A Study of the Development of Christian Education in the Evangelical United Brethren Church

The purpose of this study was to discover the multiple roles Christian Education has played in the development of the Evangelical United Brethren Church. It was the express purpose of the author to note the times and seasons when the greatest advances were made and what men and methods were moat influential in these gains

TANF Policy Implementation: The Invisible Barrier

Barriers to participation in welfare-to-work programs are generally described in terms of human and social capital. Findings from case examination of four Philadelphia-areaw elfare-to-work programs under TANF suggest that theory about policy implementation is more applicable. Faulty policy logic, organizational and personnel incompetence, and inadequate coordination between and within funding, referral, program, and employer organizations regularly resulted in delayed program start-ups and strained program operations. Generally invisible and absent from research attention, these implementation delays and strains impeded program staff efforts and harmed TANF recipients. States\u27 24-month time limit policies are a critical target for advocacy efforts

Moving Up is a Steep Climb: Parents' Work and Children's Welfare in the Annie E. Casey Foundation's Jobs Initiative

Presents an ethnographic study of ten families participating in job access programs in Milwaukee and Seattle. Includes policy implications for workforce development, immigrants, and political refugees

Voices from the Middle: How Performance Funding Impacts Workforce Organizations, Professionals and Customers

Under recent policy reforms, the landscape of authority relations in welfare and workforce development organizations has radically changed from one that privileged internal professional autonomy to one that privileges external authorities. Performance, rather than input funding is the medium for this change. Longitudinal ethnographic research reveals that performance requirements in workforce development both contribute to and challenge organizational structure and program design, professional practices, and job seeker outcomes. As such, when the voices of job-seeking customers, directly and through their affiliated workforce organizations, professionals, and employers, are added to the voices of funders under performance funding, polyvocality may result in more consensual authority relations: in particular,l ess autonomous power for professionals, less program hegemonyforfunders, and greater power for job seekers over their futures. These findings may also pertain to organizations and professionals funded under other performance directives, such as managed care and welfare-to-work

Migrant Adult Language Learning in a Transnational Context

This presentation reports on the preliminary stages of a multi-year adult literacy project. The project is motivated by the intensity of contemporary global migration, where unprecedented numbers of adult migrants are forced into linguistically alien terrains and are often isolated and disadvantaged by language barriers preventing full participation in host societies. The project responds to this challenge with a comparative analysis of the formal and informal language learning experiences of adult migrants in three transit or destination countries characterized by an influx of newcomers: York Region, Ontario, Canada; Erie County, Pennsylvania, United States; and Agrigento, Sicily, Italy. Using a hybrid theoretical framework linking transnationalism (Glick Schiller, Basch & Szanton Blanc, 1995) and translanguaging (Otheguy, García & Reid, 2015), the project undertakes a fluid and multidirectional study of migration and conducts an analysis directed at the first-person experiences of language use in linguistically diverse contexts. Drawing on surveys and interviews, the project assesses migrants’ priorities for language learning, their agency in choosing language-learning opportunities and how language learning serves their needs. Supplementary perspectives from adult education providers and academics in migration-related fields inform evidence-based pedagogical and policy recommendations for how language-learning opportunities can support the social integration of adult migrants

Security, justice and the energy crossroads : assessing the implications of the nuclear phase-out in Germany

The authors would like to thank the EPSRC for their grant (EP/I035390/1) on which this work was conducted.The nuclear melt-down in Fukushima resulted in diverging energy policy decisions across the world where Germany decided to opt out of nuclear electricity production. Yet, the government’s decision-making framework for energy policy decisions does not accurately reflect important drivers for the strategy change. This paper presents the Energy Crossroads framework as a more comprehensive tool to analyse the drivers and impacts of the nuclear phase-out. 20 expert interviews were performed across business participants as well as policy makers in the national and international energy context. Results show that Germany has adopted an environmental justice, rather than energy security, stance in their nuclear phase out policy, with significant long-term consequences.PostprintPeer reviewe