the social settings of education and community development

[Skip Zilla]

Daniel,
I've just reserved online from the my library a copy of Toward Positive Youth Development: Transforming Schools and Community Programs in hope that this 2008 book of articles can inform my understanding of the community-design, social-settings dimensions of this group's explorations and possible productions.

Here's a blurb about the book copied from the Google Book Search site:
Social settings have enormous power to promote or hinder positive youth development. Researchers and practitioners know a great deal about features of schools and programs for youth that affect development, but much less about how to transform settings to bring about these desirable features. This book shows how to harness the power of settings. It shifts the debate from simply enhancing youth outcomes at the individual level to improving the settings of youths' daily lives. The book offers researchers and practitioners blueprints for creating and changing influential settings including classrooms, schools, universities, out-of-school time programs, ethnic systems of supplementary education, and other community-based programs.

Here's the conclusion of the "Introduction" written by the book's editors Marybeth Shinn and Hirokazu Yoshikawa which hooked me to want to read the book's interdisciplinary essays:
Progress in transforming settings to improve youth development will require advances on three fronts: understanding features of settings that affect youth, understanding how to measure these features, and understanding how to create desired changes. The first front is most advanced (Eccles & Gootman, 2002; National Research Council, 2003; Tseng & Seldman, 2007). T'he current book seeks to advance the other two. The next 16 chapters offer theories of setting-level change; strategies for measuring theoretically meaningful features of settings to motivate, guide, and monitor change; and exemplars of change efforts. The last two chapters advance our understanding of how to measure settings in reliable ways, and offer an overarching theory of setting-level intervention. We hope that this book will stimulate researchers, policy makers, and practitioners to think more creatively and precisely about how to measure settings and how to change them to foster positive youth development.

The combination of "overarching theory of setting-level intervention," "how to measure settings," and "foster[ing] positive youth development" (which links to my abiding interest in "positive [child] psychology" and its emphasis on "resilience') were the editors' aims most compelling to me.