Photovoice as a Pedagogical Tool in the Community Psychology Classroom

Constructivist perspectives contend that individuals actively extract and make meaning from the world around them. In the classroom this means that students are not passive recipients or repositories for our theories and empirical findings; instead, they actively redefine and relate to (or not) the concepts presented. To simultaneously stimulate and build on this process, I adopted Photovoice as a pedagogical tool to situate students as observers of their own community and create space for them to engage in participatory, community-focused meaning making activities. By employing strategically crafted framing questions, students generated Photovoice data that served as a powerful jumping off point for discussing key community psychology concepts. In addition, the Photovoice process provided students the opportunity to directly experience a participatory research process as well as engage in basic qualitative data analysis. This article presents the general process my class undertook as well as qualitative feedback from students.     

Using Organizational Collaboration and Community Partnerships to Transition Families from Homelessness to Home Ownership: The HomeBuy5 Program

For more than a decade, the HomeBuy5 Program has successfully helped families who were homeless find an apartment, while working with them to develop a plan to move from homelessness to homeownership. This article provides an historical overview of how the program developed and evolved, a detailed discussion of the program's process and structure, the role of organizational collaboration and community partners, and demographic information on the families that have been served. It is argued that this program can be a prototype for other communities as they increase their efforts to eliminate homelessness.     

Constructing Better Futures via Video

Abstract

Some individuals can rise above disadvantaged environments by cognitively constructing better ones. One way to go beyond limited environments is by creating video futures. This article describes applications of video-based futures planning, in which teenagers find meaning in their current educational setting to prepare them for adulthood. We also describe the systematic training of school-based personnel to support the skills and positive attitudes of their students with carefully planned and edited videos that show future capability of the individual (self modeling and feedforward). We report diverse case studies to illustrate the methodologies, the range of applications, and typical outcomes. Follow-up of dissemination (especially the Video Futures Start-Up Kit) indicates successful replications, particularly in Kentucky and Aotearoa New Zealand.     

Promoting Methodological Pluralism,Theoretical Diversity and Interdisciplinarity Through a Multi-Leveled Violence Prevention Initiative in South Africa

SUMMARY

Violence prevention within low-income, under-resourced communities presents significant challenges to community development researcher-practitioners seeking to maximize partnerships, resource utilization and overall program effectiveness. This article highlights a South African research and service delivery organization's efforts to develop a violence prevention matrix, premised upon an adaptation of the public health approach and the infusion of a critical, community development praxis. It presents preliminary outcomes of a multi-level pilot application of this matrix in a low-income neighborhood in South Africa, specifically focusing on evaluating its capacity to foster methodological pluralism, theoretical diversity and interdisciplinarity, together with promoting community empowerment and coalition-building strategies.     

Women's Leadership Programs in South Africa

SUMMARY

A central premise of this paper is that the training of women for leadership roles is a critical component of the development of communities as a whole. This was the central point of departure for a study that aimed to review women's leadership training programs in South Africa. This paper reports on this study in which 38 organizations from across the country participated. Three main data sources were used: Organizational materials, interviews and questionnaires. The analysis examined the following key features: Motivation for leadership training, approaches to leadership, understandings of gender difference, training techniques and strategies and outcomes. The findings revealed trends that may have implications for best practice frameworks in interventions targeted at leadership, gender and development.     

Attitudinal and Academic Effects of Service-Learning

SUMMARY

We examined perceived learning and attitude change in classes in Cognitive Psychology and Sensation and Perception in which some but not all of the students did service-learning with autistic children or in other settings. Attitudes toward people served became more positive based on questionnaire and journal entry data, and in one class, service-learning students felt they learned more about course material from their experiences.     

School Violence Prevention

Abstract

School violence has many faces and many casualties. In varying degrees it touches students, parents, educators and communities of every school world wide. At the local level, communities are seen as playing a significant role in violence prevention. Generally, community-based violence prevention approaches involve the assessment of local problems, identification of target issues, selection of a range of interventions, and the encouragement of collaboration among civic groups, the juvenile justice system, local leaders, and young people themselves. These programs are generally judged as successful if they are able to address risk factors effectively for individual youths, strengthen those factors that provide protection and enhance resiliency, provide sufficient support and effective supervision, and increase pro-social attitudes by providing youth with a sense of having an increased stake in their local communities. Although too few educators are aware of its impact, the women's community has been involved in this work for decades. In this paper I discuss the results of interviews with members of the women's community in Atlantic Canada who have developed proactive violence prevention initiatives. I will concentrate on their efforts to bring those programs into the schools and their experiences of the successes and challenges they encounter.     

西藏社区矫正的实践分析

社区矫正是我国司法体制改革和工作机制改革的重要内容。全国各地社区矫正工作如火如荼的开展对西藏社区矫正的发展具有重要借鉴意义。然而,作为一项非监禁的刑罚执行方法,西藏地区的社区矫正工作存在一定的特殊性。目前西藏地方的社区矫正工作以适合西藏特色的方式正在推进中,积累了一定的经验．也取得了积极的社会效应。     

“第三部门”缺失语境下我国农村社区矫正模式——安徽省杜集乡社区矫正实证分析

由于城乡二元经济体制的存在、城乡社区发展的不平衡,导致农村社区矫正具有自身的地域性特点,在城市社区矫正中扮演重要角色的"第三部门"在大多数农村地区未得到很好发展。通过对安徽省杜集乡社区矫正情况的实证分析,探讨"农村第三部门"缺失语境下我国农村社区矫正模式,以提出可操作的对策与建议。     

多方合作与共赢:提高农村社区公共品供给能力之路

本文就我国农村社区公共品供给主体、范围和特点进行了讨论,分析了目前农村社区公共品供给状况、问题及原因。本文认为,增加农村社区公共品供给,仅靠政府财政供给,或者完全由农民承担,都是不现实的;需要各方通力合作,提高供给能力,达到共赢的目的。为此,需要明确政府对农村社区公共品供给职责,完善合作供给机制,大力发展农村社区非营利组织,培养志愿者精神,建立健全法律制度。