Religion, Welfare and Social Service Provision. Common Ground

Religion, Welfare, and Social Service Provision: Common Ground delves deeply into the partnerships forged between religious communities, government agencies and nonprofits to deliver social services to the needy. These pages offer a considered examination of how local faith entities have served those in their midst, and how the provision of those services has been impacted by evolving social policies. This foundational volume brings together the work of more than two dozen leading researchers, each providing long overdue scholarly inquiry into religiously affiliated helping and the many possibilities that it holds for effective cooperation

How do we integrate skills and content in classics? An inquiry into students’ use of sources

Engagement with primary sources is a key feature of arts and humanities subjects, particularly classics and ancient history. Recent instructional trends emphasise integrating skills with content, particularly in the first year of higher education. We investigate how successfully first-year university students used a variety of sources in an integrated skills and content course, through analysis of 84 final essays. Most students used four to nine sources in a 1500 word essay, but only one type of ancient source. The findings express the need to move from debates about whether to integrate skills or not, to greater discuss how key discipline-specific skills are integrated into content-based courses. Cognitive apprenticeship theory, and a thematic approach used in museum education, are used to reflect on the findings and discuss how teachers might better support students in this key aspect of the discipline

Leveling the Playing Field: Epitomizing Devolution through Faith-Based Organizations

The original New-Federalism agenda that emerged with the Reagan administration weakened federal programs and transferred power to states and localities. While Ronald Reagan and George Herbert Walker Bush\u27s years were characterized by block grants and dismantling public assistance, the Clinton years will be remembered for the dismantling of AFDC. Recruiting faith-based organizations to provide social services epitomized the second Bush presidency. In this article, we demonstrate how the seeds for recruiting faith-based groups were planted before and during the Reagan years, and how two waves of devolution chipped away at our national commitment to welfare. These first two waves provided both the ideological and practical means for faith-based social service delivery, which epitomizes the third wave of devolution. We also briefly review the incorporation of religion in social services as part of the neo-federalist trend of the Reagan legacy

Foregrounding the Disciplines in Secondary Literacy Teaching and Learning: A Call for Change

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/88028/1/JAAL.52.2.1.pd

‘Purpose’ as a way of helping white trainee history teachers engage with diversity issues

Based on a three year action research project, this study examines one strand of that research, namely the impact that ‘purpose’, i.e. exploring the range of rationales for studying a subject, has in helping white trainee teachers embrace cultural and ethnic diversity within their teaching. Through ‘purpose’ trainees explored different reasons why history should be taught (and by implication what content should be taught and how it should be taught) and the relationship of these reasons to diversity. Focusing on ‘purpose’ appears to have a positive impact on many trainees from white, mono-ethnic backgrounds, enabling them to bring diversity into the school curriculum, in this case history teaching. It offers one way to counter concerns about issues of ‘whiteness’ in the teaching profession and by teaching a more relevant curriculum has a potential positive impact on the achievement of students from minority ethnic backgrounds