Idiographic Self-Monitoring Instruments to Empower Client Participation and Evaluate Outcome in Intensive Family Preservation Services

Intensive Family Preservation Services seek to reflect the values of focusing on client strengths and viewing clients as colleagues. To promote those values, Intensive Family Preservation Programs should include a systematic form of client self monitoring in their packages of outcome measures. This paper presents a model of idiographic self-monitoring used in time series, single system research design developed for Family Partners, a family preservation program of the School for Contemporary Education in Annandale, Virginia. The evaluation model provides a means of empowering client families to utilize their strengths and promote their status as colleague in determining their own goals, participating in the change process, and measuring their own progress

Exploring Cultural Proficiency: A Case Study of a Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Middle School in a Predominantly White School District

Issues of diversity continue to plague our nation. Recent events and Supreme Court cases have revealed a side of the United States that many wanted to believe was only part of our nation’s past. Diversity is a reality and predictions about future population demographics estimate an increase in diversity. As diversity increases, conflict becomes more frequent because “difference threatens dominance” (Howard, 2006, p. 57). The academic achievement and socioeconomic gaps between minorities and the dominant culture have been extensively researched and debated. However, they have not diminished despite legislation aimed at reducing them. This begs the question: how will the United States respond to the issues that are likely to follow? Achieving cultural proficiency in school districts has been identified as one way in which students could achieve higher academic success and could be prepared to be outstanding citizens. This was the term chosen by the district being studied. Through interviews and participant observations, this study explored the cultural proficiency of teachers, staff, and students of a culturally and linguistically diverse middle school within a predominantly White school district that had taken on the task of improving cultural proficiency. Findings revealed the complexity of such a pursuit, including the ways the school had found success and the difficult issues and obstacles that arose. Cultural proficiency is about outcomes that have been achieved, not those that are intended. As such, the school and the district may have chosen the path toward cultural proficiency without sufficient planning and resources. Adviser: Theresa Catalan

Judicial management in Botswana : is it time for change?

A company is an integral part of society whose existence impacts the country's economy and community as a whole, thus, the previous global financial crisis has highlighted the need for countries to have effective mechanisms to support and encourage corporate rescue. This is important because companies that encounter financial or economic collapse are able to benefit from corporate rescue mechanisms which may help preserve their on - going viability. In this regard, the turnaround of such companies will enable restoration of production capacity, employment, and the promotion of sustainability of capita l and investments. However, existing legal frameworks on corporate rescue in many countries have been found to be wanting, and this has in turn triggered a new wave of legislative reform proposals. Thus, the aim of this dissertation is to interrogate into the issue of whether there is a need for Botswana to reform its insolvency laws in order to accommodate a modernised corporate rescue regime. This dissertation probes on the shortcomings of judicial management as a corporate rescue regime which is currently operative in Botswana. Furthermore, the study reveals the performance of judicial management as a regime in other countries in order to illustrate its inherent weaknesses. This study makes a comparison of the main components that make up modern corporate rescue regimes in order to be able to identify critical issues to be considered in making recommendations for legislative reform. Overall the study recommends the reform of the judicial management laws in Botswana by integrating the positive aspects of corporate rescue as applied in other countries as illustrated by examples of Australia, the United Kingdom and South Africa, and avoiding the pitfalls so far proving a burden in these jurisdictions. The reform should also make adjustments accordingly as relevant to the existing business environment and the economy as well as develop new provisions to cover social conditions unique to Botswana

The Family Partners Credit Card: A Token Economy System Adapted for Intensive Family Preservation Services to Enable Families to Manage Difficult Behavior of Adolescents

Increasingly, families referred for Intensive Family Preservation Services have not experienced a crisis of maltreatment, focused on the parent; rather these families have children with chronic behavioral difficulties for which their parents lack the skills to cope. These are the same families whose children were formerly placed in residential programs. This paper presents The Family Partners Credit Card System, incorporating behavioral techniques developed to treat children in out-of-home placements into a family preservation model. Two case examples illustrate how the system has been modified to train biological or adoptive parents in parenting skills, enable them to teach their children pro-family behaviors, and reinforce new behaviors through a credit card that monitors an ongoing balance of credits and fines

Building Eurafrica: Reviving Colonialism through European Integration, 1920-1960

This paper examines the history of the ‘Eurafrican project’ as it evolved from the Pan‐ European movement in the 1920s to its institutionalization in the European Economic Community (EEC) (i.e. today’s EU) in the late 1950s. As we show, practically all of the visions, movements and concrete institutional arrangements working towards European integration during this period placed Africa’s incorporation into the European enterprise as a central objective. As so much of the scholarly, political and journalistic accounts at the time testify to, European integration was inextricably bound up with a Eurafrican project. According to the intellectual, political and institutional discourse on Eurafrica—or the fate of Europe’s colonial enterprise—a future European community presupposed the transformation of the strictly national colonial projects into a joint European colonization of Africa. There is strong evidence to support that this project was instrumental in the actual, diplomatic and political constitution of the EEC, or of Europe as a political subject. According to our thesis, the origins of the EU cannot be separated from the perceived necessity to preserve and reinvigorate the colonial system. On a second level the paper also introduces a broader historiographic problematic in which we position Eurafrica as the wider but by now forgotten formation that shaped Europe and Africa and their relations to one another in the greater part of the twentieth century. Eurafrica conditioned both the integration of Europe and the political landscape in postcolonial Africa. We are thus able to shift the terrain upon which most if not all scholarly analyses of the political, economic and ideological developments on the two continents have taken place up until now. Eurafrica is the forgotten geopolitical context that must be reconstructed in order for us to resolve a set of crucial historical and political problems. Questioning the historical framework usually employed in EU studies, our intervention emphasizes the radically different geopolitical designs for the postwar world order that was encoded in the Eurafrican project. Finally, we also show how these Eurafrican designs continue to influence current relations between Europe and Africa

Eurafrica

This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. In order to think theoretically about our global age it is important to understand how the global has been conceived historically. 'Eurafrica' was an intellectual endeavor and political project that from the 1920s saw Europe's future survival - its continued role in history - as completely bound up with Europe's successful merger with Africa. In its time the concept of Eurafrica was tremendously influential in the process of European integration. Today the project is largely forgotten, yet the idea continues to influence EU policy towards its African 'partner'. The book will recover a critical conception of the nexus between Europe and Africa - a relationship of significance across the humanities and social sciences. In assessing this historical concept the authors shed light on the process of European integration, African decolonization and the current conflictual relationship between Europe and Africa