Imagining the flowers,but working the rich and heavy clay: participation and empowerment in action research for health

Participation of the ‘target group’ is a key concept in working on empowerment in health education. However, it raises many questions and is not without struggle. I will discuss the findings from a study into the state of the art of empowerment in health education, which includes a literature review and the analysis of eight Dutch health‐promotion projects. An important finding is that participation is not an unequivocal concept. Professionals working in health education strongly disagree on the value, goals and meaning of participation. Moreover, in working on empowerment, a tension exists—between the ideal of participatory, ‘bottom‐up’ approaches on the one hand; and the ‘top‐down’ structure of health education programmes, on the other. I will argue for a ‘realistic approach’ in which the practice of health promotion is taken as the starting point to work on empowerment. After all, imagining the flowers is easy, but working the rich and heavy clay is the challenge.     

‘Designing the plane while flying it’: concept co-construction in a collaborative action research project

In the field of collaborative action research (CAR), the quality of the collaborative partnerships between university researchers and practitioners has received much attention. Most accounts focus on three areas: the question how to organise and optimise the encounter of these ‘worlds’ of scientific and practical reasoning; the professional development and emancipation of practitioners; and the enhancement of the practical utility of a CAR-project. In this article, we look at CAR projects from a different angle and explore the question how theoretical concepts are co-constructed in CAR-projects, thereby acquiring both practical as well as scientific relevance. We have focused on the participatory process of conceptualization during a CAR project in primary education, in order to find out how a key concept in the considered project is co-constructed and operationalized in multidisciplinary communities of practices. Both the theoretical validity of the concept is evaluated as well as the validity of collaboration. An ‘hourglass’ model is introduced for analysing participation in CAR projects, holding a more relational and dialogic interpretation of participation than the ‘Participation Ladder’ model. Furthermore, a heuristic approach to conceptualization in CAR projects is proposed.     

The pastoral care of international students in New Zealand: is it more than a consumer protection regime?

Student security is a composite social practice that includes the domains of consumer rights, entitlement to a range of welfare supports and pastoral care, and freedom from exploitation and discrimination. Three traditions shape the systems used for managing and regulating international student security in the nations that export education: pastoral care, consumer protection and quasi-citizenship. Each has different implications for the positioning of students as agents. This study used semi-structured interviews with 70 international students from nine countries in two contrasting universities. It investigated the provision of international student security, including the distinctive New Zealand regime of security, regulated by the National Code of Practice for the Pastoral Care of International Students. This Code binds provider institutions and the International Education Appeal Authority, and permits Code-based claims by students from providers. The study found that international students in New Zealand have varying expectations of student security, which draws eclectically from all three traditions. There are gaps in the coverage of pastoral care, including the areas of financial matters and intercultural relations. Where the Code does provide protection, its provisions are not always fully implemented, such as for accommodation assistance. More seriously, there is little knowledge among students of the Code of Practice and their Code-based entitlements, and almost no knowledge of the Appeal Authority. Numerous students testified to poor information flow. This limits not only their capacities as quasi-consumers and their access to pastoral services – so that in practice, the New Zealand system is similar to the Australian system, which is explicitly limited to consumer protection – but even their ability to fully utilize consumer protection. This defect renders the promise of a regulated pastoral care regime grounded in active student agency largely inoperative.     

New era or old times: class,gender and education 1

This paper argues that past debates concerning class influences on education in the UK were inadequate because they disregarded girls' and womens' values and life patterns. New analytic frameworks involving a synthesis of gender, class and other social formations are needed to develop an understanding about how changing patterns of wealth and poverty and/or recent British educational reforms have affected student learning and life‐chances; and therefore how inequalities may be challenged. The paper draws on a range of sources including a recent study of the impact of recent British education policy changes on gender relations in schools.     

Developing critical understanding by teaching action research to undergraduate psychology students

Action research assumes the active engagement of the stakeholders, such as the community, in the research, and a multiple‐level process of reflection in order to evaluate and monitor the actions taken. This makes action research a suitable methodology to increase the critical understanding of the participants. In this paper we describe the challenge of teaching action research within the context of an undergraduate community health psychology module. The module was designed using principles from transformative learning, critical pedagogy and action learning. The module took place over one semester; and 15 students (13 females, two males) took part in it. We discuss the background to the module development and the alignment of the learning objectives with the teaching and assessment methods, and reflect upon the students’ experiences in the module and the learning outcomes. We conclude by addressing the major challenges involved in teaching action research to increase critical understanding: the ability to engage in deep learning of undergraduate psychology students; our role and expectations as tutors on the course; and the current higher education system in which action science yet has to find a place.     

Swedish Teacher Education at the Crossroads

This paper discusses recent moves to modernise teacher education in Sweden. It first considers reasons why teacher education has received increased attention in different countries in recent years, and then goes on to explore what implications this has had for Sweden The approach taken in Sweden to the so-called crisis of schooling in Beck's risk society has been to attempt to raise the status of teacher educators by proposing increased research possibilities and a new discipline utbildningsvetenskap . The paper discusses the likely response of teacher educators to these new conditions and their overall implications for the Swedish state.     

Situated Knowledge and the Virtual Science and Industry Museum: Problems in the Social-Technical Interface

The Museum is a perspicuous site for analysing the complex interplay between social, organisational, cultural and political factors which have relevance to the design and use of virtual technologies. Specifically, the introduction of virtual technologies in museums runs up against the issue of the situated character of information use. Across a number of disciplines (anthropology, sociology, psychology, cognitive science) there is growing recognition of the situatedness of knowledge and its importance for the design and use of technology. This awareness is fostered by the fact that technological developments are often associated with disappointing gains for users. The effective use of technology relies on the degree to which it can be embedded in or congruent with the local practices of museum users. Drawing upon field research in two museums of science and technology, both of which are in the process of introducing virtual technologies and exploring the possibilities of on-line access, findings are presented which suggest that the success of such developments will depend on the extent to which they are informed by detailed understanding of practice-practices that are essentially socially constituted in the activities of museum visitors and the daily work of museum professionals.     

Blocking of the sexual conditioning of differentially effective conditioned stimulus objects

The blocking phenomenon was investigated in the sexual response system of male Japanese quail. Access to a live female quail served as the unconditioned stimulus (US). The same audiovisual cue served as the pretrained stimulus in all of the experiments. Following asymptotic conditioning of the audiovisual cue, a second conditioned stimulus (CS2) was added. In Experiment 1, CS2 was a rectangular wood block that had little or no resemblance to a female quail and could not support copulatory behavior. In Experiment 2, CS2 was a terrycloth object that had no quail parts but could support copulatory behavior, and, in Experiment 3, CS2 was a terrycloth object that had a taxidermically prepared head of a female quail added. The terrycloth-only object supported more rapid conditioning than did the wood block, but the blocking effect was obtained with both kinds of stimuli. Approach responding to the terrycloth + head object required pairing it with copulatory opportunity, and the terrycloth + head object supported at least as rapid conditioning as did the terrycloth-only object. However, responding to the terrycloth + head object was not blocked by the pretrained audiovisual cue. These results indicate that the blocking effect occurs in sexual conditioning even with stimulus objects that can support copulation. However, the addition of species-typical head cues to an object makes that object such a powerful stimulus that conditioned approach responding to it cannot be blocked by a previously conditioned arbitrary audiovisual cue.