Indigenous Social Work Administration: A Qualitative Study

This qualitative study, working from an Indigenous perspective, sought to determine the content and pedagogical process of teaching Indigenous social work administration. An Indigenous philosophical and methodological approach framed a participatory action research approach to the topic; Indigenous leaders, managers, and academics in Canada were interviewed, along with a focus group of Indigenous academics to determine what content and pedagogical approach needs to be included when teaching Indigenous social work administration

Peer Influences on Adolescent Risk Behavior

Research efforts to account for elevated risk behavior among adolescents have arrived at an exciting new stage. Moving beyond laboratory studies of age differences in risk perception and reasoning, new approaches have shifted their focus to the influence of social and emotional factors on adolescent decision making. We review recent research suggesting that adolescent risk-taking propensity derives in part from a maturational gap between early adolescent remodeling of the brain’s socioemotional reward system and a gradual, prolonged strengthening of the cognitive-control system. Research has suggested that in adolescence, a time when individuals spend an increasing amount of time with their peers, peer-related stimuli may sensitize the reward system to respond to the reward value of risky behavior. As the cognitive-control system gradually matures over the course of the teenage years, adolescents grow in their capacity to coordinate affect and cognition and to exercise self-regulation, even in emotionally arousing situations. These capacities are reflected in gradual growth in the capacity to resist peer influence

Evaluation methodologies in multisector community change initiatives: The missing role of indigenous knowledge systems

Comprehensive or multisector community change initiatives (CCIs) represent a promising approach to address the overrepresentation of Indigenous children and families in Canada’s child welfare systems. However, such initiatives are difficult to establish and sustain – in part due to the difficulty of evaluating their impacts and outcomes using standardized Western evaluation methodologies. Consequently, over the past 20 years there have been extensive efforts to develop evaluation principles, methodologies, methods, and tools that are more able to illustrate the benefits of these kinds of initiatives. A systematic review of the CCI evaluation literature found that while many of these principles, methodologies, methods and tools show considerable promise, there has been limited attention to or incorporation of Indigenous ways of knowing or approaches to research with Indigenous peoples. This paper presents two examples of Indigenous led multisector community change initiatives to enhance Indigenous well-being and notes the importance of evaluating their impacts. It argues that collaborative research is needed with participants in Indigenous led multisector collaborations to advance knowledge of culturally relevant approaches to their evaluation

From Bucktown to Niketown: Doing Visual Cultural Studies (Chicago Style)

We begin this article with an epigrammatic manifesto: Art education should be a political project that engages visual representations, cultural sites, and public spheres through the language of critique, possibility, and production. Art educators should help students understand, critique, and challenge how individuals, institutions, and social practices are inscribed in power differently, to expand the possibilities for freedom, equality, and radical democracy, through relevant and meaningful production. These are the elements and principles of a politically engaged and socially just art education. This is art education as visual cultural studies

Morphophonological Variation in Haitian Creole: the Case of 3SG

Among French-based creole languages, Haitian Creole is the one with the highest degree of standardization. The written norm, Standard Haitian Creole (SHC), is based on the speech of monolinguals of the capital area, Port-au-Prince, rather than on the variety (kreyòl swa) of the politically and economically powerful Creole–French bilingual minority. For instance, the front rounded vowels and postvocalic /r/ of the latter are absent from SHC, which is spreading to the rest of the country through the media and the educational system. In order to evaluate the diffusion of SHC, a sociolinguistic study of Northern Haitian Creole (Capois) was conducted in and around Cape Haitian, whose spoken variety diverges most from SHC. In addition to stereotypical features such as the possessive kin a + pronoun (vs. SHC pa + pronoun), we uncovered several Capois features—some of which were first described in Étienne (1974)—still in widespread use in Northern Haiti. In this article, we focus on the most frequently occurring variable, the third person singular pronoun (3SG), which alternates between SHC li/l, and Capois i/y. Using a corpus of 24 speakers, we show that SHC li has yet to replace Capois i, which is preferred by a large proportion of community members (90%; N=2,823) and used categorically in the existential context i gen ‘there is/are’. For both the rural and urban populations, this variable is conditioned by syntactic and phonological factors. In subject position, the Capois or the full SHC variants are favored before a consonant, while the reduced SHC form l is the only variant favored before a vowel. In object position, Capois and SHC variants are in near perfect complementary distribution: the Capois variant occurs (near-)categorically after a vowel, and SHC variants occur (near-)categorically after a consonant. Despite these shared tendencies, we found a lower rate of Capois variant use in urban speakers, which may be due to their greater exposure to speakers from other areas of Haiti, to the media (especially television), and closer contact with middle class bilingual speakers who are more influencedby the standard emanating from Port-au-Prince