Informal Education: A New Lens on Socially Engaged Design Practices

The disciplinary intersection between community work and design is under‐explored. Despite similarities in both the context and values of the work, there has not been a significant critical comparison of their respective approaches in either theory or practice. This article suggests that informal education offers an alternative lens to consider both disciplines and inform future practice. More specifically, it considers the relevance of informal education principles in design education and design practice that has an explicit social focus. This discussion is drawn from doctoral practitioner action research in Scotland during 2016–18. The fieldwork focused on the different outlooks and approaches to work in community settings from both design and community work perspectives.     

Creating a Continuing Education Pathway for Newly Arrived Immigrants and Refugee Communities

With the increase in the number of displaced peoples, the demand for skilled social workers from diverse backgrounds to serve them is critical. This article explores a continuing education program that prepares precollege individuals from newly arriving communities who will work as entry-level workers serving these immigrant and refugee communities. The article focuses on the development of a Case Management Certificate Program as a response to community-identified issues, then presents a discussion exploring the educational pathways and unique contributions of these individuals. The article calls for the profession to explore how continuing education pathways can bridge service gaps, contribute to the knowledge base of social work, and meet current labor market demands.     

非正规经济发展与农民工就业状况变化分析--以上海市为例

非正规经济的迅速发展不仅没有给主要在非正规经济领域谋生的农民工带来多少益处，反而加剧了农民工的边缘化地位。形塑社会改革逻辑，谋求经济增长和社会状况的自然改善是一个急待研究探讨的课题。     

Empowerment Through Collaboration in a State University System

Historically, social workers have been aware of the power of group resources and the importance of networking for their clients and for themselves as professionals. This article is the outgrowth of a collaboration paper presented by the authors at the Association of Baccalaureate Social Work Program Directors Annual Conference on September 22, 1986 in San Antonio, Texas. Four separate social work education programs within a state university system formed an informal collaborative association to address common concerns, develop strategies to enhance resources and to foster mutual support. The context, developmental process, barriers, activities, issues, outcomes and benefits of the collaborative association are described.     

Lady Albemarle’s youth workers: contested professional identities in English youth work 1958–1985

This article examines tensions and developments in youth work following the Albemarle Report in 1960, which sought to revive the flagging youth service. It uses oral history interviews with former youth workers and club members in London and Liverpool, archival research looking at the documents of voluntary youth clubs and associations in London and Liverpool, and national policy documents to uncover ideas about the professional youth worker between 1958 and 1985. It examines three main areas of tension: between older and newer methods in youth work, between volunteers and those with a sense of themselves as professional workers, and the conflict between those in voluntary youth association management, allied professions (e.g. teaching and social work) and the youth worker. Ultimately it shows youth work was professionalising at this time but that its status remained unclear. This article aids our understanding of professionalisation, informal education, and youth in post-war Britain.     

Rules, Right and Wrong, and Children

The article is an informal distillation of conversations from severalworkshops held with teachers over a period of several years. Discussionswere focused around examples of ordinary classroom occurrences. Teachersin the workshops analyzed incidents, some simple, some multifaceted, asexamples of the domains of social knowledge, including moral, socialconvention, and personal/psychological, which though unique, sometimesoverlap. Conversations included possible resolutions. A final section,observations and affirmations, includes a discussion of the implicationsfor a domain appropriate approach to classroom interactions betweenteachers and children.     

“Actually, I Wanted to Learn”: Study-related knowledge exchange on social networking sites

Social media open up multiple options to add a new dimension to learning and knowledge processes. Particularly, social networking sites allow students to connect formal and informal learning settings. Students can find like-minded people and organize informal knowledge exchange for educational purposes. However, little is known about in which way students use social networking sites for informal learning and about characteristics of these students. In this paper, three studies examined the study-related knowledge exchange via StudiVZ, the German equivalent of Facebook. Results indicated that about one fifth of participants exchange study-related knowledge through StudiVZ and that these students are especially freshers seeking contact with other students and orientation. Consistent with previous research, it is shown that students use social networking sites mainly for social interaction and integration. However, results also imply that communication about social issues on social networking sites goes hand in hand with study-related knowledge exchange.     

Teachers' labour,class and the politics of exchange

In this article questions are raised about the adequacy of our theoretical frameworks for analysing teachers as class workers and actors, and as an occupational group. The problem of adequacy stems from using labour process theory and production relations as the only sphere for determining class location and class relations and in doing so fails to capture the complex way in which class relations are formed. Following Marx, the author observes that an adequate framework for conceptualising class must take into account, not only the social relations of production within the sphere of production, exchange, distribution and consumption, but how each mediates and transforms the other. This article focuses upon the sphere of exchange in understanding teachers' social class interests and teachers as political actors. It is argued that recent work on class assets by Wright (1997) and Savage et al (1992 - economic, cultural and organisational - and which the author extends to include social assets, offers a powerful way of understanding the complex nature of production relations and class as it is mediated through the process of exchange. This takes us some considerable distance forward on a much bigger project on developing a coherent theoretical and empirical project on theorising teachers work and social class.     

Intersecting work and learning: assembling advanced liberal regimes of governing workers in Australia

Much had been written over the past few years on the intersections of work and learning. This article suggests that the analysis of the intersections of work and learning can benefit greatly from understanding the ways in which governing workers as individuals and populations has changed in Western liberal democracies in the latter part of the twentieth century. Through the use of an analytics of government perspective based on the later governmentality work of Foucault and others, the article analyses the shifts in ways of governing paid workers through the programmes of reforms in industry, industrial relations and vocational education and training in Australia. These shifts can be understood, it is suggested, as shifts in the mentalities of governing – from social liberal regimes to advanced liberal regimes of government. The article foregrounds the assembling of a new subjectivity and character of the post-industrial paid worker – the ‘worker as learner’ as the lifelong learner who is continually required to reskill to maintain paid work in economic life in order to sustain desirable and normal lifestyles. The article concludes with a discussion of the implications for researching work and learning.     

Problem-Based Learning

Abstract

Problem-based learning has been described for use in medical education and is thought to be a superior approach to traditional didactic methods. We describe the use of PBL as an innovative approach to the education and training of social workers on an interdisciplinary health care team. An actual PBL case is described, and a discussion of the advantages and disadvantages to this approach is presented. The use of PBL on interdisciplinary teams helps educate social workers to work effectively on teams, and educates other professionals about the social work role and how to utilize social work services effectively.     

灾难社会工作的角色评估:"三个阶段"的理论维度与实践展望

以汶川地震紧急救援、临时安置和灾后重建三阶段为时间维度和理论框架,对各不同阶段社会工作承担的角色以及发挥的功能进行具体分析。在紧急救援阶段,由于"社工的不成熟和不自信,当地政府的不接纳,民政不放心,国家没政策",社会工作者没有采取实质的行动和举措;临时安置阶段为社会工作者的"需求评估和零散行动"阶段,社工们在资源链接、个案管理、冲突协调、政策倡导等方面积累了一些经验;灾后重建阶段为社会工作的"星星之火可以燎原"阶段,从最初的深圳、上海、广州三家社工站发展到30多家社工站,期间,运用社会心理能力建设模式开展灾后社区工作和学校社会工作进行了"摸着石头过河的探索",标志着中国社会工作走上了本土化和专业化的道路。"三个阶段"的社会工作评析和总结也为中国社会工作教育、灾难社会工作的实务发展和理论框架的进一步发展提供了新的思路。     

社会支持视角下外来工子女的城市就学——珠江三角洲地区的调查和分析

外来工子女城市就学体现教育机会均等化,也是融入城市社会的表现。基于社会支持视角,外来工子女城市就学具有非正式支持的单一性与正式支持的筛选性特征,存在无形资源支持与有形资源支持的差异,困境的解救更多依赖于非正式支持。在社会支持来源方面,外来工子女城市就学是一种结构性制约下的无奈选择;在社会支持的资源方面,就学离不开有形资源支持,但看护、认知、情感等无形资源支持甚至更为重要;在社会支持的情景方面,体制设置的障碍与正式救助的不足并存,增加了就学的成本,社会公平面临挑战。     

Lifewide learning in the city: novel big data approaches to exploring learning with large-scale surveys,GPS, and social media

ABSTRACT

Despite UNESCO’s Learning Cities agenda, which argues for the mobilisation of resources to promote education across all sectors and environments, there is little evaluative research on Learning City engagement which is both naturalistic and empirically rigorous. The research on informal adult learning in urban contexts is particularly sparse. This paper provides a case study of informal learning and lifewide literacies amongst Glaswegian adults using three distinct approaches to data collection: a household survey capturing rich data on learning attitudes, behaviours, and literacies; GPS trails that track mobility around the city; and the capture of naturally occurring social media. The work operationalises Learning City indicators, and explores domains beyond education, some of which have not previously been considered in surveys of adult learning, for example, physical mobilities and transportation patterns. We use theoretical concepts of social identity and capital to situate inclusion within explanatory frameworks of marginalisation in less tangible domains of informal learning using multi-stranded data. A triangulated analysis of city-wide participation in lifewide learning reveals a demographic picture of groups marginalised from learning opportunities and practices. We conclude with a call for new approaches to exploring learning participation which offer novel methods to evidence informal learning and lifewide literacies.     

社工在社区矫正中的角色定位和功能分析

社会的发展、人本观念的深入推动了刑罚制度的发展,社区矫正成为发展趋势。社会工作者,由于其具有较高的理论价值和职业素养,开始成为社区矫正的主体之一,具有了强大的社会需要。本文对社工进入社区矫正事业所应扮演的角色和功能发挥方面进行分析,从而探寻社区矫正事业中的社工之路。     

我国非正规就业群体的社会保障研究

非正规部门就业成为当今就业形式的一种重要的发展趋势,正处于转型时期的我国面临着更多的非正规就业的问题。这些问题的产生不仅仅有外部的原因,如劳动关系不公平、制度缺失,而且也存在非正规就业人员自身的问题,如参保意识低、自身素质低等。这就需要从政府、雇主和劳动者多方面入手来解决这类就业者的社会保障问题,改革现有的社会保障制度,从而促进非正规部门就业的发展并推动我国经济的良好运行。     

中国政府形象管理研究的必要性分析

在政府改革的理论探讨和改革实践中，政府形象一直是理论界所讨论的问题，但大多数学仅从政府形象建设这一层面进行探讨，而对政府形象管理问题进行研究的章则较为少见。本认为形象建设与形象管理是不同的概念，并且以此为契机，进一步从政府形象管理的价值体现和政府形象管理研究的动力两个方面阐述对中国政府形象管理进行研究的必要性，以期能引起广大学的关注。     

Delivering social work services in collaboration with the legal representation for individual clients: An effective,ethical and economical approach to supporting families in child abuse and neglect legal proceedings

This article discusses the need to improve the quality of helping relationships between families and social workers in the child protection system and the growing body of evidence that teams of social workers and lawyers are effective at improving outcomes in child protection legal proceedings. The author presents an alternative structure of delivering social work services within the child protection systems once a court gets involved with a family, proposing that social workers should focus on individual clients in collaboration with their legal representation, rather than the traditional model of a governmental agency social worker serving the family as a unit as it also determines placement of the children. Pairing the social worker to an individual client in tandem with their legal representative would help resolve the widely observed relationship problems between service users and governmental agency social workers that include the power imbalance created by the agency's authority to determine placement of children, the conflicts of interest that agency workers face when required to manage differing family members' needs, and the lack of protection of the due process right of confidentiality for parties involved in legal proceedings. This alternative structure also impacts the need to use resources more efficiently and has been demonstrated to result in substantial returns on investment. This article concludes that when a family becomes involved in child abuse and neglect legal proceedings, the child welfare agency should shift the delivery of social work services to the individual parties, away from the governmental agency and in conjunction with their legal representation.     

我国城镇非正规就业女性的社会保障问题研究

随着经济的发展,非正规就业越来越普遍,也由此产生了社会保障问题。本文以女性为视角,以社会保障为落脚点,研究在非正规就业前提下的女性的社会保障问题。通过对我国非正规就业女性社会保障现状的描述,从社会保障的进入门槛、家庭与工作的冲突、人力资本困境、劳动力市场及女性自身角度分析现状的原因,并针对原因提出相应的对策。     

School bullying and bare life: Challenging the state of exception

Despite a vast amount of research into school bullying and the widespread implementation of anti-bullying policies and programs, large numbers of students continue to report that they are routinely subjected to bullying by their peers. In this theoretical article, I argue that part of the problem is that there has been a lack of critical discussion of the theoretical foundations upon which such studies are based. Drawing on recent theoretical contributions within the field of school bullying, the work of anthropologist James C. Scott, and the work of philosophers Michel Foucault and Giorgio Agamben, I take particular issue with the notion of power that has long been a foundational pillar of bullying definitions. Utilizing a Foucauldian understanding of power, I argue that rather than focusing on the power imbalance involved in bullying relations, focus instead needs to shift onto the role that bullying plays in power relations. Reimagining Agamben’s figure of homo sacer as a victim of school bullying, I consider the ways in which some individuals are reduced to bare life and forced into a state of exception whereby social laws are no longer deemed applicable. The article concludes with a discussion of how this state of exception might be challenged.     

The Framing Discussion: Connecting Student Experience with Mathematical Knowledge

This article introduces the framing discussion, an informal discussion of a mathematical problem that takes place at the beginning of a lesson or unit. The purpose of the framing discussion is to assess student knowledge, motivate student interest, and to serve as a basis for guiding students to more formal mathematical knowledge. The article discusses the design criteria and the discourse moves necessary to execute an effective framing discussion.