| In the existing literature of the positive youth development, tributes are often given to the "adults", who are the program designers, frontline implementers and program trainers. However, students' voices are often excluded from the initial planning and ongoing program assessments of the positive youth development programs. The present study intends to articulate youth's voice in their learning journeys in the local positive youth development program and investigates how their learning "sparks" assist them to thrive along their life growth pathways, especially in times of life critical events.;Among the youth programs implemented in Hong Kong, the Tier 1 program of the Project P.A.T.H.S. ("Positive Adolescent Training through Holistic Social Programs") is the purposive choice as the platform for discussion of the present study. Two focus groups compiling 20 students from Secondary 6 and Secondary 7 were conducted as the preliminary data collection process. Six purposive participants from the focus groups were invited for the in-depth interviews. Conversational partnership in Responsive Interviewing is adopted as the key research strategy and method of data analysis in order to maintain the equal partnership between the adult interviewer and the adolescent participant. The data collected were analyzed according to descriptive coding and analytic coding in thematic analysis. As a result of the coding procedure, the adolescent participants evolved their learning by linking the "there-and-past learnt knowledge" in their junior secondary school years to the here-and-now application when they encounter critical life events. The "sparks" were discussed with learning concepts and theories, which is a novice attempt in discussing the learning happened in positive youth development programs.;This research study is significant in both the theoretical and practical sense. The present study is the first qualitative research focusing on students' post-program development. The integration of the learning conceptions with positive youth development program is advocated in the present study. Novice ideas of "relational knowledge" and "Gestalt view of learning" are introduced to indicate the teachable, learnable and sustainable features of student-teacher relationships. On the practical level, the findings---meaningful engagements with the adults in the learning process---of the present study can serve as the rationale to sustain school-based youth development curricula. With the ideation of "pedagogy of relationships", it is also hoped that the teacher educators would adopt this "pedagogy of relationships" into their training elements to "challenge" the deep-rooted "side-dish-belief" of the pre-service and in-service teachers. This visionary "owned" thought lets frontline youth workers, especially teachers, value every opportunity for our youth to explore their growth in an accepted environment. Implications for further studies are also recommended and discussed in the thesis to conclude the whole research. |
