Up close with community engagement: A critical reflection on its pedagogical value

Transform The Journal of Engaged Scholarship173-77Australi

Everyday roles and development of selves : understanding women's identity over time across work, family and involvement outside the household.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Rochester. Margaret Warner Graduate School of Education and Human Development, 2014.This study examines the social construction of identity by women using a quantitative methodological framework and multi-level modeling techniques. Identity construction is a social process that takes place over time and includes nested levels of influence ranging from individual to society. In case of women, these identity constructions are distinctly complex because they play different roles in everyday lives--as wives, mothers, and labor market and community participants. Drawing on theories of social identity and the development of self, which claim that identity is formed and maintained socially, and changes over time, the study attempts to understand the longitudinal relationships between the identities that women construct as participants in the (1) labor market, (2) family, and (3) community, and their attitudes about self, and how that changes over time. Socially constructed identities are based on core values and beliefs like social approval, belonging, sense of responsibility, and caring that evolve from the micro factors of life through a process of negotiation of everyday roles and help in the development of the self. Thus, the primary question that guides this research is how the identity constructs formed by women in performing different everyday roles are related to the development of the self over time. Data for my dissertation comes from the National Longitudinal Surveys of the Young Women (NLSYW) cohort, collected by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, U.S. Department of Labor, covering the period 1968-2003. My study uses data from the last seven waves of the survey, covering a period of twelve years. Specifically, I analyzed the data using descriptive statistics, correlational statistic, hierarchical linear model (HLM) analysis and residual change multiple regression analysis to explain within and across women, and across time variances. The results suggest that there is a complex effect of women taking on a more diverse set of roles within their daily lives both inside and outside their households. One of my main findings is that women, who exhibit community participation like volunteering, feel less negative about themselves over time. However, the rate of change of positive feeling about self, while improving with better economic conditions of the household, gets thwarted with bigger household sizes (probably with increase in family responsibilities). My dissertation hopes to strengthen the understanding of complex problems related with identity constructions and self-development in everyday-role-performances by women and how these issues can be studied using unique research methodologies

Steering Towards the Internationalisation of Higher Education: Lessons From Pedagogical Interventions in Overseas Experiential Learning Programmes

Asian Journal of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning12120-38Singapor