Apparent political apathy among youth in the United States has led to a moral panic about the future of democracy. Many researchers question the facts, while others seek to engage and mobilize young people around public issues they care about in order to master the citizen role and to bring social change. Civic youth work has its modern roots in this work. Its guiding ethos is authentic, meaningful, just, inclusive, and consequential youth involvement in everyday civic life through a small-group process, with the goal of supporting citizenship for young people as a life-long practice. Using their U.S. and international experience, the authors discuss civic youth work touchstones, promising practices, and activities. The text expands earlier notions of youth engagement by grounding them to a conception of the lived-citizen. A substantive bibliography lists the sources on the subject of civic youth work and provides links to scholarly work for researchers and practitioners to effectively support youth involvement in community, social, and political development.

The decreasing rate of involvement in organized groups and with voting by young people is a disturbing trend that perhaps can be turned around. Becoming Citizens: Deepening the Craft of Youth Civic Engagement brings together civic education, experiential education, and political theory to provide a revealing multiple-perspective examination of the new alternative way of practice in the youth work field called civic youth work. This helpful resource bridges the theory of civic engagement with education, ground both in extensive data, and then discuss various youth civic engagement initiatives that battle apathy and effectively invite expanded involvement by young people. This title examines three different youth civic engagement initiatives, Public Achievement (PA), Youth in Government (YIG), and Youth Science Center (YSC). The book then discusses the initiatives from various perspectives, including the academic perspectives of educational theory, political theory, theories of youth, and vocation. This unique source offers multiple points-of-view and is designed to enrich both the theoretical and practical for practitioners and scholars-and provides a revealing and useful look at the available sources. This book is a valuable resource for secondary social studies teachers; school district curriculum coordinators; youth workers; university faculty in political theory, democratic theory, youth studies, child and youth care, recreational studies, public health, education, and social work; youth and community organizers; and program directors and managers in community-based youth services. This book was published as a special issue of Child and Youth Services.

How can we better organize and support youth in their contribution to public life? Ross VeLure Roholt, Michael Baizerman, and Roudy W. Hildreth have developed this book to help practitioners and educators who work with youth look at young people in a framework that is qualitatively different. This book explores the idea of youth not only as a developmental stage but also as having a purposeful social role within civic life. This text presents co-creation as a form of direct youth work practice that invites youth to become actively involved in their communities as citizens, collaborating with youth workers to create and sustain safe spaces for civic engagement. The book's contributors show how adults who work with youth can promote a democratic environment where youth can discuss, engage, and act on issues that matter to them. This book provides concrete case studies of civic youth workers and participating youth creating spaces for the civic and political development of young people in places that lack a social expectation of young people contributing to public life. From developing strategies for conflict reduction in Africa to mending the religious divide in Northern Ireland, the examples describe how to coordinate, support, and manage programs and initiatives with young people that can effect positive change on a global scale.

Dawn and Sunset: Insight into the Mystery of the Early Mesopotamian Civilization is a fascinating and highly readable look at the emergence, blossom, and decline of the Sumerian civilization. Presented as a constellation of pristine urban communities that mushroomed in Southern Mesopotamia throughout the IV and III millennia BCE, the study of Sumerian society is an informative and applicable mode of insight into our own times. From both a geographical and historical context, the study of Sumerian civilization is rife with intriguing questions about language, agriculture, arts & crafts, foreign trade, government, laws, social classes, and warfare. Michael Baizerman grew-up in Moscow, Russia, and lived there for thirty-seven years before moving to Israel, where he works as a high-school English teacher. Mr. Baizerman is working on his next book, which will be about the discovery of India by Portuguese sailors. Publisher's website:http://sbpra.com/michaelbaizerman

The decreasing rate of involvement in organized groups and with voting by young people is a disturbing trend that perhaps can be turned around. Becoming Citizens: Deepening the Craft of Youth Civic Engagement brings together civic education, experiential education, and political theory to provide a revealing multiple-perspective examination of the new alternative way of practice in the youth work field called civic youth work. This helpful resource bridges the theory of civic engagement with education, ground both in extensive data, and then discuss various youth civic engagement initiatives that battle apathy and effectively invite expanded involvement by young people. This title examines three different youth civic engagement initiatives, Public Achievement (PA), Youth in Government (YIG), and Youth Science Center (YSC). The book then discusses the initiatives from various perspectives, including the academic perspectives of educational theory, political theory, theories of youth, and vocation. This unique source offers multiple points-of-view and is designed to enrich both the theoretical and practical for practitioners and scholars-and provides a revealing and useful look at the available sources. This book is a valuable resource for secondary social studies teachers; school district curriculum coordinators; youth workers; university faculty in political theory, democratic theory, youth studies, child and youth care, recreational studies, public health, education, and social work; youth and community organizers; and program directors and managers in community-based youth services. This book was published as a special issue of Child and Youth Services.