Prosocial development is considered foundational for youth civic engagement, yet associations between these two developmental domains is more complex and dynamic than typically recognized. This chapter examines theory and evidence linking prosociality and two main dimensions of civic engagement: civic helping and political engagement. Most research separately examines helping versus political engagement, given that different correlates and developmental processes are often evident. Positive youth development theory posits that adolescents’ caring and connections lead to civic contributions, and evidence lends support for bidirectional associations between civic helping and prosocial competencies. Youth political engagement is not as commonly studied in relation to prosocial development, but empathy combined with critical social analysis may support socially just political attitudes and actions, whereas other political attitudes are rooted in exclusion and inequality and antithetical to prosociality. Implications for theory, future research, and practice are also discussed.

Schools are essential sites for nurturing critical consciousness about race and racism with youth of color. Yet, limited research has taken up how critical race consciousness development can be carried out with a primarily white teaching force or about the classroom practices of white teachers who are motivated to do this work. Drawing on observational data collected over four years, this chapter describes and analyzes lessons taught by three white educators as they earnestly attempt to teach about race and racism. Ultimately, we conclude that these white teachers used meaningful, thoughtful, and rigorous curricula resources to support their students’ developing critical consciousness about race and racism, yet they encountered several pedagogical challenges that may be rooted in their socialization into whiteness. Our findings have implications for white teacher preparation and support and offer practical insights for white teachers who are actively seeking to foster critical race consciousness with their students.

Critical consciousness has been established conceptually and by research as an empowering tool that supports the development of youth facing social oppression. An evolving body of literature suggests that critical consciousness can also be helpful for undocumented immigrant youth, a group that is impacted by a history of racialized anti-immigrant policy that more harshly disadvantages people of color (e.g., Indigenous People, Latinx, Black, and Asian). This chapter summarizes the state of the science in the growing research examining how critical consciousness develops among undocumented youth, and the outcomes that it fosters in education, career development, and mental health. The chapter also draws on historical perspectives examining the development of critical consciousness among undocumented immigrants, including those who are beneficiaries of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA). The chapter ends with practice recommendations for individuals serving undocumented youth in education, social services, workforce, health, and mental health settings.

Although conceptual frameworks of critical consciousness development emphasize the importance of social contexts, a comprehensive understanding of how out-of-school time (OST) settings support critical consciousness development in youth of color is lacking. In this chapter, we draw on social justice youth development principles and current literature on OST programs to recast the “Big Three” model of effective OST programs to strengthen the model’s relevancy for both youth of color and critical consciousness. Organizing the evidence using this re-envisioned “Big Three” model, we review practices and principles of after-school programs, mentoring programs, and youth-adult relationships linked to critical consciousness development. Based on this review, we provide implications for practitioners, policy makers, and scholars to foster critical consciousness in youth of color through OST programs.

Despite growing interest in antiracism efforts, a dearth of theoretical and empirical work that examines how youth develop beliefs and actions that challenge racism, or develop a critical race consciousness (CRC), remains. In this chapter, we propose an integrative model that articulates the nature and dynamics of youth CRC, which includes racism analysis, racial reflexivity, and antiracism action. First, we describe the nature of racism in the United States and explain how this system serves as a developmental context for youth CRC. Second, we integrate several bodies of research across diverse fields of study (e.g., liberation psychology, developmental psychology, sociology, social work) that ground our model, followed by an in-depth discussion of the model. Then we discuss psychological processes and social contexts that may facilitate or hinder CRC praxis and development. We conclude with recommendations for future CRC research and practice that may stimulate this developmental process.

Critical consciousness theory suggests that engaging in social change behaviors is particularly important for the positive development and empowerment of youth of color. This literature has paid little attention to potential variations in critical consciousness development among youth of color with immigrant backgrounds. This chapter represents an effort to integrate acculturation and critical consciousness literatures to advance theory and improve our understanding of what promotes or hinders the critical consciousness development and liberation of immigrant youth of color. A focus of this chapter is on youths’ sense of social responsibility, or sense of duty to the systems within which they are embedded. We explore ways in which this sense of responsibility influences and is influenced by immigration phenomena, such as the immigrant bargain and the immigrant optimism hypothesis, which first emerge within families and might later transfer to more distal systems. We offer recommendations for further integration of these literatures.

This chapter presents school-based action civics interventions as a setting for critical consciousness (CC) development. Action civics programs guide students to take collective action to address locally relevant civic issues within a context that promotes reflection and skills development. We highlight one action civics program, Generation Citizen (GC), and overlay programmatic components with the core elements of CC to elucidate how action civics may support CC development and where the constraints may be. The features of GC that we propose align with CC development are: placing action at the center of the program; fostering critical social analysis and reflection; valuing children’s right to participation; and focusing on skill-building. Images of youth-generated action civics presentation posters are used to illustrate aspects of CC. Finally, this chapter offers next steps to bridge across CC and action civics theory, research, and practice.

Critical action – action to dismantle oppression and seek justice – is often motivated by and in response to being subjected to racism. Indeed, critical action can be an adaptive coping response to racism, such that critical action might reduce the negative impacts of racism on the individual. Further, the goal of critical action, at its core, is to eliminate racism and its coconspiring forms of oppression, eradicating the root source of harm to marginalized individuals and communities. In this chapter, we provide an overview of current research that has examined how racism is related to critical action for racially marginalized youth. We consider racism as a system of oppression that manifests through culture, institutions, and individuals, along with stress responses to racism. We then provide recommendations for future research and practice to extend our understanding of if, when, and how experiencing racism motivates or detracts from youth critical action.

Research has established critical consciousness (CC) as an important developmental competency, yet less is known about how to promote it, particularly for privileged youth. Service-learning experiences hold promise as context of CC development, but more research is needed to understand if they foster CC, for whom, and under what circumstances. This study examines the development of CC within what we term a critical service learning experience: the Resilience, Opportunity, Safety, Education, and Strength (ROSES) advocacy program. We connect specific features of this experience to expected growth in CC components among a group of educationally privileged university students serving as advocates for juvenile legal system-impacted girls. We delineate how engagement with ROSES is likely to influence critical consciousness among advocates themselves, then leverage exploratory data from advocates to empirically examine changes in CC over the course of ROSES. We examine changes in advocates’ interpersonal skills, critical reflection, critical motivation, and critical action as a result of participation in ROSES. We discuss patterns in these findings and examine how key characteristics of advocacy intervention implementation influenced skill development. We end by theorizing further on mechanisms of change in CC due to ROSES program participation and other service learning experiences.

Critical consciousness (CC) is a key tool for combatting injustice and has been associated with positive developmental outcomes for youth of color. Thus, it is crucial to identify the kinds of activities and settings that can facilitate youth’s CC. A small body of scholarship suggests that participation in social justice art (art that intentionally engages youth in addressing social injustice) can effectively build youth’s CC. Additionally, general art (art that does not intentionally address social injustice) has been associated with increased CC as well. However, further research is needed to understand how engagement in these two kinds of arts participation relate to each CC component, and whether certain art modalities (for example, music and dance) are more conducive to youth’s CC than others. A sample of 1,469 high school youth of color were included in this secondary analysis of data from the Stanford Civic Purpose Project (Damon, 2011–2013). Results from structural equation modeling suggest that different kinds of arts participation and modalities associate with CC in nuanced ways, revealing complexities in the relationship between arts programming and CC among youth of color. Findings point to the need to integrate a social justice focus into more traditional arts programming, with implications for youth’s engagement in the arts within school and out-of-school time settings.

Design Your Neighborhood (DYN) is a place-based action civics curriculum that teaches urban design as a tool for increasing civic participation among youth. The DYN curriculum consists of six-week cross-curricular units for seventh and eighth grade that address local urban design issues that have exacerbated inequality in a rapidly growing southeastern US city. This chapter presents findings related to critical consciousness collected from an ongoing longitudinal, quasi-experimental, mixed-methods study of DYN. Quantitative data includes two measures of critical consciousness collected from treatment and control groups at two timepoints. Qualitative data comes from focus groups with students who completed the curriculum. Although qualitative findings suggest students’ critical consciousness increased after engaging with DYN, descriptive and inferential analysis of quantitative data indicate variation in student outcomes related to critical consciousness. These findings suggest pathways for place-based action civics to better support students’ development of critical motivation and critical action in and out of the classroom.

This chapter applies critical consciousness and identity-based motivation theories to understand youth of color’s psychological experiences in the face of oppression and the processes by which they can negotiate and challenge their conditions. Critical consciousness and identity-based motivation theories explicate how inequality shapes psychological processes and how these processes can either perpetuate or serve to challenge inequality. We also draw on the framework of racial capitalism – which posits that contemporary global capitalism emerged out of racial hierarchy – to contextualize the barriers youth of color traverse in their pursuit of social mobility. A racial capitalism analysis highlights the injustices youth of color contend with. We first provide overviews of the context of racial capitalism, identity-based motivation, and critical consciousness independently, and then we highlight the overlap between identity-based motivation and critical consciousness within the context of US racial capitalism. This synthesis helps to clarify how youth experience and navigate injustice by leveraging insights from both identity-based motivation and critical consciousness to illuminate the mechanisms that either thwart or promote their healthy development.

The purpose of this project was to develop a brief, integrated measure that combines two previously published critical consciousness (CC) measures; the Contemporary Critical Consciousness Measure (CCCM (Shin et al., 2016) and CCCMII (Shin et al., 2018). This new measure is intended to assess awareness and attitudes related to various systemic, institutionalized forms of discrimination. Data from 475 participants provided initial reliability evidence for the Contemporary Critical Consciousness Measure-S (CCCM-S). Results from exploratory factor analyses suggest that the final 24-item CCCM-S provides a general index of CC as well as assesses CC specifically associated with racism, classism, heterosexism, ableism, and sexism/cis-sexism. Results support the internal consistency and factor structure of the measure. Future directions for research, training, and counseling implications are discussed.

In this chapter, we review the quantitative measurement of critical consciousness that has emerged within developmental and applied research over the last few decades. We provide a brief history and offer an overview of the current status of critical consciousness measurement. We also introduce four “phases” of critical consciousness measurement, which we refer to as (1) proxy measurement; (2) scale development; (3) scale expansion and (re)specification; and (4) scale refinement and adaptation. Due to their central role in critical consciousness measurement, we pay particular attention to instruments appearing in phase two, the scale development phase. After summarizing each phase, we identify opportunities for advancement and innovation in critical consciousness measurement and point to important new directions for measurement work in this area of scholarship – many of which are addressed more extensively in subsequent chapters of this volume.

Developmental scientists stress the importance of exploring relational processes and contexts in association with critical consciousness (CC) development. Such inquiries are critical as the social relationships within a setting can impact a young person’s ability to exercise power and have direct implications for access to valued resources. Social network analysis (SNA) offers a developmentally inclusive lens for understanding the interactions between individual behaviors and setting-level contexts by identifying patterns of relationships among sets of actors within a system. In this chapter, we describe how SNA can help us operationalize children’s and adolescents’ understanding of power dynamics within everyday proximal settings. Specifically, we highlight the potential of SNA to quantify early developmental understandings and savviness in assessing multiple components of CC. In other words, measures of SNA at the individual, dyadic, and setting-level act as precursors that can be used to engage in CC before a fuller analysis of larger social conditions emerges developmentally.

The public education provided to nonwhite youth in urban communities is a central social justice issue contributing to racial inequity in the United States. Significant disproportionality exists between urban and suburban education, causing urban minority youth to become disengaged from schooling that does not adequately serve their needs. Youth participatory action research (YPAR), a strategy through which youth act as co-researchers alongside professional researchers and community members investigating social justice issues, can help to reengage urban youth in their education by creating conditions around which youth want to learn. This chapter introduces YPAR as a mechanism through which urban education can be more tailored to the unique experiences of urban minority youth. A case study is provided that illustrates how YPAR youth participants grow more conscious of social justice issues facing them and their community, while also developing their sense of agency relative to being able to confront these issues action. Additionally, this case study explores how future urban educators can adopt YPAR practices and principles to develop a more culturally responsive pedagogy. Suggestions for YPAR facilitation are given, while specific challenges are discussed that must be met when attempting the implementation of YPAR.