, which is critical to the consideration of how adolescents’ broader social contexts influence their well-being and academic learning. Third, several chapters of this book provide suggestions regarding how the school can deal with the challenges of academic learning, well-being and identity development among adolescents.
The editors have divided the eleven chapters of this book into three sections. The first five chapters present the psychological and contextual problems that young people often experience. Chapters Six to Nine discuss cultural and contextual factors that influence adolescents’ academic experiences. The last two chapters focus on issues related to youth identity development.
Daniel Flannery and Kelly Wester discuss risk factors associated with academic achievement among youth in middle and high school at the individual, family, and school levels. Flannery and Wester examine the following risk factors related to academic achievement in adolescence: (1) delinquent behavior, substance use, and truancy and dropout at the individual level; (2) socio- economic factors, parental involvement, and parenting styles at the family level; and (3) exposure to violence, school climate, school size and resources, and teacher-student relationships at the school level. Most interestingly, Flannery and Wester discuss briefly two contrasting aspects of school climate on student behavior and achievement. Negative school climate, termed “systematic violence” includes (1) “exclusionary practices that eliminate the ability for specific students to engage or participate in various school activities, clubs, or organizations” ; (2) the tolerance of abuse when bullying, threats, or violence occur; (3) school’s disciplinary policies rooted in principles of exclusion and punishment. To achieve a positive school climate, five elements are needed: (1) a safe environment in which students and teachers can focus on academic and social skills development; (2) a sequenced and supported curriculum that demands a high level of mastery from all students; (3) a commitment from the school administration to conduct on-going assessments of the school goals and mission; (4) the elimination of school practices that assume that many students cannot and will not academically succeed; and (5) the affirmation and celebration of achievement for enhancing commitment to student academic progress and to the school mission. Flannery and Wester’s chapter provides a broad overview of a variety of risk and protective factors and thus sets out a framework for some of the risk factors that are reviewed in greater detail in other chapters.
The following four chapters deal with common psychological and contextual problems throughout adolescence. Karen Rudolph examines adolescent depression as both an antecedent and a consequence of academic difficulties in terms of a transactional model of school adjustment and depression, which emphasizes self-regulatory processes as links between depression and school adjustment. She concludes that depression during early adolescence predicts future self-regulatory difficulties (e.g., maladaptive achievement-related beliefs, disengagement, and negative evaluations of the school environment) and these difficulties, in turn, place adolescents at risk for future depression. Rudolph’s chapter examines the ecological context to present how trajectories of depression and school adjustment difficulties fuel each other in a mutually reinforcing cycle in adolescence. Moreover, it suggests several directions for school-based interventions and educational reform such as the identification of adolescents at risk in the school context, the development of resources for effective self-regulation, and better integration of mental health services into school settings.
Nancy Kellogg’s chapter begins with an overview of research on abusive, wanted, and illegal sexual experiences in adolescence. Next, she describes barriers to disclosure of sexual abuse and provides a practical guideline for detecting such abuse. Given the close and complex relationships between adolescent sexual experiences and experiences within the home and among peers, Kellogg offers several strategies for preventing sexual abuse, which focus on the school's role in the prevention, detection, reporting, and treatment of unwanted, coercive, illegal, or abusive sexual experiences that may occur during adolescence. Sandra Graham and her colleagues conducted a study to examine the relationship between peer harassment and ethnic identity from an attributional perspective. This study systematically documented the hypothesis that particular kinds of causal attributions for peer harassment might be related to particular adjustment consequences. In Chapter Four of this book, Graham presents empirical findings to show an association between ethnic majority status in a school and the consequences of being harassed by peers and thus suggests that ethnic diversity has psychological benefits for coping with peer harassment at both the individual and classroom level. This chapter offers new ways to think about ethnicity in context, ethnic diversity, and coping with peer harassment during adolescence. Chapter Five discusses adolescents’ exposure to a variety of weapons on school grounds in Israel and the United States. Ron Astor, Rami Benbenishty, Heather A. Meyer, and Michelle Elena Rosamond review some major concepts regarding weapon carrying in schools and then explore the relationships between victimization and weapon use on school grounds based on a case study in Israeli schools. This chapter demonstrates that there are many ways weapons on school grounds can victimize students and each type of victimization can produce different outcomes in students’ behavior both in the United States and cross-culturally.
Tim Urdan The next four chapters focus on adolescent students’ academic experiences in terms of a person-in-context approach. In Chapter Six, Gerald Bracey looks at American adolescents’ academic achievement by comparing the major outcomes of several international assessments. They include: (1) How in the World Do Students Read?, (2) the Third International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS-95), (3) the Third International Mathematics and Science Study— Repeat (TIMSS-99), (4) the Program of International Student Assessment (PISA), and (5) the Progress in Reading Literacy Study. He also raises questions about the validity of cross-national comparisons and the ways in which media portray the results of such assessments. Next, Tim Urdan and Deborah Garvey describe the educational enrollment and attainment profiles of first-, second-, and third-generation adolescent students in the United States based on a combination of nationally representative data and California-specific data. Moreover, they examine motivational and achievement differences across these generational groups by using a smaller sample of students from three California high schools. Urdan and Garvey point out that factors influencing youth motivation and achievement vary across generational groups, including facility with the English language and connection to the mainstream cultural beliefs and values of immigrants. However, the authors identify second and third generation according to the mother’s place of birth only, which may make the grouping problematic for comparisons across studies. Chapter Eight discusses the school-within-school model (SWS) for U.S. high schools from three sources of evidence. They include empirical research about the organization and structure of U.S. high schools, several studies focusing on school size, and a 3-year qualitative study on 5 SWS high schools. In their 3-year study, Valerie Lee and Douglas Ready examine critically the operation of SWS high schools and the stability of the SWS reform among five of these schools. They conclude that the SWS structure may offer solutions to the problems that plague large comprehensive high schools, but schools should avoid its potential to segregate and stratify. In Chapter Nine, Donna Eder and Janice McCabe consider the more intimate context of peers and friends for adolescents’ school experiences. They discuss how to bridge adolescents’ social and academic identities by examining the impact of various school structures and practices on the development of social and academic identities among young people as well as describe a wide range of alternative in this regard.
The last section of this book includes two chapters examining adolescents’ identity development in general and religious identity in particular. Gerald Adams and Susan Palijan present the notion of an identity-education link; they describe six ways that the educational environment can influence adolescents’ identity development. The six themes consist of ego identity, ethnic identity, community service, extracurricular/leisure activities, religion, and school and academic climate. They suggest that specific aspects of educational experiences can influence both identity and well-being among adolescent students. Geoffrey Ream and Ritch Savin-Williams examine the influences of religious involvement and spiritual commitment on adolescent behavior and health. They also discuss the impact of religion within contexts broader than schools such as issues related to race and ethnicity, religious organizations as youth-serving institutions, constructive cooperation between faith-based and secular youth work, and political conflict between religious organizations and schools. They argue that voluntary religious involvement is generally a positive influence on adolescents’ lives, but also note that what is beneficial to one may not be helpful for another because adolescents follow various developmental paths regarding their religious development.
The key to this book is not only that it provides objective and succinct explanations of the difficulties some adolescents may experience, but also that it introduces practical interventions in dealing with these difficulties. Young people today encounter more life challenges than previous generations, yet they are provided less guidance and intervention for their personal development. They are required to have more knowledge and skills so as to compete in the global market place. There are fewer entry-level jobs in postindustrial societies for those with little formal education. Moreover, they have to cope with new cultural and social phenomena emerging from globalization and integrate these into their overall worldview. Thus, the need to understand the challenges in the education of adolescents and the to provide appropriate programs and interventions in school settings is pressing. This book meets those needs.
I have, however, two concerns about the whole project of the book. Firstly, this book lacks the presentation of research activities and education programs with respect to social-emotional learning in adolescence; for example, brain functioning and methods of learning and instruction to identify the skills that provide adolescent students with broad guidance and direction for their actions in all aspects of their lives, in and out of school. Generally speaking, modern education has several purposes: to prepare students to become citizens and engage in service; to prepare students with knowledge, skills, and character to enter the world of work; and to help students’ develop a sense of well-being. The majority of investigations and discussion of challenges and strategies for educating adolescents in this volume emphasize students’ academic achievement, which is mostly based on standardized assessment. The exclusive attention to academic learning in this book leads to an absence of attention to social-emotional learning. Social-emotional learning, a critical aspect of ‘education of the whole child’, refers to character education, service learning, citizenship education, and emotional intelligence (Elias, 2006). Indeed, we need to take a comprehensive view of the health and development of adolescents if they are to reach their full potential.
Secondly, the project of this book is insufficient for illuminating the role of personal agency in adolescent development. Given the dominance of positivism and a conventional view of adolescent students as essentially passive, this book contributes little to the debate about the interplay of structure and agency between sociologists and psychologists. The question becomes to what extent individuals exercise control independent of social structure (finding oneself) versus to what extent external social, political, economic, and cultural forces determine individual behavior (social-institutional processes). Many chapters of this book provide empirical evidence for the influence of family, school, and society on adolescents’ behavior and academic learning. However, few chapters, if any, demonstrate the impact of personal agency; for example, how adolescents’ own cognitive structures or affective predispositions influence their academic learning and problematic behavior. How young people construct the reality of schooling and develop their ego strength, personal identity, and social identity within social-institutional processes are not readily revealed in quantitative research.
In summary, this book offers a broad overview of challenging issues and strategies for educating adolescent students in the United States. The articles are firmly supported by research findings from large-scale surveys and assessments, which provide interested audiences objective evidence to understand general phenomena with respect to adolescent development within a post-industrial and multicultural context. Most importantly, it is readable even for those who are not familiar with statistical methods.
Reference
Elias, M. J. (2006). The connection between academic and social-emotional learning. In M. J. Elias & H. Arnold (Eds.), The educator’s guide to emotional intelligence and academic achievement: Social-emotional learning in the classroom (pp. 4-14). Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press.
About the Reviewer
Jennifer Wen-Shya Lee, The Faculty of Education, University of Calgary, Canada, received her PhD degree from the Graduate Division of Educational Research at University of Calgary in June 2006. She has been awarded the post-doctoral fellowship 2006-07 from the Chiang Ching-Kuo Foundation for International Scholarly Exchange for conducting a study, entitled “Chinese Canadians’ Political and Community Participation in Calgary and Vancouver: Sense of Self and Community.” She has fifteen years of secondary teaching experience, consisting of ten years of junior and senior high schools in Taipei, Taiwan as a social studies teacher and five years at a Saturday Chinese school in Calgary, Canada. Her current research interests include citizenship, democratic education, multicultural education, comparative education, adolescent development, identity formation, immigration and diversity, and globalization.
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Editors: Gene V Glass, Kate Corby, Gustavo Fischman
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