The learning camera: A personalized learning model for online pedagogy in human services education

Abstract

This article describes the development of a personalized learning approach to human services online education that utilizes a “learning camera” as a metaphorical tool for undergraduate students’ development of knowledge, skills, and dispositions required for successful transition to professional practice. By highlighting students’ ongoing development as knowledge builders and constructivist learners, the online curriculum is enacted within each student’s area of interest and in their home communities. This “learning camera” model of online pedagogy for human services education is intended to serve as a resource for other institutions interested in praxis-oriented approaches to personalized online teaching and learning.     

Undutiful daughter(s): troubling geographies of the gendered nation and belonging in Adichie’s Americanah and Atta’s Everything Good Will Come

ABSTRACT

This paper proffers a reading of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah as a Bildungsroman that represents a moment of a daughter’s “undutifulness” to domesticating national patriarchies and cultures, textual and epistemic genealogies. In this regard, I posit Adichie’s twining of national romances and a heterosexual romantic love that travels and returns as a framework for examining gendered experiencing and relations to the “home.” The article considers the text’s representation of migration and return not simply as moments of re-domestication and formulaic reunification but as incidents that enunciate expanded relationalities to the nation and reconfigure domestic intimacies in a manner that radically unsettles “home.” Americanah is read alongside Sefi Atta’s Everything Good Will Come in an attempt to show how the development of the protagonists’ interpersonal romances goes together with a studied engagement with the national space and communities in ways that inscribe women’s labours of love, care and intellect into the public domain and charts transformative possibilities of being in the world and inhabiting home. Ultimately, Adichie and Atta’s texts demonstrate alertness to celebrations of transnational black femininities, its vulnerabilities and bonds that transcend the limited “ethical” commitments delineated by the horizons of gendered roles and the national home.     

School Discipline,Race, and the Discursive Construction of the “Deficient” Student

Abstract

Research has demonstrated how, in the current era of mass incarceration, the punitive arm of the state now extends beyond traditional criminal justice structures into institutions typically associated with providing care or a social good. The negative effects of this shift have disproportionately impacted marginalized populations, particularly low-income black and Latino communities. This article examines one way that this extension has manifested in the realm of public education. Based on ethnographic data from a public Grade 6–12 Disciplinary Alternative Education Program (DAEP) in Texas, this article scrutinizes the program’s behavioral rules and disciplinary procedures. The analysis focuses on students’ introductory experience to the DAEP as a “strategic research site” to illuminate the program’s formal objectives, methods to achieve their institutional goals, and their intended effects on students. I find that the practices and procedures in place at the DAEP operate through racializing surveillance to constitute “disciplinary technologies” devoted to the transformation of “culturally deficient” students—a racialized and gendered classification—into docile bodies. Students are disciplined through punitive and rehabilitative methods premised on the discursive construction of “deficient” students and families.     

Visual and Other Aids

This article evaluates the impact of extending a traditional written research paper into a digital documentary on students’ perception and level of comprehension of a global sustainability issue. An adaptation of Moon's (1999) five-stage map of learning was used to assess the written and digital projects students submitted to a statewide conference. The assessment was enriched by a survey gauging students’ feelings about the process of creating their papers and documentaries. Results show the value of the written paper (expository) as a reflection artifact of a student's personal worldview. Transforming the message into a digital documentary encourages students also to appreciate global issues through the eyes of cultural “others,” a process Hanvey (1982) called “perspective consciousness.”     

The role of social work field education programmes in the transmission of developmental social work knowledge in Southern and East Africa

This paper reports on the findings of a study on the role of social work field education programmes in the transmission of developmental social work knowledge in Southern and East Africa. It highlights the challenges in locating developmental social work placements and the creativity shown by social work educators in addressing these challenges and improving learning opportunities for social work students. Both academics and students were found to be committed to developmental social work, within a willing practice environment hampered by knowledge, capacity and resource constraints. Social work education was found to be playing a transformative role through the teaching of a developmental social work curriculum and the creation of collaborative developmental social work learning experiences. Social work educators trained and supported agency supervisors in developmental social work, while students served as conduits, modelling developmental social work practice. What has yet to be determined in future research is the students’ perspective of this developmental educational environment.     

The use of political motherhood in Egypt’s Arab Spring uprising and aftermath

ABSTRACT

Political motherhood, which uses traditional motherhood to mobilize and sustain women’s political participation, is understudied in political science. Women played a significant role in Egypt’s Arab Spring and its aftermath by “bargaining with patriarchy” and strategically using traditional motherhood to access the political sphere. In this article, we develop a theoretical argument based on the work of Gentry, Carreon and Moghadam and Amar. We illustrate it with examples drawn from news articles on women’s political activism and social media posts by Egyptian activists. Our argument explores how women’s agency and the larger political context in which women operate reveals how political motherhood takes the particular shape that it does. In the context of Egypt, we examine how the state’s choice to highlight women as “hypervisible” citizens, worthy of protection, backfired. Through a bottom-up political motherhood, women used their respectability as mothers in need of state protection against the state, thereby legitimizing anti-Mubarak and anti-Muslim Brotherhood demonstrations and challenging these governments.     

Working Across the Disciplines/Shifting Perspectives: Student Experiences with an Online Course Focused on Interdisciplinary Practice with Children and Families

SUMMARY

As more universities and other places of higher learning respond to the changing needs of the community-bound learner, new technologies are being harnessed to shift the delivery of historically “classroom-bound” programs to alternate and more universally accessible formats. This article describes how an online course uses interactive exercises to engage students in mutual exploration of cross and/or interdisciplinary work. The course serves students from various professional schools, including social work, child and youth care, nursing, and education. Through the use of online discussion and case-study role-plays, it facilitates an experiential learning environment that is reflective of the student's own practice in a learning setting.     

A Teaching Framework for Transformative Multicultural Social Work Education

Abstract

A major challenge in multicultural social work education is fostering meaningful learning experiences for students by matching educational methods and content to students' individual learning needs and characteristics. Building upon transformative learning theory developed by Jack Mezirow, this paper proposes a teaching framework for transformative multicultural social work education that addresses students' individual learning needs and characteristics. This framework uses the dimensions of cultural knowledge and cultural sensitivity to represent four potential stances of cross-cultural learning in students. The paper provides a detail discussion regarding the learning needs and learning foci of students at each stance, and useful teaching strategies and activities that enhance students' transformative learning process so that they develop integrative knowledge about self and others in a dynamic multicultural society from multiple perspectives.     

Margaret Atwood’s Straddling Environmentalism

Abstract

“Margaret Atwood’s Straddling Environmentalism” asks why Atwood crosses the Canada-US border in her dystopian fiction. It takes Atwood’s 2004 comments that The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) partly grew out of her ‘irritation when people say “it can’t happen here”’ and her claim that she decided to set the novel in Cambridge, Massachusetts as being related to that irritation—’”It can’t happen here,” she explained, “should be placed in the most extreme ‘here”’—as a prompt. Focusing on Oryx and Crake (2003), this article argues that one of Atwood’s motivations for crossing the Canada-US border in this novel is to provoke us to develop what Giovanna Di Chiro has termed ‘a scale-crossing environmental consciousness.’ Oryx and Crake challenges us to think about environmentalism in relation to local, embodied experiences as well as on a global, transnational scale.     

Waterpipe Smoking Among College Students in the United States: A Review of the Literature

Abstract

Objective: To review the literature on college student waterpipe use with a focus on undergraduates in the United States. Participants: Undergraduate students. Methods: Studies were accessed using the databases PubMed, MEDLINE, PsycINFO, and Academic Search Premier. Searches included combinations of the following keywords: “waterpipe,” “hookah,” “shisha,” “nargila,” “argileh,” “hubble bubble,” “college,” “university,” and “student.” Results: Results demonstrate that approximately 1 in 5 American college students report past-year waterpipe use. Results also suggest that there are a number of established correlates of waterpipe smoking, including male gender, Arab ethnicity, cigarette smoking, and the belief that waterpipe smoking is less harmful than cigarette smoking. Conclusions: Despite its harmful health effects, waterpipe smoking is quite common among college students. Future research with better methodologies and theoretical frameworks are needed to advance the field.     

Social Work Education without Walls: Ethnography as a Lens for Transformative Learning

A call for innovation in social work has been put forth to address our society’s greatest problems. This call applies to social work education, which encompasses multiple functions including teaching, research, and practice. Yet, innovation in social work is constrained by the limits of current social work approaches and methods. Increasing social work’s impact in the real world requires illuminating the complexities of reciprocal forces between human lives and the environment. Understanding such complexities incorporates spatial and interdisciplinary approaches, such as ethnography. Ethnography, as method and metaphor, is a lens for transformative learning in social work education: It is the message. Ethnography illuminates real-world complexities and deepens social work education through its core contributions: methodological holism, methodological engagement, and methodological comparison. In deepening social work education, ethnography renders visible salient links in social work’s field of dialectics, invoking the systems perspective. Yet, ethnography extends beyond and expands on the systems perspective, emphasizing engaged integration. Engaged integration of social work’s dialectics forwards the discourse about the profession’s identity. Thus, ethnography is a tool for advancing knowledge and promoting transformative learning in social work education.     

Healthy Sexual Development: A Multidisciplinary Framework for Research

ABSTRACT

A group of Australian researchers from a range of disciplines involved in studying children's sexual development developed a framework for researching healthy sexual development that was acceptable to all disciplines involved. The 15 domains identified were: freedom from unwanted activity; an understanding of consent; education about biological aspects; understanding of safety; relationship skills; agency; lifelong learning; resilience; open communication; sexual development should not be “aggressive, coercive or joyless;” self-acceptance; awareness and acceptance that sex is pleasurable; understanding of parental and societal values; awareness of public/private boundaries; and being competent in mediated sexuality.     

Andrii Liubka’s Carbide: Ukrainian democratic reforms through a dark glass

ABSTRACT

The Revolution of Dignity in Ukraine and its reforms are the topics of Andrii Liubka’s novel Karbid (Carbide, 2015). Employing Voltairean laughter and neo-Gothic aesthetics, Liubka presents the idea of European integration (one of the expected outcomes of the reforms) implemented practically by the corrupt elites of the imagined Transcarpathian town of Vedmediv as a money-laundering enterprise – an underground tunnel for smuggling drugs and people’s organs from Ukraine to Europe. The author proposes that the elites – most of whom are criminals – personify Julia Kristeva’s concept of abjection in the novel and represent social spheres that need reform. Contrary to the Euromaidan goals, these comprador elites desire even stronger borders between Ukraine and the European Union, as these facilitate their shadow economy, and they subject the local population to economic and social decline, turning them into disposable human waste. By applying the concept of abjection in its psychoanalytic and social forms to Liubka’s tragicomic novel, the author argues that his text points to Ukraine’s struggle to define itself as “West” and shed its totalitarian legacy of the Soviet “East,” and brings attention to the conflict between the post-Euromaidan national strivings of Ukraine’s citizens and the rampant corruption that negates their efforts.     

Students in distress: Unanticipated findings in a cyber bullying study

This article discusses the use of quantitative measures to foster the agency and capabilities of children and youth research participants, and facilitate opportunities for students to receive social services. Based on unanticipated findings of a cyber bullying study among students in grades 4, 7 and 10, we discuss how quantitative measures identified youth “in distress” and allowed opportunities for students to obtain resources that would be helpful. Data indicate that students were able to express their agency by navigating the quantitative phase of the research process in ways that met their needs. These findings suggest that quantitative methods should be included among a range of research methodologies that can promote children and youth's agency and unique voices; meaningfully engage children and youth; and offer benefits to youth participants.     

From Resistance to Involvement: Examining Agency and Control in a Playworld Activity

In the recent sociocultural literature, it is possible to identify at least three ways of understanding the development of individual agency in social practices: (a) through transforming the object of activity and through self-change, (b) through responsible and intentional membership, and (c) through resistance and transformation of the dominant power relations. This article puts these different perspectives in a dialogical relation to each other and examines the development of individual agency in the context of schooling. The problem of promoting student agency is that, although personal sense and motivation are crucial for learning and development, the need for control and order in classrooms often makes it hard for teachers to give space to them. To develop more meaningful educational practices, there is a need for a thorough understanding of the ways through which teachers and students deal with and momentarily overcome this contradiction in their classrooms and are able to enact or promote agency. The article introduces an empirical case study of Anton, a 7-year-old boy's participation in a joint narrative classroom practice. Anton's orientation and interest toward the narrative activity alters drastically during the spring, as does the teachers' understanding and attitude toward him. Moreover, in Anton's participation, all the three different formulations of agency just presented are visible and concurrently “in action.” The article creates conceptual and analytical tools for examining the potential that narrative learning settings provide for supporting children's engagement and development in classrooms.     

Enduring not enjoying? Emotional responses to studying abroad among Danish and Chinese students

ABSTRACT

Students’ emotions during stays abroad have mainly been treated as ”culture shock”, where difficulties are interpreted as universal ”stages” towards ”adaptation”. This paper explores how students from different cultural and educational traditions experience studying abroad differently. The study presents a qualitative study of 18 Danish and Chinese students in Chinese and Danish universities and situates itself within the literature on culture shock, student emotions and study-abroad experiences. The study exposes the students’ complex emotions throughout their studies abroad and explains how these emotions relate to processes of self-formation, professional and academic development, increase or decrease in freedom, and student agency.     

Business in Social Work Education: A Historically Black University’s Social Work Entrepreneurship Project

The destabilization of the current economy has sparked increased interest in entrepreneurship, especially for underrepresented minority social work students. The entrepreneurial thinking of these social work students entering social work programs at historically Black colleges and universities needs to be fostered in a learning environment. This article describes a historically Black university’s creative social entrepreneurship venture in response to the Social Work Congress’s 2010 imperative “Business of Social Work—Infuse models of sustainable business and management practice in social work education and practice.” The social entrepreneurship project uses the interprofessional collaborative educational model and attempts to provide meaningful and relevant education to social work students interested in social entrepreneurship through the collaborative efforts of the university’s School of Social Work and the School of Business and Management.     

Transvlogs: online communication tools for transformative agency and development

This paper examines how 21 transgender individuals used YouTube transvlogs to co-create their own transformative agency. Drawing on a social justice framework, I conduct narrative content analysis to explore how a historically marginalized population enacted their own transformative development without researcher intervention. I suggest that by questioning the status quo, explicating and envisioning new activity patterns, and committing to concrete online and offline actions, transvloggers develop themselves and their community in transformative ways. Vloggers’ resistance and pursuit of new developmental pathways illustrate the power of individuals to design their own technological transformative systems even amidst challenging circumstances.     

Achtsamkeit lernen im Offenen Dialog

Dialogue in the sense of David Bohm invites individuals and groups to consider together their ways of thinking and learning. By exploring mental models, which usually hinder reaching deeper agreement, this kind of dialogue opens new grounds and is, at the latest, since Peter Senge’;s management-bestseller “The fifth discipline” (1990), considered to be a basic process for team learning in groups and organisations. The article refers to university projects on ‘open dialogue’ with students at the universities of Oldenburg and Bochum between 2001–2003. Characteristics of “open dialogue” are represented as ways of attentiveness learning. Students practical reports are used to work out recommendations based upon “open dialogue” for the development of central deep ecology and human competences.