Architects, captains, and dreamers: Creating advisor roles that foster youth-adult partnerships

While research has documented the many ways in which student voice can enable educational change, the process of how adults can help to enable student voice is less clear. This article examines how adults new to working as advisors of student voice initiatives begin to develop partnerships with young people. Using a Youth-Adult Partnership continuum as a framework, three cases represent a range of beliefs of student leadership. Using the archetypes of Captain, Dreamer, and Architect, the cases indicate how the adults began their work with youth with adult-centered, a student-centered, and an equilibrium approach, respectively. While the article highlights that adults must learn how to scaffold youth participation to help them to develop the leadership skills necessary to share in the work of the partnership, little training and materials exist for adults to learn how to scaffold learning. Part of this training includes the willingness for adults to recognize that they themselves need to change as well in order to facilitate youth leadership.     

“Nothing is impossible”: characteristics of Hispanic females participating in an informal STEM setting

Cultural Studies of Science Education - Factors that influence the underrepresentation of females in STEM careers begin early in childhood when gender biases and stereotypes emerge. Stereotypes...     

Gendered Expectations for “Agreeableness” in Response to Requests and Opinions

To address the need for more direct assessment of gendered expectations for communication behaviors, we devised a novel experimental approach that tests whether expectations for “agreeableness” are more salient when evaluating male or female speakers in their affirmative responses to a friend’s request or expression of opinion. Briefly, as lag times are introduced, it appears that females are expected to be more agreeable (or male delay is more tolerated), particularly when alignment with opinion is at stake or when a female is responding to another female. Findings are discussed in the context of Expectation Violations Theory.