Is community necessary? Quasi-philosophical ruminations

In responding to and examining Mary Anne Raywid's (1989) adoption of community building as an aim for schools, I survey a number of types of communities, including recreational, intentional and language communities. In considering all these communities, I try to show both the power of communities in our personal lives and some idea of why we might be of two minds about promoting community as an ideal in the modern world and in schools in particular.     

情境理论的迁移观及其教育意义

支撑—活动观、社会共享认知观以及实践共同体观是当前情境理论中具有代表性的迁移观点。这些观点分别从不同的角度强调情境特性对迁移的影响,并主张在常规的学校教育中突出情境、尤其是社会文化与社会实践情境的作用。     

Pathways to Help-Seeking and Mental Health Service Provision for African Female Survivors of Conflict-Related Sexualized Gender-Based Violence

ABSTRACT

African migration to Canada is a relatively new development. There is a dearth of literature on the mental health of this newer immigrant population, especially those from the conflict zones of Sub-Saharan Africa. Our exploratory study examined the experiences of African female survivors of conflict-related sexualized violence based on the insights of six community mental health professionals. Guided by interpretive inquiry, semi-structured interviews were analyzed thematically and interpreted in light of multicultural feminist and transnational perspectives. Findings highlight refugee women’s resilience in the face of threats of social isolation and stigma. Their prioritization of assistance with practical needs, parenting, community/social supports, and education attainment in the context of counseling raises questions about agency and identity in understanding the relationships between female survivors, what they identify as important to their recovery, and their pathways to accessing mental health services.     

Sport,Girls, Trouble and Humour: Black and Indian Boys Negotiating Gender,Race and Class in a Formerly White Single Sex School in South Africa

This article reports on an interview study conducted by Deevia Bhana and Rob Pattman of Grade 11 (16–17 year old) boys attending different kinds of public schools in the Durban, South Africa. It investigated their accounts personal lives and identities as young men and women in and outside their schools. We conducted semi-structured interviews with the participants to determine how they experienced school and how they presented themselves in the interviews, their interests, aspirations, relations with other boys and girls in and out of school, and the kinds of identifications they made. The data for this are from two interviews conducted with black and Indian boys at Elmsdale, a formerly white boys' high school near Durban with an excellent academic and sporting reputation. We analyzed the data using narrative and discourse analysis. Concerns about being marginalised in school were expressed by both the black and the Indian boys. Issues of gender, race, class, sexuality and power were prominent in the interviews, notably when the boys were discussing sport, trouble, being funny and girls.     

Sole Expression: A Trauma-Informed Dance Intervention

The primary treatment for individuals who have encountered violence and/or abuse is trauma-focused cognitive and behavioral modalities. However, these therapeutic approaches are not always effective for youth who have encountered this type of trauma. Trauma is often communicated through the body via physical ailments, particularly when words are insufficient to capture an individual’s experience or when adequate processing of the trauma is not possible due to profound stress. Dance offers an alternative form of therapy that can address “where” the trauma is held, relieve tension, and restore a sense of ownership with one’s body and mind. In this article, we discuss the development of Sole Expression, a trauma-informed hip-hop dance program for youth who have experienced abuse and/or exposure to violence. We provide an overview of establishing the team, securing funding, trauma training, program curriculum, and the related research. We conclude with recommendations for best practices that benefit both practitioners and the young people served.     

中学生厌学心理及其干预与学习效率的相关研究

本研究旨在考察两个问题：1．心理咨询是否是改变中学生厌学心理的有效途径,如果是,它能够在多大程度上改变厌学心理;2．厌学心理的改善能否有效提高中学生学习效率。本实验用问卷调查法从183名中学生中筛选出有厌学心理的学生24名。运用个体心理咨询、团体心理咨询等手段对这24名学生进行为期4个月干预、结果表明：心理咨询能够有效且明显地改善厌学心理。但要完全消除厌学心理则还需要辅以其他干预手段;随着学生厌学心理的改善,其学习效率也相应有了明显的提高。     

Raising Salafī Children in the West

Despite the importance salafīs place on children’s education, this aspect of their discourse has hardly been studied. The present article examines how salafī jurists based in the Arab world, salafī imams based in the West and salafī authors of English-language children’s books conceptualize the norms for raising children, and what they believe should be done specifically to assure the virtuous Islamic upbringing of children in Western societies. Exploring issues ranging from what constitutes proper schooling to whether Muslim children may befriend non-Muslim children and whether it is permissible to celebrate birthdays, play foosball or play with dolls, the article analyses the educational challenges salafī communities in the West face as enclaves that resist both majority secular societies and the majority among Muslim minorities, and presents the nuances, and in some cases contestations, among salafī leaders as to how these challenges should be addressed and prioritized.     

Cultures of teaching in childhood: Formal schooling and Maya sibling teaching at home

Culture can be thought of a set of shared practices, beliefs, and values that are transmitted across generations through language [Bruner, J. (1990). Acts of meaning. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press]. Teaching is one way that culture is transmitted, but forms of teaching vary across cultures and across activity settings within cultures. This article explores the impact of culture on styles of teaching in a place where more than one cultural model of teaching is found: the Zinacantec Maya of Chiapas, Mexico. Zinacantecs have an indigenous model of teaching that applies to the learning of informal tasks, such as making tortillas and weaving. When children go to school, the indigenous model interacts with the model found at school, and this mixed model is transferred back home to sibling interactions. Videotaped ethnographic observations and quantitative discourse analyses reveal cultural patterns in the development of children's teaching.     

Intentional explanations and radical theories of education

In this paper I argue that Marxist studies of schools have overlooked the power of intentional explanations to explain schooling practices and policies. This oversight is at least in part due to many radical analyses failing to distinguish between explaining the acquisition and persistence of beliefs and determining the social consequences that follow from acting on beliefs. I further contend that radical researchers examining schooling practices must develop a more rigorous and refined conception of capitalist class interests.