Community Participation Reconsidered

ABSTRACT

This paper describes the process of planning, developing, and implementing a community-based project with Hmong women in a large Midwestern city. Combining action and research to forge relationships, identify common goals and garner resources, the Hmong Women's Project applied principles of both feminist and participatory action research (PAR). In light of the successes and challenges of this ongoing project, we critically evaluate the oft-encouraged goal of “maximum community participation” in PAR projects by questioning common definitions of “community” and “participation.” We argue that the parameters of what constitutes a “community” and what counts for “participation” are inherently unstable, requiring constant negotiation of ideas, values, identities and interests among all who participate in a PAR project.     

Low-Income Children's Participation in a Public Health Insurance Program in Georgia

To expand health care coverage to uninsured, low-income children, the Congress created the State Children's Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) in 1997. Given ample evidence that state Medicaid programs have failed to enroll many eligible children, experts questioned whether SCHIP could successfully enroll low-income children. Using Georgia state SCHIP data, we analyzed enrollment patterns and identified factors contributing to program enrollment. This study found that the children's enrollment is explained by perceived costs and benefits of joining the program as well as the underlying family structure, demographic factors, and health status. We discuss implications of these findings on the participation of low-income families in public sector programs.     

Developing Children's Participation: Lessons from a Participatory IT Project

The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, advances in the sociology of childhood and the consumer rights movement have placed the spotlight on children's rights in society, challenging those working with children to examine how they share power and ensure that children's views are taken on board. While childrens’ service practitioners are broadly supportive of the concept of participation and there are numerous examples of how children's participation has been realised in practice, many are unsure where to begin due to the range of options, considerations and challenges associated with participatory work. This article describes and analyses the process used by Barnardos in developing and implementing a participatory approach in a children's IT project in Galway City, Ireland. The process employed, the challenges encountered and the added value the participatory approach brought to the project are outlined. Finally, four broad lessons emerging from the experience are discussed, namely, that a clear framework and reflective practice is valuable that good participatory work is inextricably linked with good project management; that small efforts at participatory work can increase capacity and appetite for further work; and that there is a role for informal approaches in the context of a formal participatory framework. © 2006 The Author(s) Journal compilation © 2006 National Children's Bureau.     

Affordances for Participation: Children's Appropriation of Rules in a Reggio Emilia School

This study explores how young children appropriate school rules and what opportunities for active participation are afforded in a Reggio Emilia elementary classroom with particular interest in the interactional and communicative competences children display in situated practice. An ethnographic and microanalytic approach is used to study how the material environment and multimodal resources are mobilized in the activity. The analysis is based on video-recorded sequences in which 6- to 7-year-old children participate in a school project about rules for the schoolyard. The detailed analysis demonstrates how the children plan, reflect, enact, and discuss how to apply their own co-constructed rules in locally relevant ways in the playground. Overall, the findings shed light on how opportunities for children's active participation are situated within and also afforded by the particular Reggio Emilia educational practice that is also shaped by the learning process itself.     

Family Interventions in a Private Pediatric Practice1

The overwhelmingly positive response to a parent support and assistance program in a private pediatric office has been very gratifying (Mesibov, Schroeder, and Wesson, 1977). There have been several other positive offshoots of the program which had not been anticipated initially. One of these has been the identification of underlying marital and/or family problems of parents seeking advice about their children's behaviors. This is the main focus of this paper.     

The Significance of Planned Community Participation in Problem Solving and Developing a Viable Community Capability

Abstract

During the last three decades, there has been widespread interest in the role of community participation in development. However, the reasons why grassroot participation is essential have not been clearly and systematically studied. This paper aims to fill that knowledge gap. It argues that grassroots participation in community problem-solving (development) is essential for three fundamental reasons. It facilitates: (1) proper problem diagnosis and needs assessment, (2) sound decision-making regarding choice of relevant and feasible goals/solutions, and (3) successful program implementation. Evidence from recent literature and empirical case studies suggests that voluntary and planned grassroot participation fosters these conditions, and as a result, is a potent vehicle for promoting local, regional, and national development.     

父母教养方式对儿童参与的影响

儿童参与既是儿童的一项权利,也是儿童感知生活、磨练技能、锻炼意志的有效途径.受学业压力的影响,城市儿童参与社会生活的空间和时间被缩小挤占,此时家庭教育中父母起着重要的作用.研究发现父母教养方式中情感理解维度可以正向预测儿童参与行为和权利意识;儿童参与的权利意识在父母教养方式和儿童参与行为间起中介作用,而教养方式中情感理...     

Participation Structures as a Mediational Means: Learning Balinese Gamelan in the United States Through Intent Participation,Mediated Discourse,and Distributed Cognition

Participation has presented a complex unit of analysis for interactional sociolinguistics. In this study I add another dimension to participation by considering recent theories related to sociocultural activity theory—mediated discourse analysis and distributed cognition. Drawing on examples from maguru panggul, the traditional pedagogy of Balinese Gamelan music, I argue that participation structures are a mediational means that enable students to augment their learning. Focusing on two participation structures that involve keen observation and listening-in, I also consider how intent participation is a part of these participation structures and maguru panggul pedagogy. What emerges is an understanding of how participation structures used as mediational means can have an effect on the division of cognitive labor within a classroom.     

Community Effects on Welfare Participation

This paper conceptualizes and estimates a model of welfare participation that tests for community effects. Theoretically, the model is consistent with Fischer's (1984) notion of urban life, and a welfare participation model developed by Rank and Hirschl (1993). The empirical analysis includes aggregate and multivariate tests, and an identification of these effects in terms of household knowledge and behavior. We find strong evidence that community structure influences the decision to get food stamps, and one notable difference with the Rank and Hirschl findings: community poverty level is a more powerful and global predictor of participation than is population density. The findings suggest emendations to Wilson's notion of the truly disadvantaged insofar as residence in high poverty areas afford opportunities for information exchange and the development of specialized networks.     

Children's Use of Multiple Categorisations in Practice in a Multicultural Setting

Little is known about whether and how children combine categories of race, ethnicity, language and religion in multicultural settings where more than one of these dimensions is salient. Ethnographic data from a multicultural London primary school found that children usually organised multiple categories congruently (e.g. ‘If you're Indian you are Sikh’), despite strong opposition from teachers. This congruent organisation may originate in an undifferentiated experience of categories in the family and/or represent the best ‘fit' with a local population in which categories were correlated. Children used congruent organisation to infer peers’ group membership, which may amplify intergroup contrasts.     

Children's Development as Participation in Everyday Practices across Different Institutions

Children participate in different institutional collectives in their everyday life. Home, school, and kindergarten are the institutional contexts that most children share. Although there are variations between home practices and school practices, they collectively share a common core framed by societal conditions. In drawing upon Vygotsky's (1998) Vygotsky, L. S. 1998. The collected works of L. S. Vygotsky (M. J. Hall, Trans., Vol. 5, Child Psychology), New York: Kluwer Academic/Plenum.  [Google Scholar] theory of the social situation of development and Hedegaard's (2009) Hedegaard, M. 2009. “Children's development from a cultural-historical approach: Children's activity in everyday local settings as foundation for their development”. In Mind, Culture, and Activity Vol. 16, 64–82. [Taylor & Francis Online] , [Google Scholar] theory of development conceptualised as the child's participation within and across several institutions at the same time, it has been possible to examine how school practices influence home practice and the child's social situation of development. A case study of an Australian child's participation across different institutions (family and school) was undertaken to capture and analyse the dynamic processes through which development was afforded. In the case study there was a large disjunction between institutional practices of the home and school that the child had to negotiate. Due to teacher knowledge of only the child's relation to the school institution, and not the home institution, the affordances for development and the child's changing relations to his environment, were invisible to the educators in this study. The findings suggest foregrounding an understanding of children's development as changes in children's activities and thereby changing their relations to reality across institutional practices in order to support a broader view of development in early childhood education.     

Community College Participation in the Pacific Sociological Association

Sociologists have many organizations to choose from when making decisions about attending professional conferences. The Pacific Sociological Association provides an opportunity to attend a more personal venue that fits the needs of full-time and adjunct community college professors.     

Critical Community Practice

How do we conceptualize community development? What are themajor practices and processes behind the development of communities?What is critical community practice (CCP)? What are its fundamentalvalues? What are the objectives of CCP? How is CCP differentfrom the other approaches of community development? How do weoperationalize CCP? Who are the major agents in promoting CCP?Is it true that the process of CCP induces the empowerment ofcommunities? Moreover, how does this process enhance the emancipationof individuals at grassroots level? Finally, what are the     

Transformative Community Practice

ABSTRACT

The authors examine how well models and concepts of community practice fit their practice in an extremely low income urban African-American community. They describe the evolution of their agency's response to community disinvestment over the past 30 years. That response has been to create indigenous African-centered organizations that can transform how people see themselves, the community, and their futures. Early childhood education, social services, economic development, and leadership training and organizing are core programs. The authors urge model builders and educators to include the concept of transformation as a community change goal, and to strengthen attention to institution building skills, “cultural work,” and capital formation.