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In A Place to Call Home, Barton J.
Hirsch identifies the strengths of after-school settings while challenging them to rise to
new levels of excellence. After-school programs have
attracted a strong and growing constituency. Parents, educators, researchers, and
policymakers are engaged in pivotal debates about how after-school programs should be
oriented. Powerful forces are pushing programs to be more school-like and oriented to
academic drill. However, A Place to Call Home: After-School Programs for Urban Youth
provides convincing evidence that yielding to such forces would be tragic, a wasted
opportunity.
Through original and provocative analysis, author Barton J.
Hirsch describes his research conducted over a four-year period at six Boys & Girls
Clubs all located in low income, predominantly minority, urban neighborhoods. Hirsch shows
that the culture of the after-school center meets the needs of the urban youth by drawing
upon and replicating positive features of the youth's familial environment and peer group.
Staff first engage and then socialize youth toward positive identities by means of
recreational activities and wide-ranging mentoring relationships. These club environments
are repeatedly referred to as a "second home" by participating youth and seem to
thrive even though formal psychoeducational programs often fail to reach their full
potential. After-school clubs offer critical resources to urban youth in their passage to
adulthood.
A Place to Call Home does a tremendous job of
helping us to appreciate this fact. Clinical, community, and developmental psychologists,
social workers, youth workers, and policymakers will discover much from Hirsch's analysis,
abundant case illustrations, and verbatim field notes as well as fascinating quantitative
results describing these successful after-school environments.
ORDER CODE: APA4317059B
BOOK
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