The service system challenges of work with juvenile justice involved young people in the Hunter Region,Australia

Current policies suggest that collaborative approaches are core to working effectively with juvenile justice involved young people. However, there is little research examining the workings of multi‐agency and collaborative endeavours in this field, or the experiences of the human service workers facilitating these connections. This paper reports on qualitative research that resulted from the Juvenile Justice and Education Equity in the Hunter Region project. Thirty‐eight human service workers were interviewed about their perceptions of the workings, strengths and challenges of the service system that supports young people who come into contact with the Children's Court in the Lower and Upper Hunter regions of New South Wales. Data analysis revealed three key themes related to (1) service gaps, cycles and maelstrom; (2) pursuing authentic service engagement; and (3) insider–outsider dynamics in service provision. Findings are discussed in relation to emerging practice and research agendas.     

Seventh-Grade Social Studies versus Social Meliorism

The Wake County Public School System (WCPSS), in the state of North Carolina, has gone through considerable recent effort to revise, support, and assess their seventh-grade social studies curriculum in an effort to serve three goals: comply with the Common Core State Standards (Common Core), comply with the North Carolina Essential Standards (Essential Standards), and create a curriculum that best serves students. Meanwhile, the curriculum theory of social meliorism was conceived of over a century ago. Since its inception it has influenced curriculum development and provided a foundation for many other curriculum theories that all start from an assumption that social meliorism holds to an accepted truth that the purpose of education is to improve society and address its injustices. Given contemporary discussions about how to achieve social justice, this is a philosophy that seems particularly meaningful when thinking about the ways that schools can help to accomplish the goals of social justice. I intend to investigate the seventh-grade social studies curriculum of WCPSS in 2014 and juxtapose it with the goals and ideals of social meliorism, determine how well the curriculum addresses the goals of that curriculum theory, and make suggestions for how a social meliorist might suggest modifying the curriculum to better serve the needs of society.     

Access to justice for Aboriginal People in the Northern Territory

This article discusses research in the Northern Territory on Aboriginal civil and family law needs. It is based on focus group discussions and interviews with legal services providers and other associated organisations. The article argues that key areas of legal need involve discrimination, housing, child protection, social security, credit/debt and consumer law problems. It further argues that welfare conditionality, particularly as embodied in the NT Intervention and subsequent Stronger Futures policies, has exacerbated the need for legal assistance and advocacy for Aboriginal people.     

Female Perceptions of Organizational Justice

This study examines women's conceptualization of the pervasive construct of organizational justice. A comprehensive four factor model was used to represent organizational justice while outcome variables were the important employee attitudes of job satisfaction, organizational commitment and turnover intentions. Structural equation modelling was used to analyse responses from 301 male and 147 female respondents. Differences were found for procedural, interpersonal and informational justices. It would appear female and male employees have differing responses to perceptions of justice. Justice had a diffuse effect for males, but not for females. For men, interpersonal justice predicted an increase in organizational commitment while procedural justice predicted a decrease in turnover intentions. For female employees, informational justice was found to increase commitment and reduce turnover intentions. The study highlights the need for all justice factors to be considered and for sex differences to be considered in future justice research.     

REVISITING THE AGENT OF SOCIAL CONTROL ROLE: IMPLICATIONS FOR SUBSTANCE ABUSE TREATMENT

The agent of social control role and its responsibilities and goals provide an important function in social work practice. Workers in varied positions often combine this role with others that define the profession. Yet in the not too distant past, a debate arose as to whether this role, focusing on promoting and protecting the general welfare of society, could be congruent with also fostering the improved functioning and self‐determination of individual clients. Periodically, this topic emerges to challenge the appropriateness of these dual activities in satisfactorily and equitably serving both constituents.

Within the field of substance abuse, court‐mandated referrals have established a need for practitioners to perform social control tasks to monitor and report clients' compliance with and progress in treatment. This has created a conflict for many who consider their practice to be client‐centered. This article will explore the dilemmas experienced in attempting to simultaneously carry out both roles and the guidance provided from the National Association of Social Workers (NASW) Code of Ethics. In addition, proposed strategies to reduce the duality of difficulties will be summarized.     

Desire for the desert: racialising white teachers’ motives for working in remote schools in the Australian desert

Abstract

Distinct from rurality, the Australian desert has long functioned as a signifier of remoteness in the dominant imagination; a product of spatialised binary relations between ‘progressive’ (white) mainstream or idealised white countryside, and disordered/dangerous Aboriginal periphery. Remoteness constitutes a complex racial dynamic that has historically mediated white teachers’ and missionaries’ desires to travel to the social margins. This article adopts a discursive understanding of remoteness to examine contemporary white teachers’ decisions to work in Aboriginal schools in the desert – decisions that are often articulated through unwitting recourse to the ‘three Ms’ or ‘tourist’. The article explores these identity constructs and how they enable different performances of whiteness. It examines how white people’s desires are often covertly raced but does not however, position the teacher as a priori racist. Rather, desire is theorised as a social construct in which subjects invest, which may at times contribute toward processes of decolonisation. This rendering moves beyond a logic of individualism and underpins the argument that recognising how these dynamics play out is vital with respect to understanding the place of white teachers inside remote Indigenous Education. Moreover, such insights are valuable for appreciating how whiteness continues to be reproduced in White Australia under a guise of good intentions.     

The belonging model of trust

Although we know that high‐quality employee–organization relationships are beneficial, these relationships are complex and not fully understood, especially among employees of nonprofit organizations. In particular, we know little about how these employees perceive trust, which may overlook an important contributor to effective management. We begin to address this issue by testing a new theoretical model that conceptualizes perceived insider status, psychological ownership, and organizational identification as foundations for the perception of justice and subsequent trust. Our results indicate that psychological ownership and perceived insider status relate to trust through procedural and interpersonal justice. These results contrast those typically found in for‐profit contexts in that organizational identification did not predict justice and that distributive and informational justice did not predict trust.     

Working-class ecology and union politics: a conceptual topology

ABSTRACT

This paper argues that Environmental Labour Studies may benefit from incorporating the perspective of environmental justice. We offer a theorization of working-class ecology as the place where working-class communities live and work, being typically affected by environmental injustice, and of working-class environmentalism as those forms of activism that link labour and environmental struggles around the primacy of reproduction. The paper’s theoretical section draws on a social ethnography of working-class ecology in the case of Taranto, a mono-industrial town in southern Italy, which is experiencing a severe environmental and public-health crisis. We show how environmental justice activism since the early 2000s has allowed the re-framing of union politics along new ways of politicizing the local economy. We conclude by offering a conceptual topology of working-class ecology, which situates different labour organizations (confederal, social/community, and rank-and-file unions) according to their positioning in respect to environmental justice.     

Reclaiming ourselves through Testimonio pedagogy: reflections on a curriculum design lab in teacher education

This article details one teacher preparation course centering Latin American Testimonio narratives of struggle/survival amid structural oppression for use in secondary curriculum. As our class of predominantly Latina/o students and two Latina instructors engaged Testimonio pedagogy, we fashioned a hopeful alternative to our own experiences of intergenerational oppression. While research indicates that the experiences and histories of pre-service Teachers of Color lend pedagogical strength and critical consciousness to teacher education, three Latina pre-service students highlight the ways in which Testimonio became more than a pedagogical approach. Testimonio’s collectivity, resistance, hope, and assertions of voice and dignity moved through them not as educators first but as (great-grand)daughters of oppressed though still-resilient People(s). Testimonio emboldened these Latina pre-service educators to recognize and validate their own inherited multiliteracies, (re)claim their connectedness to land, and articulate their visions for more equitable schooling. This work advances research into the essentiality of engaging race and ethnicity in K-12 and teacher education curriculum and pedagogy.