Improving Teenage Awareness of Healthy Behavior by Mapping Adolescent Programming and Measurement (MAPM) Framework

The improvement of healthy behavior awareness of teenagers is still a serious concern. There are three major problems in teenage: sexuality, drugs, and addictive substance and sexually transmitted diseases, especially HIV and AIDS. Among steps that can be taken to build teenage awareness to have healthy behavior is by applying Mapping Adolescent Programming and Measurement (MAPM) Framework. The objective of the research is to build an MAPM Framework model and obtaining a description of its effectiveness as an effort to improve teenage awareness of healthy behavior. The research conducted at Walisongo Kedungwuni Islamic Junior High School. Samples are students that have problem as mapped and measured from MAPM. A non-randomized one group pre-test- post-test design was implemented in this study. The results indicate that attitude towards counseling, cigarette, juvenile delinquency, smoking attitude, attitude towards drugs, and premarital sex after the application of the MAPM positively changed (p-value <0,05). The attitude and behavior of students were improved. Teenage awareness of healthy behavior significantly increases (p value= 0,000) after the application of the MAPM framework. Further discussion will be discussed in the article below.

A Queer Sequence: Comics as a Disruptive Medium

At first glance, Hillary Chute's Why Comics? presents itself as a chronicle of the heroic deeds of a Pantheon of creative gods. Across ten chapters, Chute tracks the aesthetic achievements of more than twelve world-renowned comics artists whose innovations in sequential visual art represent a range of human experiences, from wartime violence to teenage sexuality to queer family history to living with cognitive and physical disability. In Chute's narrative, such luminaries as Alison Bechdel, Art Spiegelman, Daniel Clowes, Joe Sacco, Lynda Barry, and Marjane Satrapi rise up from the vast landscape of comics production as artists whose bodies of work testify to comics's aesthetic diversity and sophistication. These typically erudite cartoonists work at a distance from mainstream comics and produce adult-oriented, long-form graphic narratives considered aesthetic masterpieces. “Although comics of all kinds are flourishing in the twenty-first century,” Chute explains early on in Why Comics?, “there has been a dramatic uptick” in the kind of “auteurist comics” produced by these cartoonists (18), who relish, in Clowes's words, the way the medium allows them to “control absolutely everything and make it … exactly what you're seeing in your own head” (qtd. in Why? 18). For Chute, it is this “singular intimacy of one person's vision”—best displayed in comics produced by sophisticated adult cartoonists writing and drawing for other adults–that underscores that comics are also for grown-ups (18). By now, we all should know this, but we have not learned the lesson well enough (or perhaps some just refuse to listen).

Growing Up Queer

Growing Up Queer explores what it is like being young and lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and/or queer (LGBTQ) in the United States today. Using interviews and ethnographic research conducted at an LGBTQ youth drop-in center, it shows how young people understand their sexual and gender identities, their interest in queer media, and the role that family plays in their lives. The young people who participated in this research are among the first generation to embrace queer identities as kids and teens, and Growing Up Queer shows how both sexual and gender identities are formed through complicated, ambivalent processes, as opposed to the natural characteristics one is born with. In addition to showing how youth understand their identities, Growing Up Queer describes how young people navigate queerness within a culture in which being gay is the “new normal.” Using Sara Ahmed’s concept of queer orientation, it argues that being queer is not just about one’s sexual and/or gender identity but is also understood through intersecting identities including race, class, ability, and more. By showing how society accepts some kinds of LGBTQ-identified people while rejecting others, Growing Up Queer provides evidence of queerness as a site of social inequality. The book moves beyond an oversimplified examination of teenage sexuality and shows, through the voices of young people themselves, the exciting yet complicated terrain of queer adolescence.

Parents and Community Leaders' Perceptions of Teenage Pregnancy: A Qualitative Study

The purpose of this qualitative study was to understand the perceptions and experiences of parents and community leaders of two communities in Nigeria regarding teenage pregnancy and their understanding of teenage sexuality and contraception. In addition, the study set out to ascertain whether teenage pregnancy prevention programmes were available within the communities. The study was qualitative, contextual and exploratory utilising the Community-as-Partner Model. Eighty participants who were parents and community leaders responded to the semi-structured interview and completed a questionnaire on demographic data. Tesch’s approach of data analysis was used, and descriptive statistics were used to display demographic data as well as the count of data segments that constitute categories. The findings reveal that although limited teenage pregnancy prevention initiatives were in existence, most of the participants, especially those from the North Central (NC) region of Nigeria, were not informed about them. Almost half of the participants viewed teenage pregnancy as a common occurrence in their communities of which most were from the NC region. More than two-thirds of the participants discouraged teenagers from using contraceptives. Teenage pregnancy intervention programmes and strategies must be sensitive to differences among various ethnic and religious groups. The involvement of religious and community leaders in teenage pregnancy intervention programmes and initiatives is indispensable in curtailing the high incidence of teenage pregnancies and childbirths among teenagers.

The Orange Chair

After a lengthy correspondence beginning in September 1933 when twenty-one-year-old Pamela Hansford Johnson wrote to nineteen-year-old Dylan Thomas to congratulate him on winning a poetry prize, they finally met in the summer of 1934. When Thomas moved to London and gained fame as a promising young poet and his romantic involvement with Johnson ended, she followed his advice and turned from writing verse to writing fiction. His critiques of her poems were serious and stringent and they convinced her that she could never become a poet. Her first novel, This Bed Thy Centre, was greeted with shocked dismay since it dealt frankly with teenage sexuality and was set in a dingy South London neighbourhood.

Theory/praxis confusion within Irish Liberalism: The curious case of teenage sexuality

The contention that non-procreational sex is inherently sinful is a basic tenet of Catholic teaching. From a secular liberal perspective this proposition is inverted. Yet, despite this ideological clash, in 21st century Ireland there exists a unique convergence of views between members of these opposing ideologies when answering the questions as to whether teenagers under 17 should be allowed to control their sexuality and whether it is right to conceive of female teenagers under 17 as less autonomous and less sexual than their male counterparts. Utilizing an ideal type ‘Irish secular liberal’ construction, this article, deploying insights from the Foucauldian framework, problematizes the secular liberal response to a series of related issues revolving around the rights of Irish teenagers to control their sexuality. It argues that the Irish secular liberal regulation of teenage sexuality by reference to the cognitive ability/sexual autonomy discourse is not the product of a reflexive concern with the psychological harm that may ensue if underage teenagers engage in sexual relations. Rather, it advances the theory that such surveillance, both internal and external, is primarily a means through which the responsible heteronormative adult subject position is produced and governed.