Mordecai Arieli

The occupational experience of residential child and youth care workers : caring and its discontents

Contents Introduction: A Guiding Approach * The Setting and the Role * Situations * Who Hurts? * Who Is Hurt? * What Hurts? * The Residential Care Setting as a Negotiated Order * Care, Content, and Commitment * Reference Notes Included

Classroom Seating As a Definition of Situation: Observations in an Elementary School in One Development Town.

Classroom seating patterns and their changes have implications and meanings.

The two-fold care organization: on the combining of group and foster care

In this paper the theoretical grounds and the daily organizational practices of the foster home group care (FHGC) experiment are described and evaluated. The FHGC experiment combines residential care and foster care into one program for high-risk children. This is done in an attempt to utilize the built-in organizational advantages and to neutralize the built-in organizational disadvantages of each of the two strategies. The children in care constantly move between foster homes and a group care center, all located within one small agricultural community in Israel. Ethnographic descriptions—based on observations of and interviews with professional caregivers and foster parents—show that while the foster home provides regular links with a normal community, the group care center provides a continuous experience of belonging. Thus, the foster home reduces the impact of closedness and totality characteristic of regular residential group care programs, while the group care program reduces feelings of incomplete belonging experienced in the foster home.

Opportunities and Risks in Residential Education: The Admission of Day Students to Residential Schools in Israel

Residential schools in Israel often serve as facilities for the educational advancement of youth from socio-economically disadvantaged strata whose families live all over the country. Many of these schools face a dilemma in deciding whether to admit day students from relatively well-to-do neighboring communities. In the present study, three residential schools with contrasting policies regarding the approach to day student admissions were studied. The three orientations included: (1) Institutional adaptation, or conforming to the demands and expectations of the surrounding society and seeking its support; (2) Technical production, or concentrating on the original goals even if this created a barrier between the residential school and its social surroundings and deprived the program of the potential benefits of community involvement; and (3) Loosening the organizational structure, as the school strives to fulfill its traditional goals on behalf of weak populations while simultaneously adopting goals that matched the academic expectations of its middle class day students. For this purpose the school involved in effect split into two, maintaining almost separate classes for residents and day students and holding normative schooling activity in the morning and activities of educational fostering and social rehabilitation in the afternoon and evening. It is suggested that each of these three approaches to the admission of day students to residential schools involves risks, and the paper describes these risks and how the management boards of the three residential schools attempted to cope with them.