The University of Massachusetts at Lowell Work Environment Department, working jointly with four New England coalitions on occupational safety and health (COSH) groups, has developed and is delivering participatory and learner-centered health and safety training for hazardous waste site workers and emergency responders throughout New England. This consortium has created a technical curriculum for hazardous waste workers accessible to the nonspecialist and which, more importantly, draws upon workers' own experience and knowledge as a source of information, education, and experiential resources. In this article, we examine the goals of the consortium, the applicability of the training method, its successes and failures, and the wider implications such pedagogical techniques have for effective and empowering health and safety training. We conclude that such a teaching technique is a successful means of providing technical knowledge and skills in a positive and rewarding atmosphere. We also conclude, however, that the extent to which this form of education is empowering, as is claimed by many of its proponents, is less clear-cut.

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Adolescent employment is commonly valued in the United States for its ability to promote youths' positive psychosocial development. Empirical research, however, suggests the extent to which youth reap such benefits from work is largely a function of work's quality. This study investigated adolescent work quality by examining the extent to which characteristics associated with positive or negative psychosocial outcomes are found in the jobs adolescents hold today. Our findings from surveys and interviews with working youth show that contemporary adolescent jobs provide at least moderate levels of the characteristics that promote positive psychosocial outcomes and some of those that promote negative outcomes. Adolescent jobs have the greatest capacity to encourage positive psychosocial development by providing opportunities for youth to be helpful and, to a lesser extent, to be around supportive others and to learn new things. Improvements in other areas of work quality are needed to maximize work's potential to contribute positively to adolescent psychosocial development.

The need for new and revised structures to reward new forms of scholarship is being examined nationally and globally. It is also being examined on campuses that make up the University of Massachusetts system, all which are classified by the Carnegie Foundation for Community Engagement. This paper reports on the collective exploration by the five campuses of the University of Massachusetts to understand whether the existing academic policies sufficiently and appropriately rewarding community engagement and publically engaged scholarship enact the core mission of the University of Massachusetts to effectively generate knowledge, address social issues, and fulfill its academic and civic purposes.

In a period of declining union membership and severe economic and environmental crisis it is important that labor unions rethink their traditional roles and organizational goals. Responding to some of these problems and reflecting a history of innovative and progressive unionism, the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers Union (OCAW) has sought to address occupational and environmental health problems within the context of a political struggle. This study suggests that by joining with the environmental movement and community activists, by pursuing a strategy of coalition building, and by developing an initiative to build and advocate for a new political party, OCAW provides a model for reinvigorating trade unionism in the United States.