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The purposes of this study were to describe the roles mentors enacted as part of an afterschool science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) program and how those roles varied across three sites and to explain those differences.

The authors used a comparative case study design and collected data primarily from interviews with program mentors and observations of the sessions.

The authors found that the mentors played four roles, depending on the school site: teachers, friends, support and role models. Mentors interpreted cues from the environment in light of their own identities, which ultimately led them to construct a plausible understanding of their roles as mentors.

The authors identify four mentoring roles that are somewhat consistent with prior research and demonstrate that the roles mentors enact can vary systematically across sites, and these variations can be explained by sensemaking. This study also contributes to research on mentoring roles by elaborating each identified role and offering a framework to explain variability in mentor role enactment.

The authors recommend that mentoring program directors discuss the roles that mentors may enact with mentors as part of their training and that they engage mentors in identity work and also recommend that program managers create unstructured time for mentors to socialize outside STEM activities with their mentees.

This study contributes to mentoring research by using sensemaking theory to highlight how and why mentoring roles differ across school sites.

Boys & Girls Clubs of America (BGCs) provide numerous avenues for youth to connect, be physically active and have healthy meals/snacks. These services are often provided to low-income families at reduced cost to bridge the gap in after school and summer childcare. However, many of these clubs were forced to dramatically change their services during the COVID-19 pandemic. This study aims to examine how 13 BGCs in Texas, USA, experienced COVID-19 and persevered to provide services.

Interviews were conducted with 16 BGC leaders from 13 different BGCs. Open-ended questions were used to elicit leaders’ experiences with the pandemic, services their clubs were able to offer, barriers overcome and supports crucial to their ability to serve their communities. Thematic analysis was used to generate findings from these interviews.

BGC services changed significantly during the pandemic. Normal activities were no longer possible; however, leaders (alongside their communities) continually provided services for their families. Further, leaders reiterated the power of the community coming together in support of their families.

While BGC leaders had to adapt services, they found ways to reach families and serve their community. These adaptations can have dramatic impacts on the social and physical well-being of children in their communities. Learning from this adversity can improve services as clubs start to build back.

This study provides vital context to the changing care and setting children were exposed to during the pandemic response. Additionally, these results provide understanding of the adaptations that took place in these services.

The purpose of this paper is to understand how I – and many other students – became first-generation college students (FGCSs) by exploring the rise and retraction of TRIO. Originally, TRIO was a set of three college access and retention programs created in the 1960s to address the needs of a population designated as academically and economically disadvantaged. The author uses the term “becoming” as a process of how a person is constructed socially, in this case, as a FGCS and faculty member. The author uses. social construction of targeted populations theory to explore my testimonio as a beneficiary of opportunity programs.

To explore how FGCS experience policy changes affecting TRIO, I use my testimonio to build on the historical literature that covers 1968–2001. I begin my testimonio by first reviewing my background as a second generation Ecuadorian American. I then review how I encountered opportunity programs and why I continued to be a participant in these programs, specifically, TRIO. I end my testimonio by countering criticism of TRIO programs using research on and lived experiences with TRIO.

During an era when TRIO budgets remain under constant attack, testimonios shed light on participants’ experiences with policy changes. Specifically, I reveal how economic budget cuts create policy changes to terms such as “academically and economically disadvantaged” and shapes perceptions and knowledge about who are FGCS.

Research limitations include application of social construction of targeted group theory to one testimonio. Implications include more studies on how policy changes, specifically budget allocations could affect characterizations and images of targeted populations such as FGCS.

Understanding the role of policy changes to TRIO program funding benefits students from misperceptions by educational administrators and other stakeholders.

My testimonio also builds on work regarding the impacts of CARPS on FGCS like me. Most importantly, my testimonio contributes to the efforts necessary to ensure these programs continue to exist and succeed. I use my testimonio side by side with research literature on TRIO to become both the subject of inquiry and the inquirer, simultaneously a beneficiary and an informant of how these programs have influenced my persistence through the postsecondary education system and shaped my understanding of FGCS.

The purpose of this paper is to review the nature of Japanese non-governmental organisations (NGOs) in international disaster response and analyzes their distinctive characteristics.

A literature review was conducted of secondary English and Japanese sources including peer-reviewed journals, books, and non-academic journals published by government and NGOs.

First, Japanese disaster response NGOs are relatively young compared to Western ones and they continue to increase in number. Second, the scale of disaster response NGOs is much larger than that of other NGOs in the development field not only because of the availability of government funds but also because of the presence of internationally affiliated NGOs and religious-based organisations with strong fundraising programs. Third, Japanese disaster response NGOs have a long-term engagement with the local community, not only during the emergency phase, but also during the recovery and development phases in various fields. Finally, coordination NGOs play an important role in networking, advocating and supplementing NGOs that often lack financial and human resources.

The limitation of this study is the definition of Japanese NGOs in the context of international disaster response; therefore, this paper adopts MOFA’s definition, which includes NGOs engaged in overseas activities through direct intervention.

There has been little research in English on the scale and nature of Japanese NGOs involved in disaster response activities.

This article makes a case for the importance of brokering future learning opportunities to youth as a programmatic goal for informal learning organizations. Such brokering entails engaging in practices that connect youth to events, programs, internships, individuals and institutions related to their interests to support them beyond the window of a specific program or event. Brokering is especially critical for youth who are new to an area of interest: it helps them develop both a baseline understanding of the information landscape and a social network that will respond to their needs as they pursue various goals. The paper aims to describe three critical levers for brokering well in informal settings: creating learning environments that allow trust to form between youth and educators and enable educators to develop an understanding of a young person’s interests, needs and goals; attending to a young person’s tendency (or not) to reach out to educators after a program is over to solicit assistance; and enabling potential brokers to efficiently locate appropriate future learning opportunities for each young person who approaches them. The authors also include a set of program practices for providers who wish to increase their brokering impact, as well as recommendations geared primarily toward organization leaders. The authors hope that this paper brings clarity and enhanced significance to the practice of brokering as a strategy to support youth pathways toward meaningful futures.

Insights presented here are the result of a participatory knowledge building and sharing process with a community of after-school providers known as the Mozilla Hive NYC Learning Network. The topic of discussion was how these providers might continue to support young people in their intensive project-based programs after the program was over. The authors of this article, acting as embedded research partners to Hive NYC, contributed insights to these discussions based on ethnographic fieldwork and case studies of high-school-age youth in the Hive NYC context.

The authors articulate a set of brokering practices and a conceptual model that communicates how brokering might lead to valued long-term outcomes for youth, including increased social capital.

The intent is that information and perspectives from this article will inform youth-serving practice and serve as a catalyst for further conversations and activities geared toward promoting youth pathways of learning and identity development.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss how the superhero genre, when couched in a space and project that seek to act as a counter-world and is rooted in the life experiences of youth, can allow Latinx elementary school students the opportunity to create counter-stories. Such stories facilitated the process of creating “critical hope” in relation to oppressive political discourses.

This is a qualitative study conducted at an afterschool club in the Western USA. Using the superhero genre, elementary school students, grades third-fifth, participated in a project in which they created superhero and villain narratives set in their community.

The authors found that the superhero genre supported some Latinx students to develop counter-stories that engaged with and resisted the heightened xenophobic and racist discourse appropriated by then US presidential candidate Donald Trump in the context of the 2016 presidential campaign. These counter-stories allowed youth to engage in critical hope to imagine a better, more just world.

In a time when young Latinx students are continually subjected to racism and xenophobia promoted by political figures and taken up by popular media and the general public, it is necessary to support students in creating counter-stories and critical hope that push back against oppression. Findings suggest that the superhero genre can support Latinx students to discuss, dismantle and counter hateful discourses while striving for hope.

This paper aims to illustrate how first-generation immigrant youth who are English language learners respond to graphic novels and what literacies they acquire from reading and discussing graphic texts.

This paper is based on qualitative discourse data collected from an afterschool program with five high-school-aged English-language learners and their teacher. The afterschool program is centered on reading and discussing graphic novels.

Transcript analysis showed that the girls, even while working to “break” the written code, were engaged in critical analysis. In other words, English learners’ struggles to decode the words did not hinder them in assuming the role of a text analyst, and in questioning the creator’s message, purposes and worldviews.

This paper, which draws on an approach wherein the researcher pays close attention to immigrant youth as language users and meaning makers, can inform the methodologies of literacy and language researchers.

The paper can also inform the work of educators who are interested in pedagogical supports – texts and practices – that promote powerful language and literacy.

This paper is timely, given not only the challenges and possibilities associated with educating recent-arrival immigrant youth and English-language learners, but also the growing interest by language and literacy educators in the role of multimodal texts for developing multiple and critical literacies of all students.

Literature indicates African American parents can feel real or perceived discrimination that strains their interactions with teachers, resulting in them feeling alienated from their children’s school.

This is an exploratory case study of two African American parents, who although guarded in their relationships with teachers, exposed their vulnerabilities to Project ESTEEM faculty as they requested support in resolving behavioral and academic challenges with their children. It is an exploratory case study in that the field notes were taken prior to defining the research question, positioning it as research that sets the stage for a future more comprehensive study. The researchers, as participant observers recorded field notes of events and interactions that occurred. The research question was, “What were the factors that influenced the relationships between the Project ESTEEM faculty and African American Parents? The subquestions were “What were the distinctions of alienation that challenged the parents’ relationships in the schools? and "How were the factors that challenged the parents’ relationships with teachers mitigated in Project ESTEEM faculty’s relationships with the parents?” A constant comparative method was used beginning with open coding, followed by identifying patterns, themes and subthemes reflecting the specific needs of the parents in relationship to the overall theme.

The stories highlight sociocultural contexts influencing the alienation of some African American parents in their children’s education through an analysis of the relationships fostered with Project ESTEEM faculty.

This case study reports the experiences of two parents from one community and school, participating in a specialized program.

The significance resides in the representation of alternate viewpoints in understanding the alienation experiences of African American parents from schools.

This paper aims to introduce and explores the use of electrodermal activity (EDA) data as a tool for obtaining data about youth engagement during maker learning activities.

EDA and survey data were collected from a yearlong afterschool maker program for teens that met weekly and was hosted at a children’s museum. Data from four youth who were simultaneously present for eight weeks were examined to ascertain what experiences and activities were more or less engaging for them, based on psychophysiological measures.

Most of the focal youth appeared to show higher levels of engagement by survey measures throughout the program. However, when examined by smaller time intervals, certain activities appeared to be more engaging. Planning of maker activities was one space where engagement was higher. Completing sewing projects with minimal social interaction appeared to be less engaging. Specific activities involving common maker technologies yielded mixed levels of engagement.

Some research is emerging that uses EDA data as a basis for generating inferences about various states while participating in maker learning activities. This paper provides a novel analysis building on some techniques established in the still emergent body of prior research in this area.

Many initiatives are seeking to engage children in learning to code. However, few studies have examined how children’s engagement in learning and using coding develops over time. This study aims to seek young people’s perspectives on what they viewed as important in their long-term participation in a coding community.

This study identified youth with a high level of participation and who demonstrated emergent leadership in the Scratch online community. Using methods from qualitative research on youth development, individual interviews were conducted in which these youth were asked about memorable moments in their participation and how these experiences influenced them.

While each young person described a unique pathway and perspective, this study identified key experiences that motivated their participation, influenced their development and inspired their emergent leadership. These experiences included opportunities to learn through exploration, to receive feedback from peers, to engage in creative collaboration and to contribute to the community.

This study discussed these findings in light of previous research on youth development, and it suggests that building on practices and principles from research on youth programs can help more young people become engaged in developing broader skills with coding.

Youth highlighted experiences that enabled them to express their ideas, to build relationships, to help others and to see themselves in new ways. Their perspectives expand beyond the predominant focus of coding initiatives on computational thinking and problem-solving skills to also support social, leadership and identity development.