Learning the Language of Home: Using Place-based Writing Practice to Help Rural Students Connect to Their Communities

The idea of place extends beyond the locations where people live. Place is a narrative which shapes identity and culture and provides an understanding of experience. By exploring place and the connections which evolve from place, an intriguing context begins to take a shape that inspires transformational ideas and actions. This article investigates how place-based writing practices affect rural middle school students’ connections with their home community as evidenced through their writing. This study follows the critical pedagogy of place theoretical framework and works to support best practices in rural education research. A qualitative case study design was used to conduct this study in a rural middle school in North Carolina

Implementing Multi-Tiered Systems of Support in Mathematics: Findings from Two Schools

This study examined the benefits and challenges associated with implementing RtI in the area of mathematics in an elementary and a middle school in a rural district in the northeastern United States. We sought to document the ways in which two schools approached implementation of RtI and to explore the issues they encountered with respect to instruction, intervention, and assessment. Five themes were identified that described implementation of the RtI framework: Shifting roles and changing structures, increasing opportunities for collaboration and communication, increasing instructional and assessment support for students who struggle in math, increasing knowledge of support strategies for learners who struggle with math, and “spreading the word” and enhancing the use of the model. The results of this study suggest that the RtI model has potential to improve how math instruction is approached in elementary and middle schools

Uncertainty of Social Network Members in the Case of Communication-Debilitating Illness or Injury

Uncertainty is a consequential aspect of chronic illness for patients as well as their family and friends, yet little research has focused on how non-ill individuals experience uncertainty about the condition of someone in their social network. Thirty-one individuals with loved ones who had a communication-debilitating illness or injury (CDI) participated in one-on-one interviews about their experiences. We analyzed transcripts for participants' sources of uncertainty and for ways that they managed the uncertainty. Participants' experiences with uncertainty included questions about the condition itself and involved the impaired communication resulting from the CDI. Participants described managing uncertainty through information seeking, changing the ways they communicated with the person with the CDI, and creating schemata to help reduce uncertainty. We discuss the findings in terms of predominant conceptualizations of uncertainty in illness and address the prevalence of communication as both a significant source of uncertainty and an important means of managing uncertainty

Social Support in Nursing: A Review of the Literature

Nursing researchers have been investigating social support in the nursing profession with increasing interest, and the present manuscript reviews the state of the literature: methods, theories, and research findings related to social support in nursing. The aims of the existing research have focused primarily on understanding how the types, amount, and quality of social support received by nurses is associated with lower rates of professional stress, burnout, and intent to leave the profession. There is evidence that nurses in clinical settings value and are benefited by various forms of support from their supervisors. They also report lower distress when they have supportive personal relationships outside of work, although support from managers remains key. Support needs have been examined in different cultures and findings indicate that nursing in some parts of the world can be fraught because of cultural beliefs about the profession and about appropriate ways of enacting support. Less research has addressed the social support that nurses provide to patients and families. An agenda for advancing the literature is offered, with an emphasis on studying support from a communication perspective and learning more about what makes messages more or less supportive in nursing contexts

Research into integrated crime prevention strategies for rail station environs: Final report

The initial impetus for this project arose from concerns about responses to ‘anti-social behaviour’, especially by young people, in and around rail stations. The primary goal of the research was to develop a collaborative approach that provided a more constructive and integrated response that would produce benefit for local communities, for the Public Transport Authority, and for the young people themselves. In practical terms, this involved: • Development of interagency collaboration processes to support agencies with diverse goals to participate constructively without loss of autonomy; • Identification at a local level of the common issues of concern, their causes, and more integrated collaborative approaches to their prevention; • Identification of areas in which agencies have similar goals and useful operational synergies; • Identification of situations in which organisations have different goals and priorities and identification of the implications for interagency collaboration; and • Identification of strategies and joint activities that would enable disparate agencies to work together in mutually supportive ways without compromising their individual goals and purposes. This research project was funded by six organisations and had 28 participating agencies. Funding was provided by the Office of Crime Prevention (OCP), the Public Transport Authority of Western Australia (PTA), The City of Armadale, the City of Gosnells, the City of Joondalup and the City of Swan. Key participating staff included: PTA transit guard managers; local government community services managers; local government detached and out-reach youth workers; local government youth work team leaders and staff; Department of Community Development staff, including representation from Aboriginal affairs; shopping centre managers; staff from non-government youth work agencies; a representative from Police Crime Prevention; representatives from shopping centre security management; OCP crime prevention advisors; representatives from the Education Department and alternative education providers; and local government planners. The research comprised four individual projects. Each project was undertaken at one of four rail environs identified by the PTA as having a high level of adverse incidents: Armadale/Maddington, Gosnells/ Kelmscott, Joondalup and Midland. The project processes were similar in all locations. Outcomes were strongly positive in all four locations. The types of outcomes, however, reflected the differing mix of participants, interests, goals, and expertise of participating agencies, and the specific problems identified by participants in each location. The research was located within an action research framework. It combined social action and soft systems approaches to support the collaborative design and implementation of integrate Interagency collaboration involves complex social interactions. Additionally, issues of power and control create tensions between participants that reduce the potential for solutions to emerge or to be implemented. Social action methods offer a solution-focused approach that uses social group processes to help participants to gain a more complex understanding of other participants’ perceptions of issues in ways that minimise the adverse effects of the power relationships. The increased level of understanding and reduced tension provided the basis to develop and test interventions that improved the situation for multiple stakeholders. Interviews and focus groups were used to help participants share information about their agency’s roles goals and priorities and to gather initial information about participants’ perceptions of problems, their causes and their relative priority in terms of each organisation’s goals. Soft-systems methods were used to guide data gathering, interpretation and presentation back to participants. The use of the soft-systems approach helped ensure that a broader systemic understanding of problems was made available to participants. The ‘mess’ of data gathered from interviews and focus groups with participants was distilled by the researchers into ‘rich pictures’ that were presented back to participants and provided the basis for discussions about agencies’ differences in perspective and organisational goals. These ‘rich pictures’ also provided the basis for agencies to identify potential local operational synergies and arenas in which agencies’ goals overlapped. Young people were not directly involved in this research. The primary focus of the research was on improving interagency organisational functioning rather than youth work per se. Individual projects, however, involved some agencies undertaking youth work in their normal agency roles. Participating youth workers felt able to represent young peoples’ perspectives based on their interactions with diverse groups. Where youth workers believed they could not do this, they gathered additional information from groups of young people and fed this back in the project. Interventions developed by agencies had to be sustainable beyond the life of the project and undertaken within existing budgets plus very small amounts of ‘seeding’ money. Genuine participation of the full cross-section of young people was impossible in terms of the financial and time constraints. Direct participation by young people would have been tokenistic. Additionally, it would have reshaped the project into youth work. Participants identified a range of successful, useful and practical outcomes from the interagency collaboration approach developed in this research. For example, networks developed between the transit guard manager, transit guards and youth and community organisations enabled practical problems faced by young people to be resolved. This built trust between agencies. New collaborations enabled the PTA community education team to gain better access to schools and youth groups for their track safety and anti-trespass educational programs. In one locality, the collaboration resulting from the research project led to an ongoing pilot collaboration between the PTA and DrugARM WA to address issues of intoxicated young people on trains. In another location, the research project led to the identification of a problem that some young people stay on night trains because it is unsafe for them to go home, especially at weekends. Project participants collaborated to develop a long-term plan to press for a local emergency shelter for young people. The evaluation of the interagency collaboration approach developed in this research indicates it offers benefits in a wide range of contexts. The approach has application in the very large goals work independently without knowledge or understanding of other organisations that have potential to help or hinder their work. In particular, the approach offers the benefits of personal support to the individuals participating. It enables effective collaboration between organisations with disparate goals without loss of autonomy, and it successfully prevents domination of smaller and less powerful organisations by larger and more powerful organisations. A relatively surprising outcome was the strength of the benefits resulting from the way that this interagency collaboration approach facilitated organisational learning. Increased organisational learning was identified as a key outcome by participants in the final evaluation of the project. At all four locations, there was increased understanding by agencies of the operational priorities of other agencies. All participating agencies gained knowledge about how other agencies operated and were able to use this information to more effectively further their own organisational goals and avoid inadvertently causing problems for other organisations. Additionally, participants reported increased organisational learning about their own agency that provided the basis for improving its functioning and outcomes. The evaluations of the interagency collaboration approach developed and tested in this research project indicates it offers significant benefits applications across a range of rail related and other settings. This interagency collaboration approach is applicable across the population and public spaces (i.e. not just young people and not only rail environs). Significant benefits would be expected in reducing problems at any node where people gather. Typical hot spots likely to benefit from synergic interagency collaboration using this approach include bus stations, late night public traffic nodes such as Fremantle Markets, taxi ranks, and, especially, major public social events. An obvious future application is to use this interagency collaboration approach to reduce potential problems in the environs of the new Southern Rail line between Perth and Mandurah. This new rail line passes through suburbs in which there are expected to be similar levels of problems as addressed in the four locations in which this interagency collaboration approach was trialled

Textile and Apparel Industry: The Thread That Binds Us

Senior project written by a student in the UNT Honors College discussing the development of the clothing and textile industry, the social value of clothing, and social issues within the industry

Effects of Communication-Debilitating Illnesses and Injuries On Close Relationships: A Relational Maintenance Perspective

A communication-debilitating illness or injury (CDI) presents significant challenges for patients as well as for friends and family. In a qualitative study of the effects of a CDI on close relationships, 28 individuals with loved ones who had experienced a CDI were interviewed. Participants described adjustments in communication with the patient and explained what it is like to experience a relationship with a CDI patient. Themes that emerged transcended the type of illness and relationship. Recommendations are made for further research that focuses on patients' relationships with a variety of social network members, beyond primary caregivers

Communicating in Complex Situations: A Normative Approach to HIV-Related Talk Among Parents Who Are HIV+

Parents with HIV/AIDS are confronted with unique challenges when discussing HIV-related information with their children. Strategies for navigating these challenges effectively have not been systematically examined. In this study, we conducted in-depth interviews with 76 parents with HIV/AIDS who had children ages 10–18 years. Guided by O\u27Keefe and Delia\u27s definition of a complex communication situation and Goldsmith\u27s normative approach to interpersonal communication, we examined parents’ goals for discussing HIV-related information, factors that made conversations challenging, and instances where these conversational purposes conflicted with one another. Our data reveal the following parent–adolescent communication predicaments: relaying safety information about HIV while minimizing child anxiety, modeling open family communication without damaging one\u27s parental identity, and balancing parent–child relational needs amid living with an unpredictable health condition. Parents also described a variety of strategies for mitigating challenges when discussing HIV-related topics. Strategies parents perceived as effective included reframing HIV as a chronic, manageable illness; keeping talk educational; and embedding HIV-related topics within more general conversations. The theoretical and practical applications of these findings are discussed with regard to their relevance to health communication scholars and HIV care professionals

PLACE-BASED EDUCATION, STUDENT WRITING, AND CULTURAL CONTEXTS: A CASE STUDY OF BUILDING COMMUNITY CONSCIOUSNESS IN A RURAL MIDDLE SCHOOL CLASSROOM

The idea of place extends beyond just the location where people live. Place is a narrative, a story that involves interactions, characters, conflicts, and the rise and flow of humanity. By understanding the importance of place and the connection to the places from which people originate, the people, their motivations, and their strengths and weaknesses begin to take a shape that inspires transformational ideas and actions. The purpose of this study is to investigate the impact of place-based educational practices on rural middle school students’ identities and their cultural connections as shown through student writing. This study follows the critical pedagogy of place theoretical framework and works to support the best practices in rural education research. A qualitative case study design was used to conduct this study over eight weeks during the winter of 2014. This study took place in a middle school classroom of 25 students where a collaborative relationship was created between teacher and researcher. The school was located in rural North Carolina. Data sources included interviews, observations, and a collection of student writing. The data was analyzed through thematic and content analysis to better understand the influence of place-based writing practices on student identity and cultural connections as evidenced in their writing