Service Learning and The Compass Trail

Students used a compass trail to show how they could perform service to their school. When students performed service learning, they completed a real task that was needed for a grateful audience conjoined with academic content in the lesson. Students worked on the school grounds and used content from their regular curriculum while looking for real-life connections to academic applications. Students became involved in real projects that they found meaningful while making contributions to the community. Students learned about geographic tools and used those tools to accomplish their service projects. The students realized that the experience was real from their preparations, through the execution of the project, and the formative evaluation.     

Exploring new ways of inservice teacher education: an action research project

The starting point of the paper is that there is a need to develop new ways of in service teacher education and to examine the nature of the university ‐ school partnerships in school development. In service teacher education needs to be participatory, based on a long‐term commitment to work together, moving from traditional teacher isolation towards a new, collaborative school culture. An essential idea in school development is that teachers take charge of curriculum development through an action research orientation. The process can be facilitated by university researchers in a relationship that is based on an equal status of the participants and mutual trust. These possibilities are explored in the OK school development project (1994‐98), conducted in collaboration with the University of Tampere and six schools in the Tampere region. The paper discusses the design of the project with reference to supporting the teacher's professional development towards interactive professionalism.     

Essay: An Insight into Current German Research on Listening,as Exemplified by the Educational Project “GanzOhrSein”

The article gives us an exemplary insight into research in Germany that deals directly or indirectly with aspects of listening. The reader is given a clear picture of the Munich university project GanzOhrSein aimed at promoting listening skills in schools. The educational value of listening is initially derived from research findings and the model course of action to promote listening skills is explained via the cultural potential. The findings of the accompanying research clearly show that the diverse ways of promoting listening ability that have been developed and tested, do broaden the hearing and listening habits of the children and teachers participating in the project, and do facilitate listening conditions in lessons. The article will also demonstrate what researchers and everyday school practice can gain from this project, and how the institutionalisation of the promotion of listening can benefit.     

Assimilation,segregation, or integration? A teaching project examining approaches to religious and ideological diversity in the classroom

In this article, we describe the multiple phases of a project that was constructed around the real case of a young Muslim student who wished to be exempted from coeducational physical education on religious grounds. When the school refused her initial request, she decided to take legal measures which ended up in the German Federal Administrative Court. The court ultimately ruled in her favour. Her case was selected as the core ingredient for a new teaching project, which studies acculturation from different perspectives, and examines the complex balance between individual rights and societal duties, as defined by constitutional law in the Federal Republic of Germany. This case demonstrates that the majority society, represented in this study by the school, at times needs to change traditional educational policy in order to further national goals of integration; not as a compromise, but as a fair balance of interests. The project was implemented successfully as an integrated part of teacher preservice education occurring towards the end of the first academically based phase of their training.     

Applying utilization-focused evaluation to high school hazing prevention: A pilot intervention

Researchers argue that hazing can contribute to an abusive school climate and interfere with a positive learning environment for students. National efforts exist for establishing policies, protocols, evaluation, and education for students, administrators, and staff to prevent hazing at the college level, but this work has yet to be applied broadly in a high school context. In response to this gap, researchers implemented a pilot project at two high schools in Maine that consisted of hazing prevention training and assessment. This paper discusses the design, methods, and lessons learned through this collaborative, utilization-focused, and mixed-method training and evaluation with school personnel and high school student participants.     

Interscholastic Sports Participation and School Based Delinquency: Does Participation in Sport Foster a Positive High School Environment?

This article uses social control and cultural spillover theories to frame how sports programs might impact the school environment. Using a nationally representative sample of roughly 1,200 public high schools, the relationship between school sports participation rates and in-school delinquent behaviors are examined. Results indicate that schools with higher proportions of sports participants report significantly fewer serious crimes (i.e., violent crimes) and suspensions occurring on school grounds. However, the incidence of minor crimes is unrelated to the proportion of students engaging in school sports. The results of this study support social control theory and suggest that one way to reduce violence and delinquency in schools is through encouraging participation in sports programs.     

Classed,raced, and gendered biographies: young people's understandings of social structures in a boomtown

As young people attempt to adapt to a rapidly changing society, how they experience school and work has undergone significant changes in recent decades. Youth researchers attempting to understand these changes have drawn heavily on the concepts of agency and structure. In the process, researchers often end up taking a ‘middle-ground’ approach and in turn have critiqued the theorizing of Ulrich Beck for being too focused on agency. This article engages with this debate by examining young people's understandings of the social structures shaping their lives within the constantly changing environment of a boomtown. Drawing on qualitative in-depth interviews with high school students, post-secondary students, and young workers, it was found that most young people were able to recognize how class had shaped their lives, only Aboriginal young people discussed how race/ethnicity had shaped their lives, and only young women understood how gender had shaped their lives. The findings suggest that the specific local context that young people experience their school and work lives within is important in their reflexive understandings of their biographies. In this case, the boomtown environment helped to highlight difference and make only certain social structures visible to particular young people.     

Applying the ‘Experience-Near’ Principle To Research: Psychoanalytically Informed Methods1

This article is about how to preserve the vitality of the meaning conveyed to social science researchers by participants. I use the example of a qualitative, psycho-social project on the topic of how women's identities change when they become mothers for the first time. Psychoanalysis was used and adapted to understand both participants' and researchers' experience, and the relation of these to each other. I describe two psychoanalytically informed research methods, free association narrative interviewing and infant observation, and give examples of how, separately and together they can go beyond a text-based method and conceptualise identities in ways that avoid reproducing assumptions of rational, unitary, discursive subjectivity. In assessing how well the two methods worked, I focus my discussion on the observation method using four themes: dimensions of time, embodiment and practices, spatial sensitivity and multiple positioning, and how knowing is accomplished in research.     

Secondary power source: High school students as participatory researchers

Conditions that foster and hinder participatory research are examined, using examples from one such research project aimed at dropout reduction undertaken with students in a “last chance” high school. Student researchers sometimes used racial, gender, and social class differences to gain power and display undemocratic behavior within the group. Dilemmas arose as small-scale actions were implemented that seemed to threaten the power and authority of teachers and administrators both within the alternative school and the traditional high schools that fed into it. The limits to extending democracy to students through research are identified, drawing upon recent theoretical work on feminist pedagogy and participatory research. The conclusion is that youths need to be taken seriously as knowers and potential agents of change and that adults who want to work with adolescent researchers need to model democratic teaching and leadership.     

Using Hybrid Assessments to Develop Civic Competency in History

This article addresses the problem of how to best design authentic writing assessments in history that support learners in demonstrating the types of higher order thinking skills needed for effective citizenship. Recent research has primarily focused on curriculum interventions intended to build disciplinary literacies through various types of document-based essay tasks. The authors argue for increased use of “hybrid” tasks that not only emphasize historical thinking, but also require ethical reasoning and decision-making as students consider enduring societal issues connected to the history curriculum. They offer recommendations for creating this type of task based on an in-depth analysis of an assessment implemented with tenth grade history students.     

Diverse students and literacy in social work education: pedagogies for a new tertiary landscape

In the Western policy landscape, students from diverse cultural, linguistic, economic and other backgrounds are increasingly represented in an expanded tertiary education system. Structural and technological changes have challenged traditional pedagogies designed for more elite cohorts, and shifted the boundaries of textual practices in both universities and professional worlds. In spite of these momentous trends, university literacies often remain tacit and inaccessible to those new to them, and pedagogies rarely explicitly engage with the complexities of these shifting boundaries. University students unfamiliar with these tacit literacies can become marginalised and ultimately struggle with the literacy demands of their academic and professional worlds. This is problematic in social work education, as professional practice demands complex written and oral communication, with potentially significant social and legal repercussions. This paper reports on pedagogies initiated by action research in a Bachelor of Social Work programme in an Australian University. Pedagogies were introduced to make elite codes explicit, use students’ literacies as assets for learning and encourage ‘code switching’ between literacy practices to resist colonising into more powerful literacies. Students’ capacities in academic and professional literacies were significantly enhanced by these practices, and their cultural inheritances valorised, encouraging their contribution to the social work discipline.     

Disabled citizens as researchers – Challenges and benefits of collaboration for effective action and change

ABSTRACT

This article reports on the evaluation of an initial pilot for a collaborative research project undertaken in an English county between a service user-led Coalition of Disabled People, the local authority and local university. The project sought to map the assets and resources for/of disabled people in their local community as well as needs and gaps, to inform the Coalition’s strategic planning and raise awareness of disability issues across the county.

The article discusses an inclusive, co-productive approach using participatory action research. It focuses on experiences from the pilot stage of the project and considers how the authors worked together with the required knowledge exchange and power-sharing to recruit and train researchers with expertise from their personal experience of disability. Recruitment ensured they had relevant qualities and skills that could be developed, to increase their confidence, knowledge and skills set as researchers. They then undertook photo-elicited, semi-structured interviews with other disabled people, analysed findings and created photographic exhibitions for dissemination and awareness raising.

Demonstrating a commitment to emancipatory research and collective action for change, the discussion considers the promotion of shared values within the research team, and explores the benefits and challenges encountered during the process and how the particular stages were managed to achieve the beneficial outcomes of the pilot. The article seeks to add to the literature of participatory/emancipatory action research for social work.     

Active transportation to support diabetes prevention: Expanding school health promotion programming in an Indigenous community

BackgroundSchool-based physical activity (PA) interventions, including school active transportation (AT), provide opportunities to increase daily PA levels, improves fitness, and reduces risk of diseases, such as type 2 diabetes. Based on a community-identified need, the Kahnawake Schools Diabetes Prevention Project, within an Indigenous community, undertook school travel planning to contribute to PA programming for two elementary schools.MethodsUsing community-based participatory research, the Active & Safe Routes to School’s School Travel Planning (STP) process was undertaken in two schools with an STP-Committee comprised of community stakeholders and researchers. STP activities were adapted for local context including: school profile form, family survey, in-class travel survey, pedestrian-traffic observations, walkability checklist, and student mapping.ResultsSTP data were jointly collected, analyzed and interpreted by researchers and community. Traffic-pedestrian observations, walkability and parent surveys identified key pedestrian-traffic locations, helped develop safe/direct routes, and traffic calming strategies. In-class travel and mapping surveys identified a need and student desire to increase school AT. The STP-Committee translated findings into STP-action plans for two schools, which were implemented in 2014–2015 school year.ConclusionsCombining CBPR with STP merges community and researcher expertise. This project offered evidence-informed practice for active living promotions. Experience and findings could benefit Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities.     

Dynamics of identity and otherness within intercultural feminist practices in Italy

Drawing on fieldwork carried out in 2012–2013, this article explores the dynamics of identity and otherness within selected women’s intercultural associations in Italy in the light of the following issue: how to acknowledge differences among women – based primarily on ‘race’, ethnicity, legal status/citizenship, class and age – while maintaining a common political project. This article focuses on the contexts, which facilitate the formation of such a project by promoting the contesting of rigid categorization of women on grounds of nationality or culture. It first focuses on what is referred to as ‘a starting point a bit displaced’, second on the desire to move beyond divisions on nationality grounds and third on the concept of hybridity as a bridge between women. At the same time, the article confronts those issues that might conceal power differentials among women and argues in favour of a notion of feminist intercultural reflexivity.     

Digital baroque: New media art and cinematic folds

The decision to use participatory visual methods with young people in education, health or public policy research is linked to a desire to allow them to have some greater voice in the research and the professional activities that impact on their lives. But how that ‘voice’ is produced, whose voice it represents, and how the product of that research is used and interpreted are all contentious issues for researchers. This article analyses some of these conceptual, methodological, political and pragmatic issues from the perspective of a current Australian Research Council-funded project working with young people across education and health domains. It is argued that allowing or not allowing visual accounts to speak for themselves is not simply a political decision but one related to epistemological understandings about meaning, and also to different purposes of different visual projects, in particular their relative emphasis on voice as a window to the world of the young people, compared with voice as a window to ‘who I am’. The project discussed is one which aims to give greater authority and centrality to the visual accounts and voices of young people, but also one where researchers understand both the visual and voice as constructed rather than given. Case studies from the project are used to illustrate the way in which these commitments frame decisions about technology and methodology, and also to show and argue for an approach which treats the meaning of the visual evidence as something to be constructed ethnographically and reflexively over time.     

Social work and digitalisation: bridging the knowledge gaps

The aim of this paper is to spark a discussion about how social work in England has responded to digitalisation thus far. It pays attention to relationality, the interaction between people and things and includes reference to the practice landscape, the places and spaces within which social work occurs. It calls for social work to revisit the idea of professionalism in the connected age, through outlining circumstances where practitioners have been called to account for online practices that have compromised public trust. These practice failings indicate that knowledge gaps, pertaining to digital literacies and technological competence in social work education and practice, exist. Therefore, the current requirements for learning and development, pre- and post-qualification, are appraised alongside the preliminary findings of a research project designed to examine the contribution of social work education to the digital socialisation of students in readiness for practice. The suggestion is made that social work should pause to consider ‘digital knowledge gaps’ before rushing to drive technology enhanced practice methods forward.