Understanding Sarason��s Concepts of School Cultures and Change: Joining a Community in School Improvement Efforts

This paper describes an evolving transformative partnership between a large comprehensive university, an urban school system and a predominantly African‐American, low‐income neighborhood. The partnership's originating intent was to apply an array of university, civic and local resources to improve the academic performance of a neighborhood's schools and the health, welfare and economic well‐being of its residents. The extent to which that partnership would precipitate transactional (Sameroff and Fiese, Handbook of early childhood intervention, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 119–149 in 1990 ) synergies among the partners was unanticipated; the long‐term implications for each of the partners of such unfamiliar interactional processes remain unclear but are being systematically monitored over time. Evident at this point, however, it that a process has been initiated that has impacted how the university community, the local public school system, city government and the target neighborhood relate to each other, collaborate with each other and are changing each other. The pace of that process has varied over the years and challenged each partners' expectations and assumptions about the nature and consequences of their involvement. With time and perseverance, however, it appears that all are moving toward a sense of mutual learning and trust and toward extending to each other the benefit of the doubt. This paper discusses the evolution of that process and its implications for university‐school‐community collaborations.     

The Parents Matter! Program: Building a Successful Investigator-Community Partnership

We examine the issues involved in creating and maintaining a successful collaboration between university-based researchers and community members when designing and implementing the Parents Matter! Program (PMP). The roles of focus groups, community advisory boards, and community liaisons are highlighted. PMP provides an illustration of the ongoing process of collaboration between investigators and community members and the benefits and challenges of such a partnership.     

Family Therapy and Alternative Medicine: Acupuncture as a Case in Point

Collaboration between family therapists and alternative medicine practitioners is recently cultivated ground that may prove to be fertile territory for the application of family therapy skills. Acupuncture and family therapy are two healing practices that differ in cultural tradition, language, and technique, yet they appear to share some underlying assumptions suggestive of a natural alliance in helping people with a variety of biopsychosociospiritual problems. This paper describes the process of interdisciplinary collaboration between an acupuncturist and family therapist via a clinical vignette, identifying different types of referral situations, and suggesting factors of effective collaboration that can synergistically enhance a patient and family's treatment.     

Artificial consciousness, artificial emotions, and autonomous robots

Nowadays for robots, the notion of behavior is reduced to a simple factual concept at the level of the movements. On another hand, consciousness is a very cultural concept, founding the main property of human beings, according to themselves. We propose to develop a computable transposition of the consciousness concepts into artificial brains, able to express emotions and consciousness facts. The production of such artificial brains allows the intentional and really adaptive behavior for the autonomous robots. Such a system managing the robot’s behavior will be made of two parts: the first one computes and generates, in a constructivist manner, a representation for the robot moving in its environment, and using symbols and concepts. The other part achieves the representation of the previous one using morphologies in a dynamic geometrical way. The robot’s body will be seen for itself as the morphologic apprehension of its material substrata. The model goes strictly by the notion of massive multi-agent’s organizations with a morphologic control.     

Collaboration and a Self-Help Orientation in Therapy with Suicidal Clients

Working with suicidal clients historically has placed a heavy burden of responsibility on the therapist for a successful outcome. This orientation generally has left clinicians feeling stressed and in need of controlling their clients' behavior; clients, in turn, often have developed unrealistic expectations of therapy or resistance of the therapist's interventions. In this context, the chance for a potentially valuable collaboration between client and therapist is often lost. This paper builds on previous work that has introduced the notion of a collaborative working relationship with suicidal clients. It is argued that the therapeutic process ideally should not only utilize the therapist's knowledge and skills in treating suicidal clients, but also cultivate self-efficacy by encouraging the client to adopt a self-help orientation to therapy. Several general principles of a collaborative/self-help orientation to working with suicidal clients are discussed and a variety of specific therapeutic strategies consistent with this orientation are described.