"Youth Development Guide"
What did I already know?
- I already knew about the resiliency research that was done on young people and what they were able to learn about how resilient young people are. These studies examined young people who grew up with so many obstacles but still were resilient enough to look past those obstacles and life successful lives. Instead of focusing on the problems that young people had, they focused on what helped them to succeed. They discovered that young people who succeeded had the advantage of the three critical elements that young people are best when they have.
What did I learn?
- I learned what a deficit approach is and the main reasons why it failed. The deficit approach is an approach used for young people who exhibit signs of being "at risk" for negative behaviors such as drug use, teen pregnancy, higher school failure, and violence. It is designed to prevent these young people from engaging in these sorts of behaviors. One of the reasons why this approach failed is because it focused too narrowly on changing specific behaviors and didn't address the basic developmental needs that every young person needs. The main problem with this is that the focus was on all the bad and not the good. Young people didn't get the knowledge that they needed to be present in their community being a part of things and having relationships with all kinds of people. Also, young people were divided into two groups, the ones who were "at risk" and the ones who were not, which is such a horrible thing to do because then the young people can feel discouraged and children should be given equal opportunity to have access to all kinds of resources and programs. This leads into the other reason why this approach failed, and that is their focus on isolated problems, which led to different kinds of programs that were available for those who were deemed "at risk". Focusing on the bad and not the good is never a good way to get young people to learn.
What do I want to know more about?
- I would like to know more about the shift in policy from the deficit approach to the better, youth development approach and why they ultimately decided to make that shift. Also, I would like to know how that managed to get the funding to put this approach into place to better the programs for the young people.
When the article talks about separating the people into the two groups "at risk" and "not at risks" I also found it an awful thing to do and could really connect with that cause when I was younger my elementary school use to the exact same thing and grouped us together based on how we read and same if we didn't understand the math which in my personal opinion made me feel less then my other classmates.
ReplyDeleteYou and I both talked about resiliency in the "what we already know" paragraph. I remember we learned about it in social work class together. I really like how you wrote about how children who grow up facing obstacles can be resilient and can look past the obstacles to be successful. It goes to show how powerful this adjective can be and how strong some children can be no matter what they face.
ReplyDeleteId also like to know where the funding comes from an how we can increase funding or support more funding/training on shifting this approach.
ReplyDeleteThe article discusses more on young people's achievements and how it made them better people, but they did not focus or think about the mistakes or horrible things they did to help them learn. Mistakes is a way for people to become better people and you shows great details on why it is important to focus on the horrible things and maybe use the good things they did as a tool to support them. As you mention, "Focusing on the bad and not the good is never a good way to get young people to learn" i a way to show that many people are at risk and if we as a society do not understand the problems someone may have, it will not only help them learn, but it would give programs a hard time to be supportive.
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