Youth, Education and Wellbeing in the Americas

This book explores ways in which education supports or negates the wellbeing and rights of young people in or from the Americas. It shows how young people diagnose problems and propose important new directions for education. A collective chronicle from researchers working alongside young people in Chile, Dominican Republic, Guatemala, Honduras, Trinidad and Tobago, Jamaica, and the Caribbean and Latin American diaspora in Canada, the authors embrace the work in terms of justice: intergenerational, racial, cultural and ecological with/by/for various groups of young people.

This book delves into the wide gap between the expressed rights of young people in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child and the ways in which education operates. In so doing, it examines the entrenched colonial legacies which persist, including systemic racism, flabby curriculum, hyper-surveillance and broken promises for care and human relationships needed to support youth. The resourceful young people shown here - who identify as Latin American, Black, Indigenous and/or diasporic - are diagnosing and negotiating these injustices in revolutionary moves for education. Teachers, parents, communities and youth themselves could learn from these critical, transformative and anticolonial youthful pedagogies for being with education.

This book will appeal to scholars, students, policymakers and practitioners in the areas of youth studies, education, social justice, sociology, human rights, wellbeing and social work.

Kate C. Tilleczek is a grandmother, educator, and Canada Research Chair in Youth, Education & Global Good at York University. She is full professor and director of the Young Lives Research Laboratory, which she founded in 2009 as a unique intergenerational space within and beyond the university to understand, investigate, support and amplify work with/by/for young people and their various communities as they navigate new challenges to their education and wellbeing (such as intersecting systemic injustices, problems of digital technology and ecological degradation). Her newest project, Partnership for Youth and Planetary Wellbeing, builds upon lessons learned in this book as well as previous projects and writings.

Deborah MacDonald is a new mother and the senior research associate and manager of Dr. Kate C. Tilleczek’s Young Lives Research Lab at York University, where she supports Professor Tilleczek’s vast body of work and partnerships all around the world. Investigating and learning with and from youth and their communities, she explores interrelated aspects of education, wellbeing, digital technology and planetary health with/by/for young people.