The Beginnings of a Small Ethiopian, Organizational Leadership Library Collaborative

An Azusa Pacific University Reference Librarian describes the logistical, cultural, and spiritual aspects of a library building journey to Ethiopia which brought the means for a successful implementation of a new small academic library to hundreds of university students in the African country. Discusses the positive impact of the Christian global community on the university’s global distributed learning programs, the academic program in Ethiopia included well-attended Organizational Leadership courses through the university’s Operation Impact Program supported by the new library

iSpot: a citizen science platform for inclusive learning and teaching

www.iSpotnature.org (iSpot) is an Open University (OU) citizen science platform launched in 2009, which uses the challenge of identifying nature to engage people as citizen scientists. It encourages learning about wildlife while building species identification skills. iSpot has an active online community and provides a multifaceted experience, incorporating participatory science research with e-learning opportunities. Learning was always part of the design, with innovative educational technology based tools and features incorporated along with activities which encourage public participation and engagement that help to facilitate teaching; creating a unique learning journey. This poster shares best practice of an initiative that demonstrates how citizen science can act as a platform for scientific literacy. It demonstrates how iSpot supports informal to formal learning through a five-step model: explore, identify, contribute, personalise and recognition. It shares how the integration of authentic inquiry, through a citizen science platform environment, facilitates learning; and highlights this through the development a new course Global biodiversity and citizen science

Addressing cultural, social and environmental sustainability in architecture. The approach of five contemporary Australian architects

Regionalist architecture offers a promising and conscientious response to the present scenario of growing trend toward cultural, social and technical globalization. It has a great potential to preserve local cultural identities, despite the spread of global culture, to define possible relationships between construction and natural, cultural, political, economic and social factors, to combine traditional approaches and technical skills creatively and to suggest a new role for designers, as active subjects in dialogue with the manufacturing sector. An exemplary regionalist approach to contemporary architecture is given by a niche of Australian architects sensitive to the relation between communities and technical skills, dwelling patterns and building techniques, who tend to reduce the environmental load of construction through the use of local resources, who adopt community design processes and combine tradition with creative innovation. Glenn Murcutt, Richard Leplastrier, Peter Stutchbury, Gregory Burgess and Troppo Architects, who, learning from Aboriginal people's sacred respect for the land, balance the tension between global needs and local expressions, by listening to people and place, preserving traditional lifestyle preferences and combining new technologies with historic building types

Transforming food systems through food sovereignty: an Australian urban context

This article draws on La Via Campesina's definition of food sovereignty and its potential for reconceptualising food as a basic human right within the dominant Australian food discourse. We argue that the educative value that emerges from urban food production in Australia stems from the action of growing food and its capacity to transform individuals’ social and environmental concerns over food systems. Community participation in urban food production can promote a learning process that generates political understanding and concerns over food systems. We use the education theories of transformative learning and critical consciousness to discuss how Australian urban food production systems can create this social and environmental support for alternative food systems. By having control over food production practices and building collective understandings of how food choices impact global food systems, elements of food sovereignty can develop in an Australian urban context

Service-Learning Times : programme booklet 2017/18 semester 1

Service-Learning (S-L) integrates academic study with meaningful community service to create opportunities for students and staff to make positive impact locally, regionally, and globally. In line with Lingnan’s motto “Education for Service”, Service-Learning and Research Scheme (SLRS) aims to provide opportunities where students can apply subject-specific knowledge to the real world, while collaboration partners can benefit from the knowledge and innovation that faculty and students bring to these projects. Innovation and entrepreneurship are central to SLRS as it is a priority for liberal arts students to understand and engage with the impact of technology on the humanities, and vice versa. Innovation and entrepreneurship can give new impetus to community service and capacity building, and through this, the making of global citizenship for the 21st Century. All 4-year curriculum undergraduate students starting from the 2016- 17 academic year must satisfactorily complete at least one S-L course to meet graduation requirement. This booklet highlights popular courses with S-L components. Students wishing to experience the best of S-L should plan early and act quick while places are available.https://commons.ln.edu.hk/sl_times/1000/thumbnail.jp

Sustaining communities by learning from integrated assessments of place

Communities of place exist at many scales: from global village through nations, catchments, and local governments to millions of properties at the level of households and workplaces. Interventions from beyond their boundaries ensure institutional arrangements for their governance are complex. Political and bureaucratic actors network across all decision-making levels. The actors and their roles change frequently. Even so, connecting two activities can begin the process of engaging stakeholders in sustaining a community of place. First, stakeholders need to assess community conditions relative to a sustainability target. Second, stakeholders have to learn from, and respond to, the information contained in the assessment. In 2005, the authors joined with the Campaspe Shire Council in piloting a practice connecting the two activities. Trends of growth, steady state, or decline, in indicators of the Shire’s human, built, and natural capital stocks were estimated by pooling local and external knowledge. Results were presented as a balance sheet. Senior management then drafted some thirty response-statements by interpreting the accounts. A stakeholder forum used decision-support software to structure relationships between the response-statements. Conducting a SWOT analysis during the forum provided further insights into place-based learning for sustaining communities, and for building capacities to do so. Three key learnings: (1) Understanding their operational impacts within their community of place is the most useful context within which organisations can engage in sustainability learning; (2) the capital approach to measuring sustainable development simplifies learning; and (3) qualitative local knowledge is a significant element in sustainability assessment and accounting

Linking local experiments to global standards: how project networks promote global institution-building

Global regulations, such as social and environmental standards, often result from project-based multi-stakeholder initiatives. Many initiatives fail because key stakeholders cannot be mobilized, or partners are incapable of establishing common ground. We show that local development projects aimed at testing and implementing new practices at the local level and strategically coordinated project networks linking local projects and project partners together across national boundaries can facilitate global institution-building. Based on a longitudinal case study of the emergence of the Common Code for the Coffee Community, we develop a process model of global standard development and discuss in particular the importance of global project networks as intermediary organizational forms. We inform research on global standard development and institution-building, and project-based learning and coordination across national boundaries

A global community of practice: creating resource centres that build capacity in local WASH service provision

Since 2001, the IRC International Water and Sanitation Centre (IRC) has explicitly promoted the concept of Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH) sector Resource Centres to provide sector capacity building products and services. These centres operate mainly at national level, but focus capacity building at the decentralised WASH governance level, including local authorities and service providers. Products and services centre on providing better overview, access and use of existing WASH information and knowledge to improve the provision of services. The IRC Resource Centre Development Programme (RCD), which ran from 2001 to 2006, was designed as a partnership for joint learning and sharing in capacity building, and was implemented in 18 countries. To support the initiative, a global community of practice on resource centre development was created. In IRC’s current work, the resource centre development concept is carried forward in its six regional programmes. This paper presents the experiences of the global RCD community of practice in providing support to local WASH action

An Analysis of Chinese Community Education Policy

Based on the systematic review of the government- issued regulatory documents related to community education using the leading Chinese data base of WanFang, the article maps the terrain of community education in china from 1992 to present. It is found that community education in China has experienced a fundamental change from being responsible merely for out-of-school ethic education for primary and secondary school students before 21st century to training and education activities for adults in need of them under social transformation. In addition, it grows from mere community education committee responsible for its work to a comparatively complete system capable of rallying necessary human and material resources to ensure its function. The changes of community education policy were directly motivated by the domestic socioeconomic development in the past 30 years and the global educational notion of lifelong learning and building a learning society. Finally, the problems such as the absence of national laws and some others in current community education in China are discussed

An Ethics Assessment Model for Teaching Global Health Program and Policy Implementation

This mixed-method study surveyed and interviewed 60 High Income Country (HIC) US citizens/immigrants and Low-to-Middle-Income-Country (LMIC) citizens of African heritage on their perceptions of mental health services in African communities for implementation and research planning. In this study, ethics was a core emergent theme for global health initiatives and challenges, including political will for ethical change, community gatekeepers, level of government involvement, community-wide participation, public-private sector collaboration, health literacy and education, transparency, continuous monitoring, and consequences for ethical infractions. Based on our findings, we propose an active teaching and learning methodology of problem-based (PBL) and team-based learning (TBL) with multi-level HIC-LMIC citizen engagement for ethics in global health program productivity and sustainability. The intended result is to produce ethically trained and equipped health professionals, enhanced HIC and LMIC capacity building, cultural humility, and decolonization of health programs and policies