Past Projects

Mostly just as an archive, this page offers summaries of most of the major projects I’ve undertaken related to my scholarly work. Though there have been lots and lots of smaller projects along the way, as of 2020-ish the major projects (in reverse chronological order) include:

• Field research exploring the role of extracurricular activities in youth development at Kilimanjaro Region secondary schools as part of a Fulbright scholar grant to Tanzania.
• Educational research on extracurricular activities and youth development in the US, including as part of a NAE / Spencer Post-Doctoral Fellowship, involving a mix of statistical analysis and field research (in one longer project focusing on one high-income and one low-income high school in the Portland area).
• Serving as an editor and author for four editions of Taking Sides: Clashing Views in Lifespan Development
• Comparative cultural research for my dissertation looking at youth development, along with play, games, and sports, in Chicago public housing communities and Angolan refugee camps.
• Long ago work as an education specialist at the Malawi Institute of Education as a Peace Corps volunteer, developing currricular materials and training coaches and teachers.

At the very end, just for fun, I’m going to mix in a few bits of my previous soccer life. At the time it wasn’t anything like a scholarly project, but when I look back it (particularly when drafting an academic book on soccer during the 2019-2020 academic year) it set the stage.

School Activities, Sports, and Youth Development in Tanzania:

I had the great fortune of spending most of the 2019-2020 academic year as on a teaching and research Fulbright grant at Mwenge Catholic University in Moshi Tanzania — right on the slopes of Mt. Kilimanjaro. I also had the great misfortune of having that experience cut short by the COVID-19 pandemic. Fulbright told us we needed to go back to the US about 3 months earlier than planned — but we still got in a good 8 months!

While it was an enriching experience in many different ways, the opportunity to learn about extracurricular activities in Kilimanjaro Region secondary schools was the fruition of a long-standing interest in how youth development projects in sub-Saharan Africa might build on existing infrastructure. In collaboration with scholars from Mwenge, we were able do observations, interviews, and some surveys at a range of secondary schools with a robust extracurriculum — ranging from sports programs to arts programs to environmental clubs and debate. The lay-out felt very “glocal” (hybridizing global forms with local meanings), and I have bunch of articles “in process” that I hope to publish in the next few years.

School Activities, Sports, and Youth Development in the US: 

I was very lucky to receive an NAE / Spencer Foundation post-doctoral fellowship to undertake field research on extracurricular activities in different social class communities between 2008 and 2010. I was able to involve a number of UP students in this work, and it has informed my thinking on extracurriculars and youth development greatly through the years. The most representative publication from that work is: Guest, A. M. (2018). The social organization of extracurricular activities: Interpreting developmental meanings in contrasting high schools. Qualitative Psychology, 5(1), 41-58.

At other points in the past I’ve also done statistical analysis of large data sets addressing the developmental role of extracurricular participation. This includes work with my UP colleague Nick McRee [Guest, A.M. & McRee, N. (2009). “A School-Level Analysis of Adolescent Extracurricular Activity, Delinquency, and Depression: The Importance of Situational Context.” Journal of Youth and Adolescence. 38: 51-62. (Published online here)], along with work during 2000-2003 at the National Opinion Research Center in Chicago with the Sloan Study of Youth and Social Development (under the supervision of Dr. Barbara Schneider). One result of this work was what will probably go down in Google Scholar history as my single most cited paper: Guest, A. and Schneider, B. (2003). “Adolescents’ Extracurricular Participation in Context: The Mediating Effects of Schools, Communities, and Identity.” Sociology of Education 76: 89-109.

Taking Sides: Clashing Views in Lifespan Development

In my early years as a faculty member I spent significant time on putting together a book for McGraw Hill’s Taking Sides series. I ended that work after four editions, one just about every two years. At that point it felt too hard to find legitimate and readable academic articles for which we could get permissions (as everything moved on-line). It was, however, a fun project while it lasted.

Each book is a compilation of around 20 issues relevant to the study of lifespan development. For each of the around 20 issues, which are divided up according to chronological stages in the lifespan, I found two recent articles addressing opposing sides of a controversial issue (some of the issues and articles overlap editions, but many are updated), edited the articles for length, wrote introductions and post-scripts for each issue, wrote general introduction to the material, and wrote an instructor’s resource guide. It was worthwhile as a periodic chance to stay reasonably up-to-date with the field and to think carefully about what types of material best engages students, though it was also challenging to work under a big textbook publisher.

Childhood and Play in Challenging Places: Chicago / Angola

The first major research project of my academic life was my comparative cultural research with children in a Chicago public housing community and a community of Angolan refugee camps (the picture below is my trusty Angolan research assistant Noe Matteus administering surveys in Angola). It started as a dissertation, but turned into a font of data that I have mined for somewhere around a decade. Some of the output includes:

Guest, A.M. (2014). “You Traded Your Mother for an Unripe Mango”: Playing with Insults in an Angolan Refugee Community.” Journal of Folklore Research. (click here for a link to the journal site; also note that an excerpt from this was  published in the ‘Readings’ section of the July 2014 issue of Harper’s Magazine and can be accessed with a subscription here.)

Guest, A.M. (2011 online first; 2013 in print). “Cultures of Play During Middle Childhood: Interpretive Perspectives from Two Distinct Marginalized Communities.” Sport, Education, and Society. (available online here)

Guest, A.M. (2009). “The diffusion of development-through-sport: analysing the history and practice of the Olympic Movement’s grassroots outreach to Africa.” Sport in Society (available online here)

Guest, A.M. (2008). “Reconsidering Teamwork: Popular and Local Meanings for a Common Ideal Associated with Positive Youth Development.” Youth & Society. 39 (3): 340-361. (Click here for a pre-print)

Guest, A.M. (2007). “Cultures of Childhood and Psychosocial Characteristics: Self-Esteem and Social Comparison in Two Distinct Communities.” Ethos: Journal of the Society for Psychological Anthropology. 35: 1-32. (Click here for a pdf copy of this article)

Education and Sports in Malawi:

Long ago (during 1996-1998), even before I really started my academic life, I worked at the Malawi Institute of Education through the auspices of the US Peace Corps in the Republic of Malawi in south-east Africa. During that time I worked to develop curriculum materials to the national school system. Much of my time was spent on teacher guides produced in collaboration with Malawian colleagues. Unfortunately, these books were supposed to be published after I left the country, and I was never able to get copies. But I was assured they were available as: Chado, W.J., Chisale, W.R.S, Guest, A.M., Kainga, G.H., Sibakwe, B.A.M. & Tembo, M.J. (1998). Malawi Primary Education Physical Education: Teachers’ Guides for Standard 6-8.

In addition to the teacher guides, I wrote a coaching guidebook for use in schools. The book was published locally as part of the Malawi Institute for Education Professional Development Series, with help from the Malawi School Support Systems Programme and TALULAR: Ideas & Innovations for Education. Several thousand copies were distributed to teacher resource centers throughout the country: Guest, A.M. (1998). Coaching School and Youth Football [soccer] in Malawi. Domasi, Malawi: Malawi Institute of Education.

I wrote two other articles based on my experiences with education in Malawi, one for a Malawian publication, and one for a special issue of Educational Leadership (Journal of the American Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development) on “What is Basic in Education:”

Guest, A.M. (1998). “What’s Essential in a New Democracy?” Educational Leadership 55, 6: 83-85.

Guest, A.M. (1997). “The Teaching of Physical Education in Malawi Schools.” Education for the Child (Malawi) Nov. 1997: 28-29.

Finally, while in Malawi I engaged in a participant-observation study of a competitive soccer team that played in the Malawian “Super League.” I played with and helped to coach the team, kept field notes, and did extensive interviews with team members at the end of the season. Several years later, at the end of my first year in Chicago, I replicated the interviews with members of a competitive college team (for which I was an assistant coach). An article based on these interviews and comparisons between the two teams was published (for better or worse) in the peer-reviewed journal Athletic Insight: The Online Journal of Sport Psychology: Guest, A.M. (2007). “Cultural Meanings and Motivations for Sport: A Comparative Case Study of Soccer Teams in the United States and Malawi.” Athletic Insight. Volume 9, Issue 1. (to read this article click here) 

A Previous Soccer Life

For fun, and maybe also to establish my bona fides, I feel compelled to document old soccer days as a past project. Though I’m now a critic of the popular idea that sports builds character (at least as a general rule without attention to social context), I also think of my own time playing and coaching as both formative and informative. So here’s a select list of my best memories:

• Captaining Roosevelt High School in Seattle to the Washington State big schools ‘Final Four’ in 1994. 
• A senior year at Kenyon College where we earned the number 1 national ranking in NCAA Division III, losing in the Final Four to UC San Diego.
• The (not at all) valuable 1996 USISL All-Star Game ‘Autograph Poster’ – Spot the World Cup player, and spot the academic! Serving as captain of the Cincinnati Cheetahs (labelled as “professional” but I’d say semi-professional or minor league professional would be more accurate!) in the 1995 USISL, as the first captain of the Mid-Michigan Bucks in 1996 and making the USISL All-Star game with at least one player who went on to play in the World Cup.
• Playing and coaching, somewhat ignominiously, as the only non-African in the Malawian national ‘Super League’ in 1997 with the Universities Football Club team.
• Coaching as a graduate assistant at both Miami of Ohio (which at the time had an NCAA Division I men’s program) and the University of Chicago.
• Coaching with the Illinois Olympic Development program, including at least one player who went on to be part of the USMNT at the World Cup.
• Coaching with urban soccer programs in both Detroit and Chicago public housing communities; serving as Head Coach at Nathan Hale High School in Seattle; running school coaching workshops and writing a coaching manual specific to Malawi; leading coach training programs in Illinois, Malawi, and Angola.