Spring 2008 EventsApril 18 Patsy Eubanks Owens Department of Landscape Architecture University of California at Davis Youth Place in Community: Safe, Welcoming and Supportive Environments In recent years, community initiatives have emerged with the purpose of exploring and addressing how to make our communities better places for youth to grow up. One component of this effort is understanding communities from the youth point of view. Studies in two California cities, Sacramento and Pasadena, help us to understand youth perceptions of place through their photographs and writings. This presentation focuses on the community places that the study participants thought were “for youth.” Their images and words describe places that are safe, welcoming and supportive. Understanding why places are important to youth is an essential step in creating better environments for youth.
April 3 Michael Duffin Program Evaluation and Educational Research, Inc. Richmond, VT
Using the Local Community as Classroom and Curriculum Co-sponsored by the CU Environmental Center, CU Environmental Studies Program, and the CU Boulder Outreach Committee and in collaboration with Casey Middle School of the Boulder Valley School District, the Colorado Alliance for Environmental Education, and the CU School of Education.
February 1 Susan Strife Environmental Studies Program University of Colorado ENVD 102, 11:30 a.m. The Concrete Jungle: Environmental Perceptions among Denver Urban Youth This project seeks to examine the environmental perceptions and nature experiences of urban 5th grade youth across three different environmental and school contexts in Denver, Colorado. Through 45 child-drawn maps, semi-structured interviews and child-led neighborhood tours, this hermeneutic phenomenological research aims to understand how urban youth experience nature as well as how they emotionally and behaviorally respond to environmental issues they deem as important. Such research is practically important as a starting point for voicing and engaging youth perspectives in the local planning process, as well as furthering scholarly knowledge on the child-environment relationship. .
Fall 2007 EventsNovember 8 Matthew Kaplan,
Intergenerational Programs and Aging
Intergenerational Engagement: Programs, Practices, and Places Intergenerational specialists seek to develop intergenerational programs that enrich the lives of individuals, strengthen communities, and address vital social issues. Historically, little attention has been paid to the physical environment in terms of how it influences intergenerational communication dynamics and mediates program impact on participants, participating organizations, and surrounding communities. At the same time, design professionals often develop environments that do not adequately accommodate people across the age continuum nor afford opportunities for intergenerational interaction. Several ideas will be presented about how to plan and construct physical environments that are responsive to intergenerational engagement goals. Key themes include the following: providing "welcoming messages" and interaction cues for people of all ages; embracing design as a means for empowering people to have control over how much and in what ways they engage others; providing opportunities for escape as well as interaction; incorporating flexibility into the built environment; and approaching environmental design in the context of programmatic,organizational, and policy imperatives. Co-sponsored by the Institute for Intentional Sustainable Communities August 18-Sept. 14 The Gallery at Nine10Arts 910 Santa Fe Drive, Denver
Spring 2007 EventsMarch 1 Andrea Faber Taylor, Landscape and Human Health Laboratory
Healthy Functioning by Design: Evidence of the Benefits of Nearby Nature for Children and Adults Can the physical environment really foster healthy human functioning? Does it matter if there are trees and grass visible and accessible in our work, school, and home environments? Researchers at the Landscape and Human Health Laboratory have been focusing on the relationship between healthy functioning and greenspace in Chicago public housing and other settings. The labs research demonstrates the impact of green spaces on psychological and social well-being in children and adults, including reductions in aggression and violence, crime, and ADHD symptoms, and greater cognitive functioning, play behaviors, strength of community, and supervision of children outdoors. In this presentation, Dr. Faber Taylor will present these research findings and their implications for design.
May 4 Jill Litt, Department of Preventive Medicine and Biometrics
A Community-based Approach to Understanding Neighborhood Environments and Health: Gardens for Growing Healthy Communities Gardens for Growing Healthy Communities (GGHC) is a three-year study of over 60 community gardens in Denver to learn about how neighborhoods can be designed to promote health and well-being. GGHC is a collaborative research project of the University of Colorado's School of Medicine and College of Architecture and Planning, Denver Urban Gardens, Front Range Earth Force, and residents and other stakeholders in Denver. In this presentation, Dr. Litt, an assistant professor in the Department of Preventive Medicine and Biostatistics at the School of Medicine, will provide an overview of the project and its interdisciplinary approach to understand the health and social benefits of community gardens.
Fall 2006 EventsSeptember 19 Michael McDevitt, School of Journalism and Mass Communication, UCB
The Red and Blue of Adolescence: Origins of the Dutiful Voter and the Defiant Activist
An emergent culture of youth activism suggests the need to examine a fundamental question about political learning. Does formal education function primarily to engender compliance or does instruction foster differentiation, and perhaps defiance, in political identity construction? This project draws upon data from a three-year panel study of high school students. Results support a theoretical model in which schools prompt discussion in families and in peer groups. The flows of interpersonal influence in the two spheres share common steps but can be thought of as parallel staircases to divergent orientations, with families promoting compliant voting and peer groups fostering activism. September 29 Selim Iltus, Graduate Center, Environmental Psychology Program, City University of New York
Youth Participation in Planning and Design During Disaster Recovery This presentation will focus on involving children, youth and communities in the planning and design of the physical environment during the aftermath of natural disasters. Programmatic, political and policy aspects of participation will be discussed. Specific references will be given from the projects carried out after the earthquakes in Marmara, Turkey; Bam, Iran and the Tsunami in the Southeast Asia.
October 25 Richard Louv, Futurist and Author
Biophilic Design and Nature Deficit-Disorder Co-sponsored by the CU Environmental Center and the Program in Environmental Studies
November 14 Tom Miller, National Research Center, Inc.
Evaluating Community Based Organizations: Teen Programs and Community Food Security. Dr. Miller will discuss NRC evaluations of 34 after-school programs across Colorado (for The Colorado Trust) and evaluations of local farm-to-school or farm-to-community programs across the U.S. (for USDA). Spring 2006 EventsFebruary 7 Ben Kirshner, School of Education, UCB
Assistance strategies in three youth activism organizations: Facilitation, apprenticeship, and joint work This presentation examines teaching practices in three urban, multiracial youth groups engaged in social change campaigns. Although calls for "youth participation" have become more common in recent years, few researchers have studied the strategies that adult educators use to engage and empower novice youth participants. How do adults lend guidance while still supporting youth autonomy and voice? Drawing on two years of ethnographic fieldwork in three youth groups, this paper describes distinct strategies employed by adults: facilitation, apprenticeship, and joint work. Whereas "facilitation" created rich opportunities for collaborative decision-making with limited adult assistance, "apprenticeship" and "joint work" offered different ways for high school students to participate in campaigns with clear policy goals. Implications for supporting youth participation in policymaking will be discussed. February 16 David Driskell, Cornell University
The Promise and Pitfalls of Action Research with Children and Youth For the past ten years the Growing Up in Cities project has worked in a variety of contexts to develop and implement research initiatives focused on how young people (typically in the range of 10 to 15 years old) perceive, use and value the urban environment, and how they can be meaningful agents of change in their local communities. In doing so, many sites have explicitly adopted an 'action research' paradigm which places young participants as 'co-researchers' in the inquiry and evaluation process. This research paradigm presents a number of unique challenges as well as opportunities. We will begin with an overview of some of the epistemological foundations of action research, followed by an exploration of practical issues experienced in last summer's Growing Up in NYC project. March 7 Kathleen Man, Department of Film Studies
Sita, a Girl from Jambu April 4 Deborah Thomas, Darcy Varney, Laura Makar, and Amanda Gierow Department of Geography, UCD
Participatory Youth Research on Environmental Impacts in Northwest Denver: Challenges, Lessons Learned, and Successes
April 13 Greg Duncan, Northwestern University
New Hope: A policy success for working poor families and their children New Hope was designed to help working poor families by offering an income supplement that lifted them above the poverty line, subsidized health care and child care, and offered them a job when they couldn’t find one. New Hope was a social contract—not a welfare program—and participants were required to work at least 30 hours a week. If you work you should not be poor,” New Hope designers believed. With poverty rates on the rise and with lower-wage service sector jobs replacing manufacturing and other higher-paying jobs, that belief resonates even more today. In 2004, 5.7 million adults were working full-time but still living in poverty, affecting 6.8 million children. The designers knew well the history of many failed antipoverty policies. Therefore, they put their experiment to the test, hiring a group of leading researchers to evaluate its impact in the most scientific and rigorous way. The results are highly encouraging. Poverty rates declined dramatically. Employment and earnings increased among participants who were not initially working full-time. For those who had faced just one significant barrier to employment (such as a lack of access to child care or a spotty employment history), these gains lasted years. More medical needs were met. School performance improved, especially for boys. Behavior problems declined. Enrollment in child care centers increased. Participation in out-of-school activities increased. May 2 Lois Brink and Beverly Kingston Dept. of Landscape Architecture and Children, Youth and Environments Center, UCD The Effects of Elementary School Playground Renovations on the Physical Activity Levels of Children This presentation will focus on how the redevelopment of Denver inner-city elementary school playgrounds influences the physical activity levels of minority and low socioeconomic status children. A high quality outdoor environment is hypothesized to attract children outdoors and to provide a broad range of opportunities for physical activity. These hypotheses are tested utilizing a quasi-experimental design that compares three newly renovated playgrounds and three playgrounds that were renovated over four years ago, to three control sites. To identify the playground variables with the greatest impact on children's physical activity, design experts divided the playgrounds into activity areas based on area type, size, and existence of permanent improvements. Measures of children's physical activity were obtained before school, during recess, and after school hours through direct observation using SOPLAY (System for Observing Play and Leisure Activity in Youth), a validated and reliable method for measuring physical activity. Analyses test for significant differences between the renovated playgrounds and the matched control groups and assess which areas of the playground account for the highest levels of physical activity. Preliminary results show that changing the built environment by building new playgrounds may significantly increase children's physical activity levels. Results from this study have the potential to influence key decision-makers to direct capital improvement funds towards building school playground environments that increase children^s physical activity. This research was carried out in the Children, Youth and Environments Center at the University of Colorado with a grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation's Active Living Research program.
Fall 2005 Events
September 3-17 1610 Little Raven Street, Suite 125, Denver Streets of Hope: Images and Imaginings by Homeless Youth around the World The Children, Youth and Environments Center for Research and Design at the University of Colorado Denver celebrates its grand opening with an exhibit of photographs and drawings by young people living on the streets in North and South America, Europe, Africa, and Asia. Illustrating both the everyday realities confronted by insecurely housed children and their longed-for spaces of comfort, health and prosperity, the exhibit serves to spark discussions about how our society cares for its youth living in poverty. The exhibit features images of life on the streets from the perspectives of youth who participated in two international projects that resulted in the books, Home/Life: 121 Kids from 11 Cities Photograph Their World, published in 2002 by the Homeless World Foundation; and If I Had the Chance…Artwork from the Streets of Asia and the Pacific, published this year by the Asian Development Bank. When the 150 photographs from Home/Life went on display in Amsterdam, the exhibit attracted more than 36,000 visitors. Culled from 15,000 images by youth around the world, the photos powerfully depict the places, people and events that make life meaningful to young people living at the margins of society. If I Had the Chance … features drawings made by youth as part of the Asian Development Bank’s second annual Children’s Art Competition. ADB recently won two International Association of Business Communication awards for the book. The CYE Center is proud to bring both of these displays to PlatteForum Arts Organization, hailed by Westword as Denver’s “Best Art Gallery for Kids, 2004.”
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