Check & Connect: The importance of relationships for promoting engagement with school

The purpose of this study was to examine whether the closeness and quality of relationships between intervention staff and students involved in the Check & Connect program were associated with improved student engagement in school. Participants included 80 elementary and middle school students referred to the Check & Connect program for poor attendance, an early sign of disengagement, while in elementary school. After accounting for student risk and prior attendance, student and interventionist perceptions of the closeness and quality of their relationship were found to be associated with improved engagement in terms of school attendance, and interventionist perceptions of their relationships with students were associated with teacher-rated academic engagement (e.g., prepared for class, work completion, persistence). The importance of designing and evaluating relationship-based interventions for students at-risk for school failure is discussed.     

Developing Sexual Agency: Rethinking Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century Theories for the Twenty-First Century

Neo-liberal society asserts that adults should be independent and responsible for themselves, and that children and adolescents should be dependent on their parents. The earlier construction of the concept of adolescence makes this seem obviously true. Yet if we remember that “adolescence” was part of a project of gender, race, and class construction, it becomes easier to ask whether adolescence is a meaningful concept and a stage of life or whether it continues to be a component of an ideology that relies on the construction of “others.” In this chapter, I suggest that adolescence plays the latter role, and that although the naturalization of adolescence is particularly dangerous for groups like queer youth who are at the margins of society, it is dangerous for all young people because it limits sexual agency. This is particularly important because increasingly society requires that young people consider their futures not from the assumption that they will move into well-defined roles, but with the assumption that they will need to define new ways of relating.