Chapter 3: Youth Programmatic Descriptions

SUMMARY

Young people involved in the Youth Science Center, Youth-in-Government, and Public Achievement told interviewers about their experiences, and this allows us to make explicit contrasts between formal aims, strategies, ethos, curriculums, and activities of each initiative and what it is like to be a participating youth. The contrast is, as expected, remarkable, with the youth's experience providing illumination, shading and shadows on the formal descriptions. In so doing, it is clear that what works in these initiatives from the young people's point-of-view is the authentic, embodied invitation of the program staff to open, meaningful, and publicly and privately consequential involvement through a group project on a jointly decided public issue. This fits with experiential education pedagogy and is the basis of our findings and proposals for enhancing youth civic engagement.

KEYWORDS:

• Youth civic engagement
• citizenship
• qualitative research
• youth-adult partnerships
• youth activism
• action research
• evaluation