As part of an ongoing, multi-million dollar Wallace Foundation initiative to improve and expand arts learning opportunities for young people, the Wallace Foundation, in partnership with the Boys & Girls Clubs of America (BGCA), developed the Youth Arts Initiative (YAI) to deliver otherwise inaccessible high-quality arts programs to low-income…

Educators must consider how learning environments can structure experiences to produce desired learning outcomes. In this paper, the author describes one type of learning environment where youth have the opportunity to construct adaptive, emergent identities--a "dramaturgical" process that structures the telling, adapting, and…

In this article the authors explore the relationship between concepts of identity and the purpose, process, and products of youth media arts organizations. Since the explicit mission of these organizations is to work with adolescents to explore and represent identities, the authors develop our understanding of how organizations conceptualize…

Research has confirmed short- and long-term positive effects of quality youth development programs. Despite the evidence of the positive outcomes of youth programs, policies supporting these programs are inadequate due in part to limited public understanding about the developmental process and the role of quality youth development programs during…