"They're Worse Off Than Us"- The Social Construction of European Space and Boundaries in the German/Polish Twin-City Guben-Gubin

In the context of globalization and European integration, the interplay between social boundaries and territorially defined political borders becomes more complex in that they become increasingly delinked. In some regional settings, this might imply that while the political border is softened, the socio-cultural closure between the border communities becomes even tighter. This article investigates this issue in relation to the German-Polish border region. Looking at the German-Polish twin-city, Guben-Gubin, the first section describes the ways in which cultural closure materializes. Emphasis is given to the link between cultural closure and an increasing alienation of local people from the Europeanized symbolic cross-border politics pursued by the local and regional political elite(s). The second section, however, argues that the "cultural closure" thesis is perhaps too simplistic to grasp the complexity of cross-border interaction of local people. Investigating the cross-border strategies of three milieux, the article concludes that what can be found in a setting like Guben-Gubin is in fact a complex configuration of openings and closures at various spatial and symbolic levels, sometimes taking place simultaneously in one and the same milieu.     

A Call for Field Coordination Leadership to Implement the Signature Pedagogy

This article presents an overview of how social work leadership skills can assist field coordinators to implement the signature pedagogy in their schools. Although this call has been made before, no other article has described specific planning steps to implement this initiative. This work fills a distinct void in the literature about this subject. The main assumptions are that (1) schools must adopt and clearly operationalize field education as their signature pedagogy and (2) field coordinators need to lead this initiative. We provide field coordinators and schools with recommendations about how to lead this important and necessary organizational paradigm shift. The article addresses social work leadership, developing a more field-centric curriculum to operationalize the signature pedagogy, shaping a school’s culture to embrace this important and required initiative, and offers suggestions to proactively plan this process.     

Gate‐keeping for professional social work practice

The profession of social work has difficulty terminating students for non‐academic reasons because of an inability to define suitability for the profession and to formulate concrete criteria. Although discerning who is, or is not, personally suitable to practice social work is bound to be challenging, there is a growing realization that this task must be undertaken. This study was undertaken in response to this challenge, and seeks to increase our knowledge base about the personal and professional dimensions of social work, which result in suitable and unsuitable practices among social work students and practicing professional social workers. This article examines data gathered on the subject of professional suitability from a focus group and a series of individual interviews with social work field instructors. The authors attempt to broaden our understanding of personal suitability for the practice of social work and to achieve greater operational specificity to guide decision making for social work educators, as social work educators ultimately must make the critical decision about who should be admitted to the social work profession. It is hoped that this study can serve as a building block for further research. It seems clear that the choices to be explored must meet our obligation to society in general, to social work employers, and especially to clients.     

Social Work Students' Feelings and Concerns about the Ending of their Fieldwork Supervision

This qualitative study examines the feelings and concerns of 80 social work students at the ending of their fieldwork supervision. The findings show that students who described good relationships reported mixed or ambivalent feelings about the ending, deriving from their warm feelings of attachment, on the one hand, and from their drive to grow and develop, on the other. Those who described poor or fair relationships were spared feelings of sadness or loss, but they were also left without good feelings and with little ability to express their bad ones. The paper offers practical suggestions for improving the supervisory process and ending the fieldwork supervision.     

What Changes MSW Students' View on the Mission of Social Work?

Little is known about how professional social work education affects students' view on the social work mission. Using a secondary analysis of larger longitudinal data collected from masters in social work (MSW) students in California, USA, this study sought to explore the relationship among the students' demographic characteristics, their primary reasons for pursuing an MSW degree, and their view on the mission of social work at the time of entering an MSW program, whether the students' view on the mission of social work changed in the course of an MSW education, and factors contributing to a change of MSW students' view on the social work mission—individual adaptation vs societal change—between the beginning and the end of the MSW program. The results showed that students' degree of social action involvement, type of field practicum, and ideological variables predicted students' view changes or adherence between entering the MSW program and graduating.     

A Multi‐Program Collaboration in Field Education

This paper describes the development of a US‐based field education collaboration among three social work programs that includes: field instructor orientation, continuing education for field instructors, an advisory board, a joint website and database, a field instructor manual and selected joint forms. Benefits, challenges, considerations and strategies will be offered for programs that wish to embark on similar projects.     

Properties of Designs in Experiments on Spatial Lattices

ABSTRACT

When spatial variation is present in experiments, it is clearly sensible to use designs with favorable properties under both generalized and ordinary least squares. This will make the statistical analysis more robust to misspecification of the spatial model than would be the case if designs were based solely on generalized least squares. In this article, treatment information is introduced as a way of studying the ordinary least squares properties of designs. The treatment information is separated into orthogonal frequency or polynomial components which are assumed to be independent under the spatial model. The well-known trend-resistant designs are those with no treatment information at the very low order frequency or polynomial components which tend to have the higher variances under the spatial model. Ideally, designs would be chosen with all the treatment information distributed at the higher-order components. However, the results in this article show that there are limits on how much trend resistance can be achieved as there are many constraints on the treatment information. In addition, appropriately chosen Williams squares designs are shown to have favorable properties under both ordinary and generalized least squares. At all times, the ordinary least squares properties of the designs are balanced against the generalized least squares objectives of optimizing neighbor balance.     

四川青少年田径后备人才培养的现状与策略

鉴于20世纪80年代以来传统三级训练体制“学训矛盾”突出、耽误了不少后备人才的学业和出路,近年来,四川省在青少年田径后备人才的培养方面又作了新的探索,推出了以“华阳模式”为代表的“体教结合”培养模式。为了促进四川田径后备人才进一步全面发展,应当在“华阳模式”的基础上,提高人才选拔的科学化水平,加快竞赛制度和方法的改革,加强教练员队伍建设,并可因地制宜,利用地域优势,培育一些重点项目和特色项目,以提高后备人才的运动竞技水平,提升其文化素质,逐步建立健全完善的后备人才培养体制。     

Choosing fields in an expansionary era: Comparing two cohorts of baccalaureate degree-holders in the United States and Canada

In an era of expanding postsecondary markets and heightened student and institutional competition, students’ field of study decisions may be becoming an increasingly important point of differentiation in the process of social mobility. Drawing on the two most recent cohorts of the Baccalaureate and Beyond and National Graduates Surveys, this paper examines and compares field of study choices among American and Canadian baccalaureate degree-holders. Consistent with existing research, gender remains an important and consistent predictor of field of study choices. In Canada, the analyses show some evidence that the gender gap for business and management is shrinking, but the engineering and mathematics gap remains significant. In the U.S. the situation was reversed, as the engineering gap shrunk and the business and management gap did not change across cohorts. Moderate family background effects, strong and consistent academic ability effects and growing academic aspiration effects were found across most analyses, lending support to theories that predict family background has direct and indirect effects on higher education choices.