Cara Djonko-Moore, Shan Jiang and Katherine Gibson
Multicultural teacher education (MTE), self-efficacy and satisfaction are all important for teachers, especially as they relate to their engagement in practices that are…
Abstract
Purpose
Multicultural teacher education (MTE), self-efficacy and satisfaction are all important for teachers, especially as they relate to their engagement in practices that are beneficial for culturally and linguistically diverse children. Yet it remains to be seen how these important constructs work together to predict teaching practices once teachers enter the field. The purpose of this paper is to explore how MTE, teacher efficacy, teacher satisfaction and culturally responsive teaching (CRT) practices are related among early childhood teachers.
Design/methodology/approach
Specifically, the paper will address the connections between these variables via a path analysis. Previously collected data from 105 public early childhood teachers (PreK-2) in a single county in the Southeast United States was analyzed for the study.
Findings
Results suggest that CRT in early childhood is a three-faceted construct with teacher efficacy having a direct effect on all dimensions of CRT and teacher satisfaction having a direct effect on two dimensions of CRT. MTE did not have any direct effect on teacher efficacy, teacher satisfaction or CRT.
Originality/value
This paper contributes to the literature in that it is especially necessary to examine how teacher education influences teachers’ efficacy and practices with culturally and linguistically diverse students. There is limited research on how these variables work together in the early childhood setting.
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In light of the shortcomings of the current world order for indigenous peoples and the environment, there is a need to make “another world possible” by promoting new ways of…
Abstract
Purpose
In light of the shortcomings of the current world order for indigenous peoples and the environment, there is a need to make “another world possible” by promoting new ways of thinking and articulating indigenous economies. This paper aims to address this issue.
Design/methodology/approach
This paper examines Māori enterprises involved in geothermal energy production as existing expressions of this other “possible world”.
Findings
The paper finds that Māori enterprises involved in geothermal energy production are increasing in number and are demonstrating complex ways of conducting business. In seeking a clearer picture of these enterprises, it was found that analysing how Māori values were “added in” to these businesses was not enough. Instead it was found that examining how these enterprises could be charted with ethical coordinates allows a more complete account of what is taking place.
Originality/value
This paper is of value for scholars analysing the value‐based aspects of economies, particularly indigenous business enterprises. Charting ethical coordinates allows the analysis of indigenous enterprises to move away from thinking about them in binary terms, as either Indigenous or non‐indigenous. Having a way of thinking about and articulating the complexity of indigenous enterprises enables a richer conversation about their attributes.
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While some researchers have considered commodity chain analysis to be a tool or method that is “innocent of theory,” or can be combined with any theory, this paper argues that it…
Abstract
While some researchers have considered commodity chain analysis to be a tool or method that is “innocent of theory,” or can be combined with any theory, this paper argues that it has a specific set of theoretical investments. It argues that commodity chain analysis emerged in response to criticisms of the determinism, economism, and western bias in earlier development paradigms. Drawing on recent scholarship, it argues that researchers have turned to the study of commodity chains to provide situated and contingent accounts of global political economy that are historically specific, sensitive to culture and meaning, and attentive to subaltern perspectives.
Rafaela Costa Camoes Rabello, Karen Nairn and Vivienne Anderson
Corporate social responsibility (CSR) has provoked considerable debate. Initial expressions of CSR can be traced back to the seventeenth century. However, the ideal of socially…
Abstract
Corporate social responsibility (CSR) has provoked considerable debate. Initial expressions of CSR can be traced back to the seventeenth century. However, the ideal of socially responsible business was most evident after the depression of the 1930s and the post-war period in the 1950s. CSR was, by then, mainly influenced by values of philanthropy and principles of the welfare state, and mostly centred on corporations’ charitable donations which provided social welfare for materially deprived families and individuals. In the 1980s, there was a marked shift to the neoliberal ideals of profit maximisation and free regulation in corporate activities and this fed through into CSR practices. We argue that these conflicting ideals of CSR create divergent discourses where corporations on the one hand proclaim a lack of self-interest and a duty of care towards host societies, and on the other hand legitimise corporation’s self-interested preoccupation with profit. Divergent care versus profit discourses influence how legislators, CSR experts, corporations and NGOs understand and practise CSR in host societies. In this chapter, we examine how welfare and neoliberal ideologies contribute to divergent discourses of duty of care and profit, and how these discourses influence corporations’ decision-making about their social responsibility. The chapter concludes by proposing alternative ways for rethinking political and economic relationships between communities and corporations, in order to move beyond the limits of the current discourses of duty of care and profit.
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The purpose of this paper is to use a case study of an online parenting forum to theorise how mothers’ everyday environmental and caring labour is a form of environmental and…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to use a case study of an online parenting forum to theorise how mothers’ everyday environmental and caring labour is a form of environmental and social activism in the home, that while not organised as such, is still collectivised in a “hybrid activist collective”.
Design/methodology/approach
Using ethnographic data and content analysis from an online parenting forum for the nappy-free infant hygiene practice known as “elimination communication”, the author compares the matters of key concern arising for this group of mothers with economic activist concerns as identified by Gibson-Graham et al. (2013) in their community economies work.
Findings
The paper finds a high degree of resonance between the key concerns of the elimination communication forum members with the key concerns of community economies. Furthermore, the author identifies the components of what might comprise a “hybrid activist collective” of mothers and others undertaking direct action for environmental and social change.
Social implications
Mothers and others acting for social and environmental change through domestic practices should be recognised for their important environmental and caring labour.
Originality/value
The paper proposes the “hybrid activist collective” as a way of understanding the human and non-human elements that gather together to act for environmental and social change in a collectivised, but not formally organised manner.
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This chapter will detail the methodologies and methods used in a research project aimed to develop a working democratic model of parent engagement in a coastal primary school in…
Abstract
This chapter will detail the methodologies and methods used in a research project aimed to develop a working democratic model of parent engagement in a coastal primary school in England. Building on John Macmurray's (1958/2012) insistence that learning to live and act in relationship with each other is vital to democracy and thus education, the project involved working with a group of parents who explored different ways of working with and relating to the school. Initially, the study involved using Community Philosophy (SAPERE, 2015) which provided a forum to discuss, problematise and develop new concepts and forms of parent engagement. As the research project continued, it was necessary to take a post-structuralist turn and develop a more dissensual approach to both parent engagement and research. This chapter explores the need for such an approach argues for a re-conceptualisation of action research as the rope makers tool, the fid, an approach that ruptures understandings and the status quo. The implications of such an approach are explored, especially the need for a destabilising approach to methodology and research ethics.
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George Cheney, Matt Noyes, Emi Do, Marcelo Vieta, Joseba Azkarraga and Charlie Michel
The purpose of this paper is to examine three explanatory perspectives in the academic literature on informal economies that seek to account for agents’ engagement in informal…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to examine three explanatory perspectives in the academic literature on informal economies that seek to account for agents’ engagement in informal economic practices.
Design/methodology/approach
The paper draws on Pierre Bourdieu’s reflexive sociology to interrogate the existing perspectives and to provide a conceptual rethinking of informal economies and informal economic practices.
Findings
The paper reveals an inherent scholastic epistemocentrism in the established perspectives. By privileging either an objectivist or a subjectivist viewpoint, these accounts do not examine the practical knowledge and logic that constitute agents’ knowledgeable engagement in informal economic practices. By making use of Bourdieu’s thinking tools of “field”, “capital” and “the habitus”, the paper offers a conceptual rethinking of informal economic practices as the product of a dialectic relationship between socially objectivated structures and subjective representations and experiences.
Originality/value
The paper introduces a reflexive rethinking of informality that draws on but also develops an emergent literature on informal economic practices as relational and context bound.