This study provides a narrative synthesis of the findings published in journal articles from a broad range of scientific fields about the impact of extracurricular activities (ECAs) on the academic success and employability of university students. The analysis included 39 articles from the Scopus and Web of Science databases, published over the period 2010–2021. Results show that the vast majority of ECAs have a positive impact on the academic success and employability of university students. ECAs showing a negative impact are residual. In light of these results, higher education institutions should promote activities with an educational purpose outside the strictly curricular objectives and beyond the classroom, fostering a more holistic development of students that combines academic success with a better capacity/preparation to enter the labour market.

In the current climate crisis, young people are portrayed paradoxically: victims and stakeholders, political protagonists and school truants. Based on ethnographic research with the climate movement, this article explores how youths manage their activism as it interfaces with their socialisation contexts, tracing prevalent adult antagonisms: radicalism, condescension and individualism. Drawing on sociological conceptualisations of climate precariousness and on an educational theorisation of subjectification, I argue that activists construct margins of resistance in their everyday political practices by incorporating processes that interrupt adult structures while reframing educational imagination. This highlights how the individual present is colonised by the risks posed to a collective future, leading adult power to be contested at a collective-public level (through performative reconfigurations of existing orders) and subverted at an individual-private level (by repurposing privileges towards climate struggle). Resistances to adultism uncover competing notions of future and education as integral to politicisation processes within the climate movement.

Approaches to youth engagement typically focus on withdrawal from conventional politics and participatory transformation. In this paper, we argue that such approaches fall short in grasping how groups with blended styles of relationship with politics assess their political ownership. This became apparent when, in the context of European elections, the rise of extreme right wing in Europe and intensification of austerity in Portugal, we discussed the circumstances framing youth’s relationship with politics with 40 youngsters outside regular school. Quantitative data from regular-school students on the same topic were used to trigger focus groups and later used by participants to interview their peers. Participants displayed ‘ordinary’ approaches to engagement, attributing an unexpected relevance to vote. Socioeducational disadvantages and self-blaming perspectives were actively contested, and the gap between youth and politics is to be filled by a normative equipment, with the school indicated as a fundamental, structured and unbiased locus of political education.

This article explores how young activists in Portugal and Finland negotiate the value of social media in their practices. Considering the near ubiquitous intertwinement of online-offline environments, and its contradictory promises for social movements, we look at these negotiations through the moral principles drawn upon to critique and justify social media practices. Based on ethnographic data from Portuguese climate activists and Finnish mental health activists, we build on pragmatist sociology as an analytical frame to investigate value and meaning-making within these social movements. Results show how activists predominantly criticize social media for its fame-valued logic, which they consider leading to the individualization and depoliticization of communication and the ‘marketization’ of messages and practices. These challenges are managed with reference to the groups’ civic values through two sets of practices: 1) grounding the online and 2) repurposing individualism. Yet these practices reveal different compromise strategies in each country to accommodate social media demands and core group values, highlighting different interpretations of civic values that materialize in competing stances in relation to ‘political’ content and ‘individual’ action. We argue that an analytical framework focusing on values as they unfold in everyday practices is particularly apt to understanding meaning construction in social movements, whose very essence is the evaluation and critique of existing justifications within certain socio-political arrangements.

The field of civic and political participation has been studied mostly from individual, psychological approaches rather than collective, relational perspectives. Here we address this gap through a political ethnography in the youth wing of a major Portuguese political party, conducted during the fervent months right before and after the Portuguese parliamentary elections of October 2015. Investigating the meaning-making of doing politics in real-life contexts, we assess the collective learning processes involved in political participation. This paper shows that youth wings can provide quality participation experiences. Indeed, collectively envisioning and constructing a more democratic society and working for the public good are guiding principles of the wing. Debatement politics and pedagogical politics thus play a fundamental role in the wing's activity, even if they are accompanied by the more mundane, festive party politics and the backstage politics. Through their activity, the wing's members acquire and display high levels of political efficacy, critical thinking and effort regulation regarding political involvement. Methodologically, this paper shows that ethnography is well equipped to study the experience of participation, foregrounding activities and perceptions of wing's members in order to make sense of their learning processes and outcomes.

The WaterCircle (WC) project was implemented in a school, with young adolescents, to address environmental problems. Framed in a participatory research (PR) approach, this school-and-community based intervention includes the use of online tools through which environmental problems in the community are discussed within and by a group of students. Using a quasi-experimental design, with intervention and control groups, the present study involved 361 young adolescents, in grades 7 to 9, from a public school in the northern region of Portugal. Mixed methods were used for data collection and analysis, namely based on questionnaires administered in the pre- and post-test moments, as well as on students’ discourses produced in the classroom during planned activities. Statistically significant changes on self-efficacy were found for the experimental group, suggesting that the intervention program has the potential to raise young people’s empowerment regarding environmental issues. The WC program seems to foster students’ awareness of the socio-political dimensions of environmental problems, since they were able to identify different actors in the community who should be involved in the proposed solutions. Longer-term intervention is required to foster the impact of the PR on the students’ experience.