Learning communities : schools, parents and challenges for wider community involvement in schools

This presentation will focus, for the most part, on a project of parental involvement in a state primary school located in a predominantly working-class area in a Mediterranean country. It will draw briefly on qualitative empirical work carried out with a colleague (Carmel Borg). The presentation gives an account of the socio-economic context of the school, and foregrounds, through empirical data culled from transcribed semi-structured interviews, the voices of parents, administrators, school-council members and teachers. It will be argued that, if this project is to develop into a genuine exercise in democratic participation, parents must begin to be conceived of not as “adjuncts”, but “subjects”. The parents interviewed in this empirical work see themselves as such, and derive confidence from the fact that, at the time of the interview, their claims and recommendations were translating into concrete developments. The second part of the presentation will discuss the issue of parental involvement in schools within the context of a wider discussion on ‘changing the face of the school’ by helping it develop into a community learning centre. Insights from the work of Paulo Freire and his Education Secretariat, when he served as Education Secretary in the Municipal Government of São Paulo, Brazil, and from SMED in Porto Alegre, Brazil, will be drawn upon.peer-reviewe

Why Equity, Diversity and Inclusion Matters at Western

A keynote talk on diversity at Western by Dr. Isaac Luginaah of the Department of Geography and the Environment. Reporting of the keynote talk was done by students of the GHS class 2021

2015 Making Literature Conference

Keynote Speakers: Scott Russell Sanders, Angela Shannon, Jessie van Eerden, Miho Nonaka Keynote Address: Translating Endo Shusaku\u27s Silence: Literature of Faith and Human Weakness, Miho Nonaka Keynote Reading: Reading & Craft Talk: The Midrashic Impulse, Jessie van Eerden Keynote Address: Pictures into Words, Scott Russell Sander

Fluctuation-enhanced sensing

We present a short survey on fluctuation-enhanced gas sensing. We compare some of its main characteristics with those of classical sensing. We address the problem of linear response, information channel capacity, missed alarms and false alarms.Comment: Keynote Talk at SPIE's 4th international symposium on Fluctuations and Noise, Conference Noise and Fluctuations in Circuits, Devices and Materials, Florence, Italy, May 20-24, 200

Opportunities, Challenges, and Fantasies in Lattice QCD

Some important problems in quantitative QCD will certainly yield to hard work and adequate investment of resources, others appear difficult but may be accessible, and still others will require essentially new ideas. Here I identify several examples in each class.Comment: 10 pages, 2 figures; Keynote talk at Lattice 2002, Boston, June 2002. (Text unchanged; figure formatting corrected.) Email correspondence to [email protected]

The Universe is a Strange Place

This is a broad and in places unconventional overview of the strengths and shortcomings of our standard models of fundamental physics and of cosmology. The emphasis is on ideas that have accessible experimental consequences. It becomes clear that the frontiers of these subjects share much ground in common.Comment: 12 pages; Keynote talk at SpacePartII, Washington D.C., Dec. 2003; to be published in the Porceeding