Search results for ""Author Jerome Beker""

In this readable book, Zvi Levy, Hadassim’s Director, provides a careful account of how, over time, he and others have shaped a community to foster health, identity, and competence in distressed young people. Canadian WIZO (Women’s International Zionist Organization) Hadassim is a thriving youth village in Israel that is home for 500 young people and a day educational program for an additional 1,000. Negotiating Positive Identity in a Residential Group Care Community illustrates the organizational expression of a developmental idea, in this case Erik Erikson’s identity development theory, to show how an environment can be created to cope with disrupted development processes among children and adolescents. The book describes an ongoing experiment that started fifteen years ago and has since been recognized as an outstanding success. The basic information and ideas expressed by Levy can be used to improve the effectiveness of any framework through which adolescents pass during the stages of development, including schools, community centers, and normal families. Some of the main topics discussed in this volume are: principles for running a multicultural facility organization of the daily life of a large residential setting major parameters in a residential setting as derived from the theories of Erik Erikson on adolescence as a developmental stage comprehensive care for youth in transition and adolescents suffering from aggravated identity crisesAll child and youth care workers and program administrators can learn much from Levy’s account of Hadassim. Negotiating Positive Identity in a Residential Group Care Community will be disturbing to many who adhere to the current tenets of good management and child care practice; readers need to be prepared to have many assumptions and beliefs challenged. The book emphasizes the distress of immigrant and troubled urban youth as an aggravated identity crisis, the cause of which needs to be treated before the symptom. This volume is of interest to theoreticians, practitioners, and policymakers in the fields of education, child and youth care, and developmental psychology, as well as scholars in Erikson’s theories. It is also useful in courses which study education in Israel or that seek solutions to problems such as homeless youth in the Third World.Negotiating Positive Identity in a Residential Group Care Community stresses that: The answer to deprivation is not the provision of efficient services, but an environment and an approach that encourages adolescents to see themselves as active participants and not as patients or passive inmates. Residential settings for children and adolescents can successfully handle large numbers and, in fact, larger numbers can offer some definite advantages. The best way to help children develop into autonomous adults is to give them responsibility for their own choices within the framework of a goal-oriented community.

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Residential Education as an Option for At-Risk Youth explores recent residential programs in Israel, draws comparisons with their European counterparts, and recommends practical approaches for the revitalization of such programs in the United States. This volume refutes the conventional professional “wisdom” in the United States that residential group care programs for children and youth are intrinsically flawed and counterproductive. Instead, it delivers effective models for the implementation of effective residential services. The editors and authors demonstrate the growing need for residential programs, given the overburdened family foster care resources, swelling numbers of “zero-parent” families, and homeless youth. Though the United States helped launch and develop residential services in Europe in the aftermath of World War II and has produced many excellent thinkers in the domain of quality residential group care, American programs have languished in recent decades. This book is designed to accelerate and facilitate progress in revamping and establishing excellent residential group care. The authors examine residential education as a developmentally based alternative to the more clinically and correctionally oriented programs for marginal children and youth dominating this field in the United States.The authors present their material in the context of appropriate theoretical principles, yet in practical ways that will permit program developers and managers to implement it effectively. Some of the specific areas chapters discuss are: exemplary Israeli programs as observed by visiting American professional in social work and allied fields important program variables and the cultural influences that may affect them African American experience for such programs a conceptual model for building successful residential education programs key organizational and management considerationsResidential Education as an Option for At-Risk Youth serves as a vital resource for ambitious program developers and managers wishing to reconceptualize and enrich their programs. It will also benefit advanced students, practitioners, and decision makers who have had, heretofore, few resources to rely on when seeking to promote more effective programs for socially marginal children and youth.

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Helping Delinquents Change sets before itself a formidable task--that of removing the mystery from the understanding of delinquent behavior. Jerome Stumphauzer offers direct, useful means to work toward altering delinquent behavior. Abandoning an orientation to delinquency that focuses on punishment or medical models, Stumphauzer presents a view of delinquency that emphasizes the learning of adaptive, prosocial behavior, and provides to the youths themselves an opportunity to become engaged in selecting their own goals and methods for changing their behavior. The nondelinquent is presented as an example from whom to learn. The text is nontechnical and useful for students and practitioners alike. The book in intended expressly for those who work directly with delinquents--counselors, teachers, therapists, probation officers, those working in junvenile corrections, and for students of delinquent behavior in psychology, sociology, criminology, and education. Tables, diagrams, references, and indices supplement the text. Helping Delinquents Change is available for classroom adoption. Undergraduate and graduate students in criminology, psychology, counseling, education, and sociology are the primary audience. The book is particularly well-suited as a training manual or supplementary text and an instructor’s manual is included.

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