Food Landscapes: Cooking,Community Service and Art-Making with Teens

ABSTRACT

In this article, we describe Food Landscapes, an interdisciplinary program involving youth who live in an urban community identified as a food desert. Food Landscapes combined socially engaged art-making, cooking, community engagement, and community service to open dialogue with youth about food justice and equity, the meaning of community, and the formation of meaningful relationships between youth and community members who have disabilities. We describe the program and discuss the theory and model bases for the program and lessons learned during program implementation.     

Panic and the Breakdown of Social Order: Popular Myth,Social Theory,Empirical Evidence

Abstract

The academic public that I encounter at my lectures always show surprise when I speak intimately and deeply about the classroom. That public seemed particularly surprised when I said that I was working on a collection of essays about teaching. This surprise is a sad reminder of the way teaching is seen as a duller, less valuable aspect of the academic professions. This perspective on teaching is a common one.     

“They Always Ask What I'm Doing and Who I'm Talking to”: Parental Mediation of Adolescent Interactive Technology Use

Burgeoning technology provides instant access to information and communication. Responsible adults are concerned about the material accessed by adolescent technology users. From an ecological system's lens, using a mixed-methods design, the current study identified adolescent and parent perceptions of parental mediation of adolescent interactive technology use (i.e., cell phones, Internet). Eighty adolescents (16–18 years of age) and their parents (n = 113) participated in the study that identified generational differences in perceptions of parental mediation, techniques for mediating interactive technology (i.e., monitoring data and usage, active mediation, rules, restriction), and adolescent perceptions of the process of parental mediation. We used the results to propose principles for parental mediation of adolescent interactive technology use and provide directions for future research.     

Promoting Deep Learning: A Teaching,Learning and Assessment Endeavour

The need for social workers to develop expertise in critical reflection is now a dominant theme in the literature. How this expertise is achieved, however, remains under‐explored in an environment increasingly focused on outcomes, evidence of performance and teachers' preoccupations with curriculum content and assessment. Students' understanding of critical reflection and how, if at all, their social work education assists in developing this capacity, continue to be under‐represented.

Applying a ‘deep‐learning’ framework, this article outlines an attempt to engage final year social work students in a teaching, learning and assessment exchange that promotes critical reflexivity. It presents the thinking behind the evolution of a unit focused on social work in public welfare and health settings. Using their final assessment exercise in which they are asked to review their learning, it then offers students' responses to that unit. In particular, the paper highlights the personalised practice visions offered by students as they seek to locate themselves, personally and professionally, before making the identity‐challenging transition from student to qualified practitioner.     

Rural Women,Anti-Poverty Strategies,and Black Feminist Thought

Rural U.S. poverty rates have been persistently high. Market-based anti-poverty strategies, specifically microenterprise programs, have gained currency as a feasible avenue for moving women out of poverty. While rural women may share some commonality, homogeneity among rural women is often assumed in poverty scholarship. It is imperative that poverty scholars contribute to closing the gap between theoretical explanations and the actually experiences of poverty among individuals occupying different social locations. As researchers address this gap, this article argues for the value of integrating two important components consistent with black feminist epistemology: (1) an intersectionality perspective, and (2) the voices of the local actors/stakeholders. This article concludes that without a purposeful examination of individuals located at the intersection of race/ethnicity, gender, and/or class; even carefully formulated policy can inadvertently discriminate against or benefit some women more than others.     

Parental health and children's economic well-being

The life course perspective emphasizes that past economic experiences and stage in the life course influence a family's ability to cope with negative life events such as poor health. However, traditional analytic approaches are not well-suited to examine how the impact of negative life events differs based on a family's past economic experiences, nor do they typically account for the potentially spurious association between negative life events and family economic well-being. We use finite mixture modeling to examine how changes in parental health affect children's exposure to poverty. We find that for some children the association between family head's health and children's exposure to poverty is spurious, while for other children family head's poor health is associated with increased risk of economic deprivation. The extent to which a family head's poor health alters children's economic well-being depends on a child's family's underlying economic trajectory and past history of exposure to disadvantage.     

Observed Infant Reactions During Live Interparental Conflict

Associations between interparental conflict and infant reactions were examined. Infants' history of exposure to interparental conflict and infant reactive temperament were examined as moderators. A community sample of 74 infants, aged 6–14 months, participated with their parents. Behavioral observations were made of parents' marital conflict and their infants' reactions. Parents reported on their emotional states during conflict, infants' history of exposure to interparental conflict, and infant temperament. Multilevel modeling indicated that infants showed differential responses to marital conflict; destructive and depressive conflict were associated with increased infant discussion attending and negative reactions, whereas constructive conflict was associated with decreased discussion attending and negative reactions. Infants' history of exposure to marital conflict and infant reactive temperament emerged as moderators.     

The over-representation of indigenous children in the Australian child welfare system

Similar to other wealthy countries with colonised indigenous populations, Australia's indigenous children, those of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander descent, are seriously over-represented in the child welfare system. The specific dimensions of this problem warrant detailed examination. It is useful to consider factors such as rates of entry to care, length of stay and the nature of services provided in order to understand the problem more fully. This article uses child protection, out-of-home care and juvenile justice administrative data to examine the levels of disproportionality at key decision points in the child welfare system. The data show that child welfare interventions are persistently more intrusive for indigenous children, and that levels of disproportionality have not improved over time. More comprehensive child and family welfare policies are needed to address indigenous disadvantage. Despite calls by indigenous community agencies for more input to decision-making, their participation in the Australian child welfare system remains marginal.