Abstract
Within US public school ecologies, roughly 45 million children spend a 12-year, full-time, government-mandated interaction with other children and adults as well as legal-, legislative-, and social-systemic factors that potently influence their developmental trajectories. Further, American children are developing in local contexts at the intersection of regional, ethnic, racial, religious, political, economic, and linguistic diversity. Therefore, any attempts to implement evidence-based programs to promote psychological well-being in schools must take into account the great diversity of American children, families, and communities. Our aim is not to tell a broad strokes story of “America’s children,” but rather to situate a specific group of New Orleans elementary school students’ perspectives on risk, protection, and well-being in both a broad, US context and their unique, culture-specific context. Through student focus groups and ecomap drawings and stories, a catalogue of risk factors, protective factors, valued competencies, and children’s responses to stress and support emerged unique to this New Orleans population of students. An insight from these data was that even young participants were quite attuned to, and could make explicit, the norms, values, and expectations that the adults in their environments hold for them. The results are presented and discussed not only in their potential to understand avenues for psychological well-being promotion, prevention, and intervention at the local level but also as a critique about children’s perspectives on risk, support, and values vis-à-vis macrosystem legislation and standard practices in American education.
Keywords
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- 1.
The racial constructs of white and black are used as alternatives to ethnic constructs that may incorrectly infer identity (e.g., African American, Cuban American, etc.).
- 2.
This chapter is organized according to the levels of ecological systems theory (see Chap. 2) and proceeds from the most distal (i.e., chrono-, macro-system) to the most proximal (meso-, micro-system).
- 3.
In the USA, college graduates who have not been trained in a teacher education program within a university setting may be certified via alternate routes, such as state and national organizations. Typically, alternate route certification involves an intensive, 5-week training in pedagogy and student teaching, followed by a year of continued coursework and coaching. After this full year, they may qualify for full teaching certification.
- 4.
Michael Cunningham, PhD, is a professor of psychology at Tulane University, with a specialization in developmental psychology.
- 5.
“Whoop” is a local term akin to spanking. It typically involves hitting a child either with the hand or with an instrument (e.g., a belt).
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Bell, P., Verlenden, J., Swift, A., Henderson, H., Nastasi, B. (2016). Emic Perspectives of Risk and Support: Voices from Lower Elementary Students in New Orleans, Louisiana, USA. In: Nastasi, B., Borja, A. (eds) International Handbook of Psychological Well-Being in Children and Adolescents. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4939-2833-0_16
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