Michaela Hynie, Krista Jensen, Michael Johnny, Jane Wedlock and David Phipps
The purpose of this paper is to evaluate whether unstructured graduate student research internships conducted in collaboration with community agencies build capacity and knowledge…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to evaluate whether unstructured graduate student research internships conducted in collaboration with community agencies build capacity and knowledge for students and community.
Design/methodology/approach
The paper reports the results of four semi‐structured interviews and 20 pre‐ and post‐internship surveys of students' perceptions of their internship activities; whether participation built research capacity in students and community resulted in the creation of new knowledge and promoted ongoing partnerships and relationships.
Findings
Students reported generating concrete outcomes for community partners, the acquisition of new research and professional skills, plus an increased understanding of theoretical knowledge. Many students also maintained ongoing relationships with their organizational partners beyond the terms of their internship.
Research limitations/implications
Limitations to this study are the relatively small sample size and reliance on self‐report measures.
Practical implications
The paper describes a model for student‐community engagement that benefits both community and students.
Social implications
As universities explore their relationships with their local communities, graduate student internships have tremendous potential for supporting research and knowledge‐based needs of local communities, while providing valuable skills and training to a cohort of students in bridging academic research to real world solutions. These students may go on to be community engaged scholars, or research trained personnel in the community.
Originality/value
The results presented in this paper demonstrate the benefits to graduate students in scholarship of engagement programs that prioritize true partnership between students, universities and communities.
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Keywords
Michaela Hynie, Krista Jensen, Michael Johnny, Jane Wedlock and David Phipps
The aim of this paper is to report on student perceptions of 24 graduate student internships funded in 2007‐2008 by York University's Knowledge Mobilization (KMb) Unit. These…
Abstract
Purpose
The aim of this paper is to report on student perceptions of 24 graduate student internships funded in 2007‐2008 by York University's Knowledge Mobilization (KMb) Unit. These internships provided opportunities for students to engage in research with community agencies around real world problems.
Design/methodology/approach
The principal sources of data were semi‐structured student interviews, conducted as part of an overall evaluation of the unit by an evaluation team, and student responses to surveys administered by KMb staff.
Findings
The significant findings were that students reported acquiring research and professional skills, plus a new understanding of theoretical knowledge, and that projects generated concrete outcomes for their community partners. Several students maintained ongoing relationships with their organizational partners beyond the terms of their internship, creating opportunities for ongoing benefits to both students and community partners. Students also identified areas of potential improvement, notably, there is an opportunity to strengthen the experience through integration into a formal curriculum.
Research limitations/implications
Limitations to this study are the relatively small sample size (n=20) and reliance on self‐report measures.
Practical implications
As universities explore their relationships with their local communities, graduate student internships appear to have tremendous potential for supporting research and knowledge‐based needs of local communities, while providing valuable skills and training to a cohort of students in bridging academic research to real world solutions.
Originality/value
This article makes an original contribution by focusing on benefits to graduate students in scholarship of engagement programs that prioritize true partnership between students, universities and communities.
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Juliet Millican and Tom Bourner
The purpose of this Editorial is to introduce key themes in the area of student‐community engagement (SCE) and the papers included in this special issue.
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this Editorial is to introduce key themes in the area of student‐community engagement (SCE) and the papers included in this special issue.
Design/methodology/approach
The paper discusses dominant trends in the current context.
Findings
The selection of papers in this issue represent the range of programmes that have been developed over the past five or so years and indicate what they have, and have not been able to achieve. However, the recent context indicates an acceleration of the expectations placed on higher education to develop socially responsible citizens and to create graduates who will be able to solve the complex problems of an increasingly complex world.
Originality/value
The paper provides a background to SCE and the changing role and context of higher education.
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This chapter examines the relationship between constitutional guarantees of sex equality, understood as prohibiting unequal treatment between men and women, and the constitutional…
Abstract
This chapter examines the relationship between constitutional guarantees of sex equality, understood as prohibiting unequal treatment between men and women, and the constitutional protections of maternity. Textual guarantees of sex equality are nearly universal in constitutions around the world, and many constitutions in Europe, Latin America, and Asia also include provisions guaranteeing mothers the special protection of the state. In the United States, by contrast, the special treatment of mothers has long been contested as a threat to gender equality, and the efforts to add a sex equality amendment to the U.S. constitution have failed over the past century because of conflicts about the status of motherhood. This study traces the origins and jurisprudential development of maternity clauses in European constitutions to shed light on the possibility of synthesizing maternity protection with a constitutional commitment to gender equality.
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To provide a list of non‐fictional books, as published, for the use of Librarians and Book‐buyers generally, arranged so as to serve as a continuous catalogue of new books; an aid…
Abstract
To provide a list of non‐fictional books, as published, for the use of Librarians and Book‐buyers generally, arranged so as to serve as a continuous catalogue of new books; an aid to exact classification and annotation ; and a select list of new books proposed to be purchased. Novels, school books, ordinary reprints and strictly official publications will not be included in the meantime.
Since the 1970s, interest in African literature has grown considerably in English and comparative literature departments at American colleges and universities. African writings…
Abstract
Since the 1970s, interest in African literature has grown considerably in English and comparative literature departments at American colleges and universities. African writings increasingly appear on multi‐disciplinary and multi‐cultural reading lists, exposing both high school and undergraduate students to such Anglophone and Francophone writers as Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, Ngugi wa Thiong'o, and Ferdinand Oyono. Noticeably absent from this literary boom, however, was a female point of view. Nearly all of the writers read and discussed were male and these writers, in turn, created a picture of a male‐dominated society with women portrayed in the traditional roles of mothers and wives. In fiction, women characters were nearly always secondary to the major male protagonists. Some works, such as Elechi Amadi's novel, The Concubine, went so far as to openly disdain women. Critics also concentrated solely on male writers and examined the roles of women primarily from a male perspective. Even a dearth of female writers have added to this limited view. It was not until 1956 that Flora Nwapa published Efuru, the first African novel by a woman in English, and she was then dismissed as just another woman writing about women's issues.
The author’s story of a familial connection on the move was part of the research process of an ethnographic project about a demolished ex-industrial village. Growing up in the…
Abstract
The author’s story of a familial connection on the move was part of the research process of an ethnographic project about a demolished ex-industrial village. Growing up in the 1970s, the author’s fatherless childhood was silently lived out in its spatial geography. The author’s proximate, unknown father was a potent figure that the author would glimpse in the street spaces but was never allowed to acknowledge. Twentieth century accounts of working-class life have little to say on the personal stories of families where ‘father’ was rarely present (Steedman, 1986). Here the author offers a daughter’s emotional geography of fatherlessness. To sketch a socio-cultural backcloth to the personal subplot, the author draws on scholarship about fatherhood, fatherlessness and lone motherhood as a way to discuss men’s involvement in fathering in relation to the author’s own experience of living without a father in a paternalistic company village. Turning to the author’s return in 2015 as a researcher, the author uses autoethnography to explore the personal familial subplot bubbling underneath the main project. The author charts how the methodologies used held affordances which offered a process of coming to terms with the inter-connections of spatial and familial absence and loss: the loss of author’s home-village where memories of an absent father were played out and the revelation of the loss of an already absent father through a DNA test. In this way, it traces the shifting movements of a familial (dis)-connection through memories, photographs and mobile research encounters against the backcloth of the absent spaces of an ex-industrial community.
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Communications professor, Norman Denzin, describes interactional moments that create potentially transformational experiences as epiphanies, which are subdivided into the major…
Abstract
Communications professor, Norman Denzin, describes interactional moments that create potentially transformational experiences as epiphanies, which are subdivided into the major, the minor, the cumulative, the illuminative, and the relived. In his paradigm for the examination of racialized identity formation, psychologist William Cross offers a Nigrescence Model with a four-stage approach to understand the development of Black racial identity. Cross’ model has been modified to assess other aspects of identity formation such as gender consciousness. My story illuminates how the convergence of these theories offers a new lens through which to view the maturation of raced and gendered subjectivities. This performance text uses an Africana feminism performance pedagogy rooted in Yoruba feminist philosophy to expose the reproductive violence perpetuated against Black women and recover the healing, generative force of female power.