Community organizing and educational change: a reconnaissance

Ten years ago community organizing as a form of educational change had only begun to challenge traditional models of school reform. Yet a decade later, community organizing has led to important changes in school and community relationships that have been documented by scholars in the areas of education, sociology, social work, and political science. Current US President Barack Obama, a former organizer who worked on the South Side of Chicago, has given new visibility to community organizing. The American Educational Research Association (AERA) has approved the creation of a new Special Interest Group (SIG) on the topic of community and youth organizing. This article traces the origins, spread, and impacts of community organizing on educational change, arguing that it provides an important repertoire of practices for change leaders.     

In the Service of Self-Determination: Teacher Education,Service-Learning,and Community Reorganizing

Influenced by Third World Liberation social movements in the United States and abroad, this article applies a serve-the-people concept to service-learning in education. Rooted in pedagogies more traditionally associated with ethnic studies and community organizing, and informed by sociocultural and critical frameworks in education, this article offers insights from school community spaces that serve K–12 youth from different urban working-class neighborhoods. Transformative opportunities for grassroots collaboration, learning, agency, and community reorganizing are explored with implications for students, teachers, teacher educators, and community workers concerned with social justice.     

俱乐部公益职能开发与社区文化建设初探——以柳州为例

在社会转型影响下,城市社区承担政府与社会各方剥离的文体活动的组织管理职能,压力日益增大。以柳州市商业健身俱乐部运营现状为例,探讨如何开发利用俱乐部的公益性职能,重视创造社会效益,创新经营管理模式,以俱乐部为平台整合社区的体育资源,建设社区体育俱乐部和俱乐部联盟,共同承担对社区文化体育活动的组织管理职能,促进社区文化生活的丰富多彩与可持续发展。     

论构建和谐虚拟社区

虚拟社区在精神文化层面上分化和聚合着网民，是新型的社会维系方式，是现代社会生活的重要的共同体。社区和谐是社会和谐的基础。虚拟社区既存在有利于社会和谐的因素，也有令冲突加剧、破坏社会和谐的可能，这值得高度重视。当前必须进行虚拟社区内部的和谐构建，也需要进行虚拟社区与社会整体的和谐构建。     

Where’s the Community Practice? Gaps in Community Practice Education in a Clinical-Community Social Work Program

Although the profession of social work has a rich history of supporting community organizing and engagement efforts, there has been a trend toward educational programs that focus heavily on the clinical components of social work. The purpose of this study was to perform an exploratory investigation of the potential need for more community-centered educational content at a school of social work in the Gulf Coast, which advertises itself as offering a clinical-community practice program. Researchers developed and administered a questionnaire to all current students of the School of Social Work to evaluate the program’s efforts to provide a balanced clinical-community practice education. Student responses to the questionnaire suggested that the community practice learning opportunities at the school were not represented equally in quality or quantity to the clinical material. Students reported limited access to field placements that focused on community practice. The researchers suggest that the results of this study are reflective of a potential national trend in social work education toward a narrower focus on clinical practice, and away from its roots in community organizing and advocacy.     

Living in history and Changing the World: An Investigation Into the Culture of All Stars Project,Inc.

This article focuses on the experiences of individuals organizing at All Stars Project Inc. in New York City. Interview and observation were employed to understand individuals' involvement and commitment to the organization. Results show that the perceived successes of the organization can be attributed to strong leadership, fostering community, commitment to action and social change, and valuing empathy.     

Collective Worldviews and Health of Pacific American Elders

The community as part of the social environment is a key social determinant of health and is a central organizing feature of Pacific culture. A collective worldview informs the way social support is conceived in Pacific cultures, and it is core to Samoan and Tongan elders’ perceptions of the influence of community on health and well-being. In turn, inability to fulfill community responsibilities may be an indication of poor health and well-being and may be distressful because of this collective worldview. Using principles of grounded theory that informed the data collection and analysis, in-depth interviews were conducted with 10 Samoan and 10 Tongan elders in Hawai'i, the port of entry for most Pacific Americans migrating to the U.S. and the location where the majority of Samoans and Tongans reside. Four main themes—community norms, social functions of community, community capacity, and negative community influences—were identified as community factors affecting the health and well-being of Samoan and Tongan elders. Implications for research and policy practice are offered.     

转型期城市社区功能变迁与社区制度创新

社区作为地域性社会生活共同体，集中体现了社会转型的基本特点，当代中国正处于从传统社会向现代社会转型的过程中，城市社区的结构与功能都发生着越来越深刻的变化，这一变化客观上要求改变原有的社会管理体制，创立新的社区组织形式及社区运行机制。     

Classroom Needs of Community College Students with Asperger's Disorder and Autism Spectrum Disorders

Community college students with Asperger's Disorder and Autism Spectrum Disorders can experience significant challenges from the social aspect of classroom learning and college life in comparison to their peers. This article explains unique challenges of postsecondary learners with Asperger's Disorder and Autism Spectrum Disorders. It also presents several classroom practices than can be beneficial to college students with these disorders. Practices discussed include those related to helping students get started and make the transition into a new course, organizing learning space, following class routines, and directly addressing individual social concerns.     

The Utility of Simulated Clients in Macro-Practice Courses

Over the past several decades, the use of simulated or standardized clients has been an important area of pedagogy for social work education in training students to work with individuals, families, and groups in practice settings, often in preparation for a practicum placement. Little in the extant literature, however, has focused on the possible utilization of this pedagogical tool in preparing students for engagement at the macro level, such as community development, organizing, policy practice, or other types of involvement with large systems. This article considers the possible strengths and benefits of simulated clients within macro-level courses—especially relative to experiential activities that don’t involve simulated clients—as well as important logistical considerations related to such use.     

中国地方组织化与乡村治理——中国政治发展的微观分析

发展与治理的目的都在于形成一种现代社会秩序。组织化是其达成目的的重要手段,组织化的过程即是社会秩序生成的过程。社会秩序的生成有两种机制:唯理建构与理性自生,组织化的过程也是如此。文章从中国地方组织化与乡村治理从而形成乡村现代社会秩序的过程入手,对中国政治发展做了一个微观的分析。     

Integrating Video Documentary Into the Classroom: A Community Assessment Assignment

Community assessment is a strategy commonly taught to social work students to identify a community’s strengths and challenges. This article describes the value of using video documentary as part of a community assessment assignment. We identify the advantages of using video documentary in the assessment process and the reporting of findings. We discuss the preproduction, production, and postproduction steps necessary to produce a video documentary and illustrate how such assignments can be incorporated into a social work course. We conclude by identifying the educational benefits accrued to students.     

Using Photovoice as a Tool to Engage Social Work Students in Social Justice

In order to ensure that social workers graduating from social work programs embrace social justice's central role in their professional careers, educators must find creative, theoretically grounded, practice-relevant ways of conveying this value and socializing social work students. This article describes the use of Photovoice as one tool for helping convey that value and describes its theoretical underpinning and use in a social work course. Originally developed as a participatory action research approach largely in public health, Photovoice can also serve as a powerful social work tool that facilitates the development of critical consciousness among community members who photograph and discuss elements of their lives and community. The author describes using this strategy with social work students, asking them as community members themselves to engage in the process of documenting, discussing, and transforming their analysis into an advocacy plan using the photographs. Through this process, the students learn about the power of collaborative creativity and strategic messaging. In the process of demonstrating the importance of relationship and the power of “problem-posing” the professor, as facilitator, role-models while teaching and engendering increasing critical consciousness among class participants.     

Building and sustaining community in asynchronous learning networks

This article applies the concept of classroom community to asynchronous learning networks (ALNs) by taking on the issue of how best to design and implement a course that fosters community among learners who are physically separated from each other. The following factors that can influence sense of community among distant learners are examined: student–instructor ratio, transactional distance, social presence and instructor immediacy, lurking, social equality, collaborative learning, group facilitation, and self-directed learning.     

社区基金会:地位与前景——对一个类社区基金会的个案研究

当下,社区基金会对于中国的学界和实践界仍然是个相当陌生的概念。但是转型中出现的一些回应本土问题的草根性组织已渐具社区基金会的雏形——“类社区基金会”。在探索和实践的过程中,类社区基金会积极激活并建构社区社会资本,整合社区资源,满足着一些弱势群体通过官方正式救助渠道不能及时接纳或者不能充分满足的福利需求,并在一定程度上促进了社会整合。在国家单中心福利供给模式迈向福利多元主义的进程中,福利取向的非政治威胁/危险的类社区基金会有可能会转型为社区基金会,成为社区建设和可持续发展一个有潜力的切入点和支撑点。     

Pedagogies of being with: Witnessing,testimonio, and critical love in everyday social movement

This conceptual article explores education and the relational in everyday social movement. I highlight a single, local community event—a Speak Out—and travel with scholarship on public pedagogy, witnessing, and Latina feminist theories of coalition to articulate pedagogies of ‘being with’ in community activism for racial justice. My interpretive vignettes of the Speak Out are part of a larger ethnographic study focusing on a segment of a rural/small city community that moved with intention to teach and learn racial justice. While larger concrete goals were crucial and at the center of the community’s curriculum for justice, the various sites and forms of race-conscious pedagogy in public life—community forums, vigils, celebrations, mural projects—were also enactments of a profound commitment to the relational, to finding common ground in difficult solidarities. With a focus on the testimonios of three women of Color participants in the Speak Out, I show how witnessing and testimonio were at the center of pedagogies of ‘being with.’ In this work of education, the women (1) redefined community, accountability, and ally work, (2) exposed the fissures in social justice organizing across difference, describing commitment to social action with rather than for those most affected by institutional violence, and (3) affirmed the knowledge, histories, and self-determination of people of Color while challenging self-defeating stereotypes. Critical love sustained an ethics of openness to difference and facilitated the intentional work of creating race-conscious learning communities.     

Latina/o Parent Organizing for Educational Justice: An Ethnographic Account of Community Building and Radical Healing

This article describes a parent organizing effort with Latina/o immigrant parents in a large, high-poverty, racially and linguistically diverse urban school district. Drawing from ethnographic research and the theoretical framework of mujerismo, it examines the relational processes of community building and radical healing that occurred in weekly community-based parent workshops. Findings suggest the need for more research that empirically examines the relational, embodied, and pedagogical dimensions of parent organizing work.     

The discursive construction of the ‘competent’ learner-worker: from key competencies to ‘employability skills’1

Australian unions have adopted new organizing methods to rebuild and develop their organizations. This represents a change in direction from the commitment to partnership and tripartite planning that characterized the Accord period under the Labor governments of the 1980s and 1990s to a new focus on capacity building. A serious decline in union density along with shifts in the labour process has led unions to focus on recruiting and organizing new members. The vitality involved is tempered by a hostile legal climate that supports workplace flexibility, casualization, fragmentation and low-wage work, while curtailing the rights of unions to recruit and organize. This paper explores the common heritage between the new organizing and theories of popular education, radical history and social movement experience. The paper suggests that contemporary efforts to regenerate unions as assertive organizations that rely on developing and educating new activists and leaders can benefit from drawing on emancipatory traditions of popular education, radical history and community organizing, and in so doing avoid an uncritical adoption of what might become simply a new set of organizing techniques.     

Rebuilding New Orleans: A Community Field Learning Experience

This article examines how to set up educational seminars for social work students that expose students, first-hand, to a natural or man-made disaster's physical and human impact on a community. These short, intensive experiential seminars help students appreciate the social work role in addressing extreme cases of trauma and loss that have immediate application to their professional work and studies at home. The study also presents evidence via personal reflections of students and faculty about the value-added benefits of the seminar learning experience in terms of the students' integration of course material, readings, and field placement experiences, and their personal and professional growth and maturation as beginning social workers.     

A Social-Justice-Based Resident Assistant (RA) Training Program on a Midsized Rural Community College Campus

Social justice education within the community college setting has not been an academic focus to date; yet, community colleges remain an environment for a diverse student population due to their low cost, open access, and variety of course delivery methods. Rural community colleges, however, may pose an interesting challenge to those wishing to implement social justice initiatives within coursework and existing programs. This article provides an example of a social justice training program that was developed for resident assistants on a midsized, rural community college in the Midwest, with a booming residential student population, and the challenges encountered during the phases of the project. Results of pre- and postassessments with the participants of the training suggest that a quality training program can equip students with the tools needed to feel more confident in their abilities to perform their job well.