Investing in Native Youth: Grantmaking Trends from the Native Youth and Culture Fund

In this report, First Nations highlights a snapshot of grant requests under our Native Youth and Culture Fund from 2010 through 2014

Repurposing resources as open content: studying the experiences of new providers

Much educational content sits within institutional systems protected from global access, this proprietary approach restricts opportunities for informal learning and the exchange of materials between cultures. One response to reducing this particular digital divide is to open up access to existing courses by providing them as free to use Open Educational Resources (OERs). This is being addressed through work on OpenLearn (the open content initiative from The Open University developed with support from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation) and POCKET (The Project on Open Content for Knowledge Exposition and Teaching, supported by JISC under the repositories and preservation programme). The approach is evaluative considering transfer of lessons from work on the reworking of distance learning materials (within the OpenLearn initiative) to the reworking of material from campus-based universities (supported by the POCKET project). Analysis will include the role of supporting artifacts (guidelines, examples, tools) and the process support required (shared aims, workshops, structure). Evaluation tools that are being applied include logging of experience, stake holder interviews, and analytics data. We are building on existing evaluation of the OpenLearn initiative that has revealed models for learner use of open educational resources and studied the reuse of released open resources. Results include the need for a range of reworkable formats, support and time pressures on voluntary use – these results are supported by case study information and overall usage statistics. Further data that will be available from POCKET by September 2008 will include reflections from participants, workshop outcomes and initial stakeholder interviews, full evaluation of POCKET will be complete by April 2009. This paper will have examined our understanding of the process by which content can be transformed from existing learning materials to freely available open educational resources. Conclusions at this stage will focus on the process of adoption and transfer from OpenLearn and the effectiveness of the evaluation and project approach. Comparison will be made with the advantages and disadvantages of the self supported approach adopted initially in OpenLearn and suggestions given for structures that enable collaboration in producing open educational resources

Criminal Responses and Financial Misconduct in Twenty-first Century Britain: tradition and points of departure, and the significance of the conscious past

The Financial Services (Banking Reform) Bill 2013/14 (hereafter Banking Reform Bill) is set to introduce a new criminal offence of reckless misconduct by senior bank staff. The introduction of such an offence was recommended in the Final Report of the Parliamentary Commission on Banking Standards (PCBS) Changing Banking for Good, published 19 June 2013; as part of a ‘package of recommendations to raise standards’. This particular recommendation had been widely anticipated. A short time before this Report, the PCBS Chair, Andrew Tyrie MP, had bemoaned the lack of ‘orange jumpsuits’ being donned by bankers. Equally, press reportage that ‘reckless bankers’ could ‘face jail’ had started to appear from as early as the close of 2011. 4 Government endorsement of the PCBS recommendations followed quickly from the publication of the latter’s report. On 8 July 2013 the Government Response to the Report to this effect signalled that this would be achieved by adding amendments to the Banking Reform Bill 2013/14, first introduced in Parliament 4 February 2013. This has now transpired, by virtue of amendments to the Bill introduced on 9 October 2013. Like the initial PCBS recommendation, government support for the new criminal offence was also widely anticipated. Government favour for such a measure had been strongly signalled in the Treasury Consultation Sanctions for the Directors of Failed Banks, published in July 2012. It had been signposted earlier still by very public declarations of support from Matthew Hancock, MP, a close ally of George Osborne, the Chancellor of the Exchequer. At one level, this new criminal offence is intended to be very narrow in application, and enforced only very exceptionally. In other respects, analysis of it through the current proposals show it to be a manifestly important measure which will alter the longstanding course of criminal liability for ‘financial sector’ crime in Britain. It is also part of the discourse of the post-crisis regulatory environment encouraging reflection on the past in configuring responses for the future; including suggestions that too little attention has been paid to ‘lessons of history’. In exploring aspects of both these distinctive angles, attention is paid to how nineteenth-century responses were themselves informed by contemporary Victorian understanding of a ‘conscious past’. Little work has been undertaken on how Victorian responses to financial crime were influenced by a conscious past and the article considers why the introduction of the reckless conduct in banking offence creates such an appropriate juncture for doing so. This is in the light of our own awareness of how criminal law has responded to financial misconduct for over 150 years, and what new approaches might be required to respond to the regulatory challenges of the early twenty-first century

Direct and indirect effects of social class on career expectations and likelihood of compromise in an adolescent sample

The current study investigated the application of classic attainment models, both direct and indirect effects, in the predication of career expectations and likelihood of compromise. The results indicated that among high school students (N=200) in grades 10-12 there is no direct effect of socio economic status (SES; as measured by parent education and occupation) on career compromise (aspirations exceeding expectations). Similarly, educational expectations are not directly related to the compromise of occupational expectations. Results of exploratory analysis suggest that career compromise is best explained by academic achievement and parent expectations. In an analysis of the process by which social class is transmitted to occupational expectations, results suggested no direct effect of SES on occupational expectations. However, there was a direct effect of educational expectations on occupational expectations. Given the finding demonstrating a direct effect of SES on educational expectations, the path from SES to occupational expectations appears to be indirect and mediated through educational expectations. Building on the importance of educational expectations in the prediction of occupational expectations, the results indicated that self-efficacy, aligned expectations, and perceived parent expectations explain educational expectations. Of the variables, perceived parent expectations were significantly related to increased levels of educational expectations. Overall it appears that the effect of SES on occupational expectations is mediated by educational expectations; therefore, individuals of lower SES who have increased educational expectations are more likely to have occupational expectations similar to those of their higher SES peers. Moreover, increasing parent expectations is positively associated with educational expectations among individuals of various SES levels. The results of the current study provide insight into the mechanism involved in the intergenerational transmission of social class, notably the importance of educational expectations and significance of the educational expectations parents of various SES levels have for their children

Digital technologies, children and young people's relationships and self-care

Children and young people’s access to and use of digital technologies have received increasing attention in recent years. While influential UK media commentators have often focused on associated risks, researchers have taken a less exclusively problem-focused approach. Children and young people’s use of, for example, social media and computer games to extend the spaces available to them in which to maintain relationships, to experiment with social identities, and to engage in an ‘economy of dignity’, however fragile, have all been highlighted. This paper builds on this work to further consider the role of such resources, accessed primarily through computers and mobile phones, as means of caring for oneself or ‘self-care’. It draws on a qualitative study which employed visual and audial methods to explore the sense of belonging (or not) of young people who have been ‘looked after’ by others than their biological parents, often in less affluent circumstances

Belonging in difficult family circumstances: Emotions, intimacies and consumption

Much work on young people’s material and consumer cultures has focused on the relatively affluent, and on those living with their parents. This chapter is concerned with the often more problematic material and affective circumstances of young people whose family difficulties have led them to be ‘looked after’ by the state. In particular, it focuses on the significance of material objects in helping to construct (or not) a sense of belonging, however ambivalent, in often successive places of residence. Further, while there has been much policy and research discussion of young people’s use of consumer items affording access to the internet and other electronic means of communication (Livingstone and Haddon, 2008; Livingstone et al., 2012; Osvaldsson, 2011), this chapter focuses on the importance of items of lesser monetary but often great affective or ‘sentimental’ value. As such, it draws on and develops recent literature on the role of consumption and material culture (Miller, 2008; 2010) in producing the self as a person who ‘belongs’ (May, 2013[A1][EC2]), and who can ‘display’ a family (Finch, 2007). In addition, this chapter discusses the research interview itself, in particular where, as in the project discussed, visual (and audial) methods are employed, as a place in which families and relationships may be ‘displayed’, through photographs of material objects and places or drawings of ‘ideal homes’. The chapter also explores the consumption of the artefacts produced in such research. On the one hand, these artefacts are analysed as possible means of drawing sympathetic attention to the material and relational absences and fragility associated with difficult family circumstances. It is argued that these items, if carefully used, have the potential to evoke the type of ‘haunting’ in a wider audience discussed by Gordon (2008) as a potential prompt for changes in the public imagination of groups whose difficult circumstances tend currently to be understood in individual terms. At the same time, the potentially more negative effects of research council requirements to evidence research ‘impact’ and to archive all data produced are addressed. In particular, the potential for archived photographic data to fix and reinforce stigmatised representations of difficult circumstances, and by extension of those associated with them, is discussed. [A1]AQ: Please provide complete details of this work to include in references [EC2]May, Vanessa.Connecting Self to Society.Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 201

Haunting and the knowing and showing of qualitative research

This article focuses on the representation of qualitative sociological research to academic and non-academic audiences. It argues that a broader, ethically informed consideration of the communication of findings is required, rather than the current, audit-shaped approach, to do justice to complex (affective) data and to research participants. An important catalyst for this article is the concern that the current predominance of peer-reviewed articles may contribute, however unintentionally, to the maintenance of stigmatizing social imaginaries of groups including marginalized young people. This article draws on interdisciplinary sources to extend Avery Gordon’s work on haunting to the representation of research. It contends that research ‘outputs’ can ‘haunt’, or stay with and produce empathy in their audience, by communicating the ‘seething absences’ that trace the everyday effects of power affectively and by highlighting the ‘complex personhood’ of those affected. The possibilities of such an approach are illustrated through consideration of textual and visual representations of findings from a project that explored understandings of ‘belonging’ among young people in state care, and particularly a short film, co-produced with, and featuring, a participant. While ‘representation’ is employed here primarily in an everyday sense, this article discusses ‘non’ or ‘more than’ representational approaches, while advocating a strategic negotiation with representation in relation to social justice