Play, Talk, Learn E-Book

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Bildung
• Serie: J-B MHS Single Issue Mental Health Services
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 224

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Beschreibung

This volume brings together the findings from separate studies ofcommunity-based and school-based mentoring to unpack the commonresponse to the question of what makes youth mentoring work. A debate that was alive in 2002, when the first NewDirections for Youth Development volume on mentoring,edited by Jean Rhodes, was published, centers on whethergoal-oriented or relationship-focused interactions (conversationsand activities) prove to be more essential for effective youthmentoring. The consensus appeared then to be that the mentoringcontext defined the answer: in workplace mentoring with teens, aninstrumental relationship was deemed essential and resulted inlarger impacts, while in the community setting, the developmentalrelationship was the key ingredient of change. Recent large-scale studies of school-based mentoring have raisedthis question once again and suggest that understanding howdevelopmental and instrumental relationship styles manifest throughgoal-directed and relational interactions is essential to effectivepractice. Because the contexts in which youth mentoring occurs (inthe community, in school during the day, or in a structured programafter school) affect what happens in the mentor-mentee pair, ourgoal was to bring together a diverse group of researchers todescribe the focus, purpose, and authorship of the mentoringinteractions that happen in these contexts in order to help mentorsand program staff better understand how youth mentoringrelationships can be effective. This is the 126th issue of New Directions for YouthDevelopment the Jossey-Bass quarterly report seriesdedicated to bringing together everyone concerned with helpingyoung people, including scholars, practitioners, and people fromdifferent disciplines and professions. The result is a uniqueresource presenting thoughtful, multi-faceted approaches to helpingour youth develop into responsible, stable, well-roundedcitizens.

Leseprobe

Contents

Issue Editors’ Notes

Executive Summary

Chapter 1: Youth mentoring with a balanced focus, shared purpose, and collaborative interactions

Youth mentoring interactions and relationship styles

Focus, purpose, and negotiation styles: Toward a framework for training mentors

How the framework explains two effective mentoring relationship styles

How the framework explains two ineffective mentoring relationship styles

Using the framework to explain structured yet effective natural mentoring relationships

Conclusion

Chapter 2: Mutual but unequal: Mentoring as a hybrid of familiar relationship roles

Mentoring and metaphors

Conceptual framework

Interpreting the research

Discussion

Chapter 3: “I dunno, what do you wanna do?”: Testing a framework to guide mentor training and activity selection

Why we focused on school-based matches and teen mentors

Testing a framework for conceptualizing mentoring interactions

Study 1

Study 2

Discussion

Chapter 4: Beyond the dichotomy of work and fun: Measuring the thorough interrelatedness of structure and quality in youth mentoring relationships

A note on terminology

Measuring match characteristics: Structure and quality

Findings

Implications: Further reflections on match structure and quality

Chapter 5: GirlPOWER! Strengthening mentoring relationships through a structured, gender-specific program

Focus: What types of interactions are prioritized?

Purpose: Whose agenda is served by mentor-youth activities?

Authorship: Who chooses and is most invested in activities?

Implications and conclusion

Chapter 6: Deconstructing serendipity: Focus, purpose, and authorship in lunch buddy mentoring

A tale of two mentoring programs

Deconstructing lunch buddy mentoring

Provisions of lunch buddy mentoring

Implications for understanding the role of the relationship in youth mentoring

Reconstructing lunch buddy mentoring as selective prevention for bullied children

Focus, purpose, and authorship in lunch buddy mentoring

Conclusion

Chapter 7: The structure of effective academic mentoring in late adolescence

Determinants of mentoring relationship quality

Variety of experiences in mentoring

Mentor approaches

The MIRES program

Links with the typology of mentoring relationship structure

Implications for mentoring programs and mentor training and supervision

Chapter 8: Building mentoring relationships

Chapter 9: Culture, context, and innovation: A Kiwi Canuck perspective

Chapter 10: Structuring mentoring relationships for competence, character, and purpose

Index

Notes for Contributors

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Play, Talk, Learn: Promising Practices in Youth Mentoring

Michael J. Karcher, Michael J. Nakkula (eds.)

New Directions for Youth Development, No. 126, Summer 2010

Gil G. Noam, Editor-in-Chief

This is a peer-reviewed journal.

Copyright © 2010 Wiley Periodicals, Inc., A Wiley Company. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form or by any means, except as permitted under sections 107 and 108 of the 1976 United States Copyright Act, without either the prior written permission of the publisher or authorization through the Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA 01923; [phone]; fax [phone]. The copyright notice appearing at the bottom of the first page of an article in this journal indicates the copyright holder’s consent that copies may be made for personal or internal use, or for personal or internal use of specific clients, on the condition that the copier pay for copying beyond that permitted by law. This consent does not extend to other kinds of copying, such as copying for general distribution, for advertising or promotional purposes, for creating collective works, or for resale. Such permission requests and other permission inquiries should be addressed to the Permissions Department, c/o John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030; [phone], fax [phone], www.wiley.com/go/permissions.

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New Directions for Youth Development (ISSN 1533-8916, electronic ISSN 1537-5781) is part of the Jossey-Bass Psychology Series and is published quarterly by Wiley Subscription Services, Inc., A Wiley Company, at Jossey-Bass, 989 Market Street, San Francisco, CA 94103-1741. POSTMASTER: Send address changes to New Directions for Youth Development, Jossey-Bass, 989 Market Street, San Francisco, CA 94103-1741.

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Cover photograph by www.track5.co.uk

www.josseybass.com

Gil G. Noam, Editor-in-Chief

Harvard University and McLean Hospital

Editorial Board

K. Anthony Appiah

Princeton University

Princeton, N.J.

Peter Benson

Search Institute

Minneapolis, Minn.

Dale A. Blyth

University of Minnesota

Minneapolis, Minn.

Dante Cicchetti

University of Minnesota

Minneapolis, Minn.

William Damon

Stanford University

Palo Alto, Calif.

Goéry Delacôte

At-Bristol Science Museum

Bristol, England

Felton Earls

Harvard Medical School

Boston, Mass.

Jacquelynne S. Eccles

University of Michigan

Ann Arbor, Mich.

Wolfgang Edelstein

Max Planck Institute for Human Development

Berlin, Germany

Kurt Fischer

Harvard Graduate School of Education

Cambridge, Mass.

Carol Gilligan

New York University Law School

New York, N.Y.

Robert Granger

W. T. Grant Foundation

New York, N.Y.

Ira Harkavy

University of Philadelphia

Philadelphia, Penn.

Reed Larson

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Urbana-Champaign, Ill.

Richard Lerner

Tufts University

Medford, Mass.

Milbrey W. McLaughlin

Stanford University

Stanford, Calif.

Pedro Noguera

New York University

New York, N.Y.

Fritz Oser

University of Fribourg

Fribourg, Switzerland

Karen Pittman

The Forum for Youth Investment

Washington, D.C.

Jane Quinn

The Children’s Aid Society

New York, N.Y.

Jean Rhodes

University of Massachusetts, Boston

Boston, Mass.

Rainer Silbereisen

University of Jena

Jena, Germany

Elizabeth Stage

University of California at Berkeley

Berkeley, Calif.

Hans Steiner

Stanford Medical School

Stanford, Calif.

Carola Suárez-Orozco

New York University

New York, N.Y.

Marcelo Suárez-Orozco

New York University

New York, N.Y.

Erin Cooney, Editorial Manager

Program in Education, Afterschool and Resiliency (PEAR)

Issue Editors’ Notes

AS THE FIELD OF youth mentoring has grown over the past decade, spawning different types of approaches within a variety of settings, research and evaluation knowledge has evolved as well. One of the largest shifts in our understanding of mentoring effectiveness relates to the role of structure, both program structures and mentors’ efforts to structure their relationships with mentees. This special issue summarizes and synthesizes what the emerging literature teaches us about match structure and its connection to mentoring relationship quality and outcomes for youth. It features summaries of mentoring programs that make use of different training and activity structures and illustrates how such structures influence mentors’ and mentees’ approach to their evolving relationships. Although external influences on match structure, such as program mission and training practices, can influence mentoring outcomes, the primary emphasis of the articles in this volume is on what happens within the match itself—inside the black box of youth mentoring—and how that relates to mentoring’s benefits for youth. More specifically, each contribution speaks to whether it is play, talk, or learning experiences in youth mentoring relationships that yield the greatest impact.

This volume opens with an article that integrates key lessons from the mentoring field into a coherent conceptual framework for understanding how matches are structured. The framework is organized around three key dimensions that help structure mentoring approaches: focus, purpose, and authorship.

Focus addresses the types of activities matches use to actualize mentoring goals, and it is framed along a continuum running from largely relational interactions on one end to primarily goal-directed interactions on the other end.

Purpose captures the mentor’s core motivations for engaging in the relationship, such as to provide emotional support, foster academic improvement, or enhance self-esteem. The purpose dimension also is framed along a continuum running from youth centered and playful interactions on one end to adult centered and conventional or serious interactions on the other end.

Authorship represents the decision-making processes for activity and conversation topic choices made within matches. It reveals whether activities and topics are selected primarily by the program, mentor or mentee unilaterally, or through a more collaborative discussion process.

Although each of these core dimensions is important on its own, the central utility of the framework described in the first article comes from their integration into a three-dimensional matrix that results in categories of mentoring structure. Each of those categories provides a general snapshot on how mentors, mentees, and programs approach mentoring relationships. The framework also provides the key to understanding how relational interactions differ from developmental relationships and how goal-directed interactions contribute to but are distinct from instrumental relationships. Each of the articles that follow uses, applies, and sometimes challenges this guiding framework.

Thomas E. Keller and Julia M. Pryce present a complementary framework for conceptualizing mentoring as a hybrid of other meaningful relationships in the lives of young people. Specifically, they view mentoring as a blend of vertical (power hierarchy) and horizontal (egalitarian) relationships and argue that this view can be used for interpreting the special nature of the mentoring relationship relative to other relationships in the lives of mentors and protégés. They illustrate how these relationship dimensions contribute to our understanding of the structure and function of effective mentoring interactions by showing why hybrid relationships lead to more rewarding interpersonal experiences.

In the third article, Michael J. Karcher, Carla Herrera, and Keoki Hansen examine differences between developmental and instrumental relationship styles in school-based mentoring. It is one of three articles that study processes between mentors (Bigs) and mentees (Littles) in the context of one of Big Brothers Big Sisters mentoring programs. Their study confirms that goal-directed and relational interactions are distinct and make separate contributions to relationship quality. Their work also shows that Bigs and Littles in peer mentoring relationships in which interactions are collaboratively negotiated report higher relationship quality than those matches that interact unilaterally.

In the fourth article, Michael J. Nakkula and John T. Harris follow with an analysis of how different contributions to match structure predict both mentee and mentor perceptions of match quality. Their key finding is that the role of sharing—the nature of personal exchanges in the match—is critical in a variety of ways. They present implications for how program directors and mentors might think of sharing differently, depending on the purpose and developmental status of the matches.

Next, Pryce, Silverthorn, Sanchez, and DuBois depict how structural changes to a traditional Big Brothers Big Sisters community-based mentoring approach can lead to very different mentoring processes and outcomes. The authors studied the application of a structured curriculum as part of their GirlPOWER! program. They present key activities from the curriculum and the program’s impact on the girls’ engagement with their mentors and the larger program.

Conversely, the sixth article reveals the power of less structured interactions. Timothy A. Cavell and Joye L. Henrie describe the lunch buddy program, in which mentors interact with elementary school mentees during lunchtime meetings in the cafeteria at tables that deliberately include the mentored children and their classmates. The authors acknowledge that their informal mentoring model was originally intended to be “inert” (the control group to compare with a more structured mentoring approach) and that they did not expect measurable gains for the lunch buddy mentored children. Contrary to their expectations, the program yielded impressive psychosocial gains, which on closer inspection appear to reflect the presence of several programmatic best practices in youth mentoring.

In the seventh article, Larose and colleagues present their findings on structural implications for mentoring college students. Early college students fall into the transitional period between adolescence and early adulthood and therefore pose particular mentoring challenges as a function of their unique developmental needs. The authors argue that mentees fitting this category are especially interested in structured approaches that meet their specific educational and identity needs. Their study of one college mentoring program yields findings that hold important implications for mentoring older adolescents, particularly those in college settings, but also explains why and how relational interactions are essential to the success of their structured academic mentoring program.

Next follow three brief responses from the field. The first is from Stephen F. Hamilton and Mary Agnes Hamilton, who initiated much of the research that informs this volume. Through their groundbreaking studies of youth mentoring matches and outcomes, their designation of more effective matches as instrumental provides one of the main examples of effective relationship styles described in the framework that organizes the diverse contributions to this volume. The second commentary is from program specialists Dave Marshall and Karen Shaver, leaders within Big Brothers Big Sisters of New Zealand and Canada, respectively. Marshall and Shaver bring an international practice-based perspective into dialogue with the applied research contributions. The concluding commentary is from leading mentoring researchers Jean E. Rhodes and Renée Spencer, who helped shape the dialogue that informed this volume through a range of critically important studies and related insights. In combination, these three commentaries reveal the importance of the contributions in this volume for research, policy, and practice.

Michael J. Karcher

Michael J. Nakkula

Editors

MICHAEL J. KARCHER is a professor of education and human development at the University of Texas at San Antonio.

MICHAEL J. NAKKULA is a practice professor and chair of the division of Applied Psychology and Human Development at the University of Pennsylvania, Graduate School of Education.