Florence E McCarthy

University-community engagement : exploring service-learning options within the practicum

Since 1999, pre‐service teachers undertaking the Bachelor of Teaching (Secondary) Program at the University of Western Sydney have participated in an alternate practicum called Professional Experience 3 (PE3). This practicum encourages students to engage in broader educational settings within local communities. Increasingly, a number of service‐learning opportunities have been developed, most notably, senior student tutoring programs and the involvement of students in the Plan‐It Youth project in conjunction with the Department of Education and Training (DET) and the South‐western Sydney Institute of TAFE. A focus of these programs has been to address the issues related to students at risk of leaving school early within the local South‐western Sydney community. In this paper we discuss the benefits of these programs to the university, pre‐service‐teachers, school students and school communities, and the broader local community. Specifically, we examine service learning as a conduit for the development and maintenance of meaningful symbiotic relationships between the university and the educational community, and pre‐service teachers and the local community. Finally, we look towards the future and highlight the challenges and opportunities for service‐learning programs within the practicum.

Purdah and Changing Patterns of Social Control among Rural Women in Bangladesh.

Using data gathered in 1966 and between 1975 and 1982 this paper shows how changes in womens productive activities and in the demand for female wage labor have affected the accoutrements and expression of purdah among Bangladeshi villagers. Purdah is defined as the specific pattern of exchange between the sexes. Purdah incorporating as it does patterns of social control in combination with religous justification changes in saliency as social conditions change. 1 reason is that the ability of a society to institutionalize and perpetuate particular forms of social behavior depends on the continuation and stability of particular patterns of social organization. Traditional patterns of social control encompassed by the purdah system enhanced the status of the families of women who observed purdah as well as providing the basis for the personal status of individual women. The traditional observance of purdah was generated and maintained by a distinctive sexual division of labor and the status and condition of rural families contributed to the form of purdah observed in earlier periods of Bangladesh. An illustration of the changing nature of the purdah system was the advent and popularization of the burkha in perindependent Bangladesh. This garment which conceals a woman from head to toe actually increases the mobility of Muslim women thereby enhancing their social participation and visibility this paper argues with mixed results. In the more recent period as the ability of 1 person to support a family has decreased and the household itself is threatened women and children are increasingly forced to provide for their own subsistence. Having few skills except those related to agriculture they seek employment close to their homes in areas related to agriculture. While it is apparent that old forms of repression and control have passed away what has replaced them has had mixed effects on women. Greater mobility and freedom of movement have been gained because of deteriorating socioeconomic conditions; along with this great mobility however has come even greater personal responsibility for ones subsistence.

Digital natives, dropouts and refugees: Educational challenges for innovative cities

Abstract However cities respond to the monumental challenges of climate change, trans-national migration, diversity, and scarce resources, one aspect of city life remains certain: children will continue to require an education. How this education is shaped, how its content is formulated and delivered, and how it constructs who a student is, remain open and troubling questions. The larger social and political context in which schools are embedded will also help shape the innovations that will be deployed in an effort to raise the quality of education and encourage innovative citizens of the future.

Conditions influencing rural and town women's participation in the labor force: Some important considerations

Abstract This paper suggests that changes in the basic conditions of subsistence of Bangladeshi families, particularly increasing destitution and landlessness, are prime factors in forcing increasing numbers of rural and urban women into the wage sector of the economy. It has been found that as an initial step towards womens control over their own lives, participation in the labor force may be considered an advance for women in comparison to previous forms of labor. It is suggested, however, that the patterning of wage labor in less developed capitalist countries, to the extent that it follows Western trends, has every possibility of duplicating in Bangladesh the structures of womens exploitation and differential income earning opportunities hindering womens development in other countries, It is also suggested that traditional forms of social control legitimating and governing the subordination of women in Bangladesh are being undermined by worsening socio-economic conditions. It has been found that the traditional system controlling womens subordination, which is known as purdah, may be losing saliency for increasing numbers of rural families. This leads one to conclude that the development and extension of a wage economy brings new forms of social control involving contradictory results, exploitation, and dependence on the one hand, and changing conditions of independence and control on the other .

Positive Community Relations: Border Crossings and Repositioning the ‘Other’

Positive psychology examines factors that enable individuals, organisations and communities to develop, be empowered, become self-determining and thrive. Positive community relations, however, are the least developed area of positive psychology. This chapter presents a case study that illustrates how positive community relations can be created, overcoming complex real and symbolic boundaries through the development of joint activities that bring disparate groups together. Through the establishment of an NGO-sponsored in-school programme teaching local Indigenous languages to primary school children, participants including school staff, primary students, Indigenous female elders, Indigenous high-school students and university pre-service secondary teachers, created spaces that allowed new relationships to form. This process led to a repositioning of themselves in relation to each other. The positive relationships and mutual benefits participants created during the programme illustrate how positive community relations can be forged within communities long beset with patterns of differentiated power and exclusion.