Teaching Beautiful Questions: Using Literature to Teach Youth Appreciative Inquiry (AI)

Learning to ask the right questions and being empowered to dream is essential to 21st century education. In an effort to create innovative citizens who are able to compete in our increasingly diverse and competitive world, youth can be taught how to discover and build on successful aspects of the past, dream creatively about the future, ask positive questions to design plans, and deliver action. These four components, discovering, dreaming, designing, and delivering, are the mainstays of Appreciative Inquiry (AI), a positive approach to organizational development. In recent years, AI has been increasingly utilized with youth. Teaching AI facilitates the potential to unlock youth’s capacity to identify strengths, build creativity, and ask the right questions to incite action. This positive educational tool stimulates the well-being of youth through an increase in positive emotion, engagement, relationship-building, meaning, and achievement. This author’s capstone suggests that AI principles can be taught to youth in order to improve innovation and well-being. Further, this capstone recommends that literature is one meaningful method to instill and teach AI principles prompting wide scale change. As a result, an AI children’s picture story book is proposed to accomplish this goal

A Comparison between the Constitutional Protections against the Imposition of Involuntary Expatriation and a Taxpayer\u27s Right to Disclaim Citizenship

This Note examines both sides of the coin: the constitutional protections given the individual fighting to retain his citizenship will be compared with the burdens, particularly the tax consequences, imposed on individuals wanting to relinquish citizenship. Section II examines the classic constitutionally-based expatriation material. It discusses the legislative history of expatriation law, including the 1978 amendments to the INA, reviews the major expatriation case law, and concludes with an analysis of Vance v. Terrazas, the most recent Supreme Court pronouncement on the nature of the voluntary conduct required to constitute expatriation. Section III deals with the tax aspects of expatriation. In order to demonstrate the tension existing in this area prior to the 1966 enactment of the Internal Revenue Code (IRC) provisions specifically addressing expatriation, section III examines the early judicial approach to attempted expatriation for tax avoidance reasons and the response of the Internal Revenue Service to that approach. A detailed analysis of the applicable income, estate, and gift tax provisions, including the legislative history, the fundamentals of each section, and relevant planning strategies, follows. Section IV employs an analysis of United States v. Matheson to address the impact of the tax consequences vis-a-vis the particular IRC provisions involving expatriation in juxtaposition to the constitutional safeguards examined in Section II

Open borders, closed minds: the discursive construction of national identity in North Cyprus

The article investigates the discursive construction of a Turkish Cypriot national identity by the newspapers in North Cyprus. It questions the representation and reconstruction processes of national identity within the press and examines the various practices employed to mobilize readers around certain national imaginings. Using Critical Discourse Analysis, the article analyses news reports of the opening of border crossings in Cyprus in 2003, based on their content, the strategies used in the production of national identity and the linguistic means employed in the process. In this way, the nationalist tendencies embedded in news discourses, as well as discriminatory and exclusive practices, are sought out

Perception, Action and the Social Dynamics of the Variable Self

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Contemporary understanding of riots: classical crowd psychology, ideology and the social identity approach

This article explores the origins and ideology of classical crowd psychology, a body of theory reflected in contemporary popularised understandings such as of the 2011 English ‘riots’. This article argues that during the nineteenth century, the crowd came to symbolise a fear of ‘mass society’ and that ‘classical’ crowd psychology was a product of these fears. Classical crowd psychology pathologised, reified and decontextualised the crowd, offering the ruling elites a perceived opportunity to control it. We contend that classical theory misrepresents crowd psychology and survives in contemporary understanding because it is ideological. We conclude by discussing how classical theory has been supplanted in academic contexts by an identity-based crowd psychology that restores the meaning to crowd action, replaces it in its social context and in so doing transforms theoretical understanding of ‘riots’ and the nature of the self

Eating well in care homes:Testing the feasibility of a staff training programme aimed at improving social interaction and choice at mealtimes

Background: The health and well-being of care home residents are influenced by their experience of mealtimes, which provide an opportunity for residents to socialise and exercise control over their lives, as well as providing essential sustenance. Care home staff are pivotal to this experience, responsible for the provision of meals and eating assistance, but also for establishing a positive mealtime culture valued by residents. Despite this, mealtimes can be task-focussed, as the pressure on staff to perform multiple duties in limited time, or a lack of knowledge and awareness, means that resident needs and preferences risk being neglected. Methods: A staff-focussed training programme aimed at improving social interaction, and resident choice was developed and delivered in a workshop. Intervention feasibility was assessed using a qualitative survey and workshop observations. A combination of descriptive and content analyses was conducted on the data. Results: Thirteen women and one man took part in the workshops, representing multiple roles within two homes in the South West UK. The workshops were found to be deliverable and practicable. Participants responded positively to the workshops, anticipating that improvements to the mealtime experience would result from their workshop outputs. Conclusion: This study suggests that staff training workshops based on improving the mealtime experience are feasible to deliver within the day-to-day running of a care home and are acceptable to staff. Positive changes resulting from these workshops could improve the health and well-being of residents. Implications for practice: Mealtimes in care homes may be improved by increasing social interaction and by providing residents with greater choice. Management-faciltated staff training may be a useful tool to encourage staff to reflect on current practice and develop their own strategies to improve the mealtime experience for residents.</p

On order and disorder during the COVID-19 pandemic

Funding: Canadian Institute for Advanced Research.In this paper, we analyse the conditions under which the COVID‐19 pandemic will lead either to social order (adherence to measures put in place by authorities to control the pandemic) or to social disorder (resistance to such measures and the emergence of open conflict). Using examples from different countries (principally the United Kingdom, the United States, and France), we first isolate three factors which determine whether people accept or reject control measures. These are the historical context of state‐public relations, the nature of leadership during the pandemic and procedural justice in the development and operation of these measures. Second, we analyse the way the crisis is policed and how forms of policing determine whether dissent will escalate into open conflict. We conclude by considering the prospects for order/disorder as the pandemic unfolds.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe

From mindless masses to small groups: Conceptualizing collective behavior in crowd modeling.

Computer simulations are increasingly used to monitor and predict behavior at large crowd events, such as mass gatherings, festivals and evacuations. We critically examine the crowd modeling literature and call for future simulations of crowd behavior to be based more closely on findings from current social psychological research. A systematic review was conducted on the crowd modeling literature (N = 140 articles) to identify the assumptions about crowd behavior that modelers use in their simulations. Articles were coded according to the way in which crowd structure was modeled. It was found that 2 broad types are used: mass approaches and small group approaches. However, neither the mass nor the small group approaches can accurately simulate the large collective behavior that has been found in extensive empirical research on crowd events. We argue that to model crowd behavior realistically, simulations must use methods which allow crowd members to identify with each other, as suggested by self-categorization theory

Q methodology and a Delphi poll: a useful approach to researching a narrative approach to therapy

Q methodology and a Delphi poll combined qualitative and quantitative methods to explore definitions of White and Epston's (1990) narrative approach to therapy among a group of UK practitioners. A Delphi poll was used to generate statements about narrative therapy. The piloting of statements by the Delphi panel identified agreement about theoretical ideas underpinning narrative therapy and certain key practices. A wider group of practitioners ranked the statements in a Q sort and made qualitative comments about their sorting. Quantitative methods (principal components analysis) were used to extract eight accounts of narrative therapy, five of which are qualitatively analysed in this paper. Agreement and differences were identified across a range of issues, including the social construction of narratives, privileging a political stance or narrative techniques and the relationship with other therapies, specifically systemic psychotherapy. Q methodology, combined with the Delphi poll, was a unique and innovative feature of this study