Poor Philanthropist II: New approaches to sustainable development

The second title in the Poor Philanthropist Series, this monograph represents the culmination of a six-year journey; a journey characterised in the first three years by in-depth qualitative research which resulted in an understanding of philanthropic traditions among people who are poor in southern Africa and gave rise to new and innovative concepts which formed the focus of the research monograph The Poor Philanthropist: How and Why the Poor Help Each Other, published by the Southern Africa-United States Centre for Leadership and Public Values in 2005

Poor Philanthropist III: A Practice-relevant Guide for Community Philanthropy

This is a guide for a research study carried out between 2003 and 2005, the purpose of which was to explore the local ethos of caring and sharing in poor African communities.This guide is intended to assist grantmakers and funders working with impoverished communities in applying a PoC lens to their practice

Poor Philanthropist III: A Practice Relevant Guide to Community Philanthropy

This guide has its origins in a research study carried out between 2003 and 2005, the purpose of which was to explore the local ethos of caring and sharing in poor African communities. Focus groups carried out by national research teams in Namibia, Mozambique, South Africa and Zimbabwe generated rich narrative text revealing what the term 'help' means to the poor, who helps and is helped in poor communities, the forms help takes and, finally, why people help each other. This knowledge informed the first systematic understanding of 'indigenous philanthropy' in southern Africa. To emphasise the local ethos of caring and sharing and make it more visible to development organisations, it was named. The term 'horizontal philanthropy' or 'philanthropy of community' (PoC) was coined and the research findings documented in a 2005 monograph entitled, The Poor Philanthropist: How and Why the Poor Help Each Other (Wilkinson-Maposa, Fowler, Oliver-Evans & Mulenga 2005). The findings published in 2005 sparked the interest of the development community

Media of the people: broadcasting community media in Australia

Provides an overview of Australia\u27s community media sector, looking at its origins and composition and the problems it faces in light of the tasks it performs and the lack of resources available to it to deliver a media which is ‘of the people’ in terms of aims, objectives and production. Introduction The term community media refers to radio, television and print services. Any or all of those forms of community media tend to emerge when communities are denied a voice for their views. In many countries they have provided a rallying point for protest and demands for rights. In post-apartheid South Africa, for example, community radio stations have emerged in an attempt to promote democracy as well as freedom of expression and diversity of broadcast content and ownership previously been denied in that country. It would be drawing a long bow to equate the situation which led to the establishment of community radio in South Africa with that of Australia. Nevertheless it is possible to consider that the Australian community broadcasting sector, which emerged in the 1970s, represented the demands of groups who felt that they were denied the opportunity to express their opinions or listen to alternative sources of entertainment. These groups ranged from those who felt marginalised to those who were beginning to feel that traditional media sources were not acting in the interests of the people. They even included groups who just wanted to hear music that was different from that broadcast on commercial stations. In seeking to deliver such alternatives, broadcast community media has done much to enhance Australian cultural diversity. It does much also to furnish ordinary Australians with an opportunity to contribute to debate on social and political issues. Indeed, researcher Michael Meadows and his colleagues argue that community broadcasting in Australia empowers audiences ‘to re-engage in the processes of democracy at the grass roots’ level creating social coherence through diversity’. Community broadcasting can be seen therefore as an alternative medium to public service and commercial media. As such, it occupies ‘an important space in citizen participation’ and is an important, though neglected, media sector. This paper provides an overview of the sector, looking at its origins and composition and the problems it faces in light of the tasks it performs and the lack of resources available to it to deliver a media which is ‘of the people’ in terms of aims, objectives and production

Identity performance in a TESOL classroom

Udostępnienie publikacji Wydawnictwa Uniwersytetu Łódzkiego finansowane w ramach projektu „Doskonałość naukowa kluczem do doskonałości kształcenia”. Projekt realizowany jest ze środków Europejskiego Funduszu Społecznego w ramach Programu Operacyjnego Wiedza Edukacja Rozwój; nr umowy: POWER.03.05.00-00-Z092/17-00

UNDERSTANDING INFORMAL LEARNING IN VIRTUAL PROFESSIONAL COMMUNITIES OF TEACHERS IN KAZAKHSTAN

Reinforced internationally in the context of educational improvement, teachers’ professional networks, as a source of social capital, have been conceptualised as an integral part of teacher professionalism, as well as an essential element of successful educational change, and in the context of what Van Dijck, Poell and De Waal (2018) call “the platform society”, the use of social media platforms within professional networks of teachers has become an agenda for both research and practice. Therefore, with the overarching aim of understanding how to promote informal learning of teachers in virtual professional communities in Kazakhstan, this study explored this phenomenon within the conceptual framework identified by a review of related concepts, in particular a triangle of learning factors, namely, the need for professional connectedness, knowledge sharing self-efficacy, and knowledge sharing and receiving. This parallel mixed-method study was carried out in 29 schools of Kazakhstan by collecting teachers’ self-reported practice with the help of a paper-based questionnaires (n=440) and face-to-face interviews (n=41). An emergent trend within the identified findings is that teachers in Kazakhstan use social media within professional communities in order to obtain knowledge, which is manifested in an overlapping mixture of news, information, opinion, experience and resources, suggesting that virtual professional communities are one of the spaces for informal learning since they provide the opportunity to gain public and/or personal knowledge related to the teaching profession. In line with the identified conceptual framework, the results of the study provide a partial explanation for teachers’ engagement in virtual professional communities in the context of informal learning. The study suggests that both the need for professional connectedness, as part of professional identity and commitment for learning, and knowledge sharing self-efficacy are positively associated with knowledge sharing and receiving. As well as identifying contextual types of virtual professional communities, the study identifies some of the contextual factors associated with the need for professional connectedness in the research context, such as professional isolation of teachers in rural schools, the need for mentoring support, and the context of educational change, and contextual sources of knowledge sharing self-efficacy, such as professional comparison and sense of professional connectedness. Finally, in contribution to the growing body of research, the present study also argues for the importance of face-to-to face collaboration within and beyond schools in order to promote professional knowledge exchange within virtual professional communities. The research has clear implications for research and practice in the fields of teacher professional learning, particularly in Kazakhstan, hence it is believed that present study can help future efforts to support informal learning in virtual professional communities

Toward a New Social Contract: A Tripartite Mixed-Methods Analysis of Social Sustainability at Three Land-Grant Universities

Increasingly, colleges and universities in the United States are adapting toward a model of behavior that incorporates issues of sustainability. This adaptation in universities and in society has implications on the organizational and nation-state level, the very core of which may serve to reshape the social contract between the two. In addition to supplying a strong counter-hegemonic argument that alters the competitive economic agenda-setting paradigm, this study serves as a tripartite comparative case study analysis of university adaptation toward social sustainability. By employing a social capital lens to understanding social sustainability in higher education, this study seeks to examine the relationship between higher education, sustainability, and the nation-state.The conceptual framework of this analysis will draw on Putnam\u27s concept of social capital, in the effort to understand the relationship between higher education, sustainability, and social capital as well as what a sustainability paradigm could mean in terms of a new social contract. The methodology of this study is exploratory and aimed at understanding university adaptation in three ways: first, elements of organization and administration aimed at advancing sustainability; second, teaching and research efforts that have been established within a sustainability frame; and third, community and outreach efforts that examines the role of the university in its local environment as well as the work toward public service. The specific methodology employed can be categorized as comparative case study (Yin, 2003). To validate findings, data is triangulated via a between-methods design and collected through: qualitative survey, contextual content analysis, and comparative discourse analysis respectively (Jaeger, 1988). The result is effectively a 3 x 3 mixed methods design so that each individual case study employs each of the three methodologies in order to provide a rich description of the social sustainability phenomena and offer data for comparative discourse analysis. Findings reveal three distinct strands amongst the case studies in the analysis of sustainability discourse. Results show the importance of the role of, organizational context, personal approach of the chief sustainability agent, and organizational saga in contributing to adaptation. In this way, sustainability approaches and the priority and university adaptation differed. These three approaches can be described as: an energy/operations/facilities perspective, a research and academic-focused perspective, and a humanistic-grassroots approach

Co-constructing a new framework for evaluating social innovation in marginalized rural areas

The EU funded H2020 project \u2018Social Innovation in Marginalised Rural Areas\u2019 (SIMRA; www.simra-h2020.eu) has the overall objective of advancing the state-of-the-art in social innovation. This paper outlines the process for co- developing an evaluation framework with stakeholders, drawn from across Europe and the Mediterranean area, in the fields of agriculture, forestry and rural development. Preliminary results show the importance of integrating process and outcome-oriented evaluations, and implementing participatory approaches in evaluation practice. They also raise critical issues related to the comparability of primary data in diverse regional contexts and highlight the need for mixed methods approaches in evaluation

Recruiting a nonlocal language for performing local identity: indexical appropriations of Lingala in the Congolese border town Goma

This article describes discursive processes by which inhabitants of the Congolese border town Goma attribute new indexical values to Lingala, a language exogenous to the area of which most Goma inhabitants only possess limited knowledge. This creative reconfiguration of indexicalities results in the emergence of three "indexicalities of the second order": the indexing of (i) being a true Congolese, (ii) toughness (based on Lingala's association with the military), and (iii) urban sophistication (based on its association with the capital Kinshasa). While the last two second-order reinterpretations are also widespread in other parts of the Congolese territory, the first one, resulting in the emergence of a Lingala as an "indexical icon" of a corresponding "language community," deeply reflects local circumstances and concerns, in particular the sociopolitical volatility of the Rwandan-Congolese borderland that renders publicly affirming one's status as an "autochthonous" Congolese pivotal for assuring a livelihood and at times even personal security. (Lingala, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Goma, orders of indexicality, language community, autochthony, Kiswahili)