Writing With At Risk Youth

This book describes a specific program for teaching and mentoring expressive writing by at-risk youth—a program that can generate transformative change in the teens, and generate significant new satisfactions for you. When young people write personally and creatively, it helps them to overcome challenges in their lives. They feel better, think more clearly, are more self-confident, and are better able to relate to others, including their helpers. This personal creative process is enriching and enlivening for everyone. It brings emotional clarity and meaning to everyone. It brings closeness, in addition to learning and growth.Welcome to the Pongo Teen Writing Method.

This volume details the development and initial evaluation of a supplemental literacy course intended to support at-risk high school students in the US. Developed using design based research (DBR), the course combines argument writing and knowledge building literacy routines to support academic literacy development. Acknowledging the demand for US students to meet academic literacy standards that emphasize explanatory and argumentative writing, the text foregrounds knowledge building as key to effective writing development. Chapters trace the development and implementation of course literacy routines designed using DBR and use whole-class and individual case studies to demonstrate how informational reading, discussion, and argument writing become an activity system to support literacy development. Ultimately, the text has important implications for literacy course design, and the use of knowledge building analysis and DBR in research. The text will benefit researchers, academics, and educators in higher education with an interest in academic literacy education, writing and composition, and secondary education more broadly. Those specifically interested in methodologies relating to classroom teaching and learning as well as argumentation and argument writing will also benefit from this book.

Based on the book by the same title, the Reclaiming Youth at Risk video workshop takes viewers inside two schools and two residential treatment centers that have experienced great success in creating environments that allow young people to transfrom crisis into opportunity and failure into success.

This resource offers counseling strategies to promote adolescents' overlooked strengths and create healthy alternatives to problem behaviors such as bullying, drug use, violence, and promiscuity.

For more than a quarter of a century, Pat Schneider has helped writers find and liberate their true voices. She has taught all kinds--the award winning, the struggling, and those who have been silenced by poverty and hardship. Her innovative methods have worked in classrooms from elementary to graduate level, in jail cells and public housing projects, in convents and seminaries, in youth at-risk programs, and with groups of the terminally ill. Now, in Writing Alone and with Others, Schneider's acclaimed methods are available in a single, well-organized, and highly readable volume. The first part of the book guides the reader through the perils of the solitary writing life: fear, writer's block, and the bad habits of the internal critic. In the second section, Schneider describes the Amherst Writers and Artists workshop method, widely used across the U.S. and abroad. Chapters on fiction and poetry address matters of technique and point to further resources, while more than a hundred writing exercises offer specific ways to jumpstart the blocked and stretch the rut-stuck. Schneider's innovative teaching method will refresh the experienced writer and encourage the beginner. Her book is the essential owner's manual for the writer's voice.

States the need for community-based, integrated services to meet the many needs of at-risk youth and their families. Discusses services integration, case management, parental involvement, tutoring, mentoring, fund-raising, and monitoring program outcomes.