Abstract
Youth development researchers and practitioners have the common goal of understanding and enhancing the positive development of all young people. The work of Professors Mary Arnold and Ryan Gagnon on the 4-H Thriving Model provides a creative and richly theoretically and empirically informed vision for promoting positive youth development (PYD) through integrating youth development research and practice. Their vision is an exemplar of how theoretically predicated and cutting-edge developmental science and the enactment of youth programs can be mutually informative. Drawing on the theory, research, and ideas for program design encompassed within the Science of Learning and Development (SoLD) Alliance, which applies developmental scholarship that integrates research from multiple disciplines and underscores the malleability, agency, and specificity of mutually influential coactions between youth and their contexts, Professors Arnold and Gagnon illustrate the features of researchópractice integration that must be enacted for innovative progress in programs aimed at enhancing youth thriving. The compelling roadmap for promoting PYD through the integrations framed by the 4-H Thriving Model will advance youth development practice, developmental science theory and research and, most important, the lives of the diverse young people of our nation.
Highlights
The work of Professors Mary Arnold and Ryan Gagnon on the 4-H Thriving Model continues to give inspiring voice to the importance of creating a bridge between developmental science theory, methodology, and research and program practices in both 4-H and in the youth development sector more generally
The present article is an invited commentary on Professors Arnold and Gagnon’s (2020) most recent presentation of the 4-H Thriving Model, which is an exemplar of their important and timely scholarship. It is both a pleasure and an honor to have been asked to provide my thoughts about the work of these colleagues, especially because their article is marked by the inclusion of several sections (e.g., “Further Research: What Works for Whom under What Conditions?”; p. 14) that provide a compelling roadmap for instantiating a major emphasis in their scholarship, an emphasis that is a foundational feature of contemporary developmental science, that is research practice integration in the service of enhancing thriving among all young people
I focus on this defining feature of the conceptual frame used by Professors Arnold and Gagnon because I think their vision for the evolution of the 4-H Thriving Model to occur in relation to the work of Science of Learning and Development (SoLD) is of utmost importance for both developmental science per se and for the translation of developmental science into specific practices in 4-H programs
Summary
The work of Professors Mary Arnold and Ryan Gagnon on the 4-H Thriving Model continues to give inspiring voice to the importance of creating a bridge between developmental science theory, methodology, and research and program practices in both 4-H and in the youth development sector more generally. I focus on this defining feature of the conceptual frame used by Professors Arnold and Gagnon because I think their vision for the evolution of the 4-H Thriving Model to occur in relation to the work of SoLD is of utmost importance for both developmental science per se and for the translation of developmental science into specific practices in 4-H programs.
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