Bøker i Child Development in Cultural Context-serien

Schools, as one form of complex organizational settings, are regulated by often invisible expectations, understandings, and values that comprise the culture of the institutions. This volume will extend the already substantial understanding of academic motivation by moving beyond important and well studied relational and personal variables to an examination of school culture and motivation. Prevailing normative expectations for students are constructed and guided bycultural values and shape student motivation and achievement in powerful ways. This value system, however, is often left invisible in motivational analyses. Chapters in this volume challenge the prevailing discourse that equates ethnic minority with culture and places the cultural assumptionsguiding schools outside the sphere of cultural inquiry.

Considering research, practice, and policies on opening pathways to overcome educational disparities, this book provides new quantitative and qualitative evidence to introduce a multi-level theory on how youth navigate across the cultural worlds of their families, schools, peers, and community programs to access academic opportunities.

This book explores Positive Youth Development (PYD) in Roma ethnic minority youth. Standing apart from current volumes, this book focuses on the Roma ethnic minority - one of the most marginalized and oppressed minority groups in Europe - and on strengths and resources for optimal well-being in the community. The international and multidisciplinary contributors to this book address the complexities of Roma life in a variety of cultural settings, exploring how keydevelopmental processes and person-context interactions can contribute to optimal and successful adaptation.