Search results

This purpose of this study is to examine the fluidity of family life which continues to attract attention. This is increasingly significant for the intergenerational relationship between adult children and their elderly parents. Using practice theory, the aims are to understand the role of food in elderly families and explore how family practices are maintained when elderly transition into care.

A phenomenological research approach was used as the authors sought to build an understanding of the social interactions between family and their lifeworld.

This study extends theory on the relationship between the elderly parent and their family and explores through practice theory how families performed their love, how altered routines and long standing rituals provided structure to the elderly relatives and how care practices were negotiated as the elderly relatives transitioned from independence to dependence and towards care. A theoretical framework is introduced that provides guidance for the transition stages and the areas for negotiation.

This research has implications for food manufacturers and marketers, as the demand for healthy food for the elderly is made more widely available, healthy and easy to prepare. The limitations of the research are due to the sample located in East Yorkshire only.

This research has implications for brand managers of food manufacturers and supermarkets that need to create product lines that target this segment by producing healthy, convenience food.

It is also important for health and social care policy as the authors seek to understand the role of food, family and community and how policy can be devised to provide stability in this transitional and uncertain lifestage.

This research extends the body of literature on food and the family by focussing on the elderly cared for and their family. The authors show how food can be construed as loving care, and using practice theory, a theoretical framework is developed that can explain the transitions and how the family negotiates the stages from independence to dependence.

This case series describes the startup of Farm to School of Park County, an emerging nonprofit organization in the US state of Montana. Case (A) describes the community, the need, and the origins of Farm to School in Livingston, Montana. The leaders of Farm to School face a budget crisis and need to evaluate four options to decide whether, when, and how it should become an independent organization. As Case (B) begins, Farm to School has decided to enter into a fiscal sponsorship agreement with the local community foundation. The next task for the organization's leaders is recruiting founding board members. They need to decide whom to ask and how to do it. In Case (C), the board develops a strategic plan and establishes committees. However, the board members and leaders start to feel fatigue in the face of the demands of a startup organization, leading to questions about what is truly strategic and how work will get done. The Farm to School organization in Case (D) has just issued its first annual report, filled with meaningful accomplishments. The leaders of the organization begin to plan to build an organization that will outlast them and the founding board members.

Comparatively, men have poorer physical and mental health outcomes than women, with a significantly higher suicide rate. Contributory factors are thought to be social and biological, leading to reduced access to health-care services. The study aims to develop and implement community-based support to increase awareness of and access to men’s mental health support networks and groups.

The project involved three key work-packages discussed in this paper: raising awareness of men’s mental health needs in health care, educational and community settings; collaboration between National Health Services (NHS) and non-NHS health-care support organisations to build multi-sector partnership working; and developing a supported sports-based community intervention aimed at men living with mental health conditions. The acceptability and feasibility of these work-packages were pragmatically evaluated through mixed-methods surveys and qualitative content analysis.

Overall, both community events and sports groups successfully engaged men living with mental health problems. Organisations interested in men’s mental health are continuing to engage in a partnership initiative. Community events were well-attended and received positive feedback, particularly regarding the educative and real-life experiences approach promoted in the events. The sports intervention is feasible and well-accepted by participants, who described feeling supported with their physical and mental health needs, with increased mental well-being reported.

The main limitations of this project are that the authors only evaluated a football group rather than all work areas. The project collected outcomes relating to participants’ demographics and qualitative reflections of participating in the football group along with a retrospective survey of perceived benefits, but the project did not undertake a pre- and post-comparison of well-being outcomes owing to low completion of these measures. Future work could focus on collecting more pre- and post-measures related to well-being, recovery and inclusion and compare these with men not involved in the football groups or public events.

This paper discusses the development and feasibility of setting up community-based men’s mental health support networks, involving public events, partnership working and targeted-sports interventions. All initiatives were well-received and successfully attended by men living with mental health conditions. Evaluation of the programme revealed the value placed on education about mental health and the role that community sports interventions may play in men’s mental health care.

This project has demonstrated three different ways of supporting men’s mental health needs in the community. Community public events were held to raise awareness of men’s mental health needs and issues were well-attended and highlighted the need for health promotion and education in this area across all the communities. The men’s football group demonstrated the feasibility of moving mental health support out into a non-clinical and more community arena in a way that men engaged effectively. Finally, the creation of MensNet has bought together disparate multi-sector organisations successfully to lead public health mechanisms to support men’s mental health needs.

This paper describes a new multi-disciplined approach to supporting health-seeking challenges among men, in particular, how partnership working across NHS and non-NHS sectors can successfully support an identified public health need pragmatically using existing services and organisations.

Every family has its own structure and unique characteristics. The family in this book has diversity and many of the nontraditional family groupings prevalent in society today. Created for kindergartners, this lesson celebrates individual likenesses and differences of families and students. It encourages both student and parent participation.

This paper aims to demonstrate methods that sustainability-conscious brands can use to include their primary producers in the measurement and reporting of the environment and sustainability performance of their supply chains. It explores three questions: How can farm businesses provide information required in sustainability reporting? What are the challenges and opportunities experienced in preparing and presenting the information? What future research and policy instruments might be needed to resolve these issues.

This study identifies and describes methods to provide the farm-level information needed for environmental performance and sustainability reporting frameworks. It demonstrates them by compiling natural capital accounts and environmental performance information for two wool producers in the grassy woodland biome of Eastern Australia; the contrasting history and management of these producers would be expected to result in different environmental performances.

The authors demonstrated an approach to NC accounting that is suitable for including primary producers in environmental performance reporting of supply chains and that can communicate whether individual producers are sustaining, improving or degrading their NC. Measurements suitable for informing farm management and for the estimation of supply chain performance can simultaneously produce information useful for aggregation to regional and national assessments.

The methods used should assist sustainability-conscious supply chains to more accurately assess the environmental performance of their primary producers and to use these assessments in selective sourcing strategies to improve supply chain performance. Empirical measures of environmental performance and natural capital have the potential to enable evaluation of the effectiveness of sustainability accounting frameworks in inducing businesses to reduce their environmental impacts and improve the condition of the natural capital they depend on.

Two significant social implications exist for the inclusion of primary producers in the sustainability and environmental performance reporting of supply chains. Firstly, it presently takes considerable time and expense for producers to prepare this information. Governments and members of the supply chain should acknowledge the value of this information to their organisations and consider sharing some of the cost of its preparation with primary producers. Secondly, the “additionality” requirement commonly present in existing frameworks may perversely exclude already high-performing producers from being recognised. The methods proposed in this paper provide a way to resolve this.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this research is the first to describe detailed methods of collecting data for natural capital accounting and environmental performance reporting for individual farms and the first to compile the information and present it in a manner coherent with the Kering EP&L and the UN SEEA EA. The authors believe that this will make a significant contribution to the development of fair and standardised ways of measuring individual farm performance and the performance of food, beverage and apparel supply chains.

This paper aims to address the issue of why students want to drop out from a course and suggests appropriate strategies to enhance student retention.

A sample of 260 hospitality management students were surveyed based on both Tinto's model of student–institution integration and a theory of planned behavior on student departure. The research applies data mining and decision tree using the classification and regression trees (CART) method as an analytic tool to identify a group, discover relationships between groups and predict future events for segmentation.

The results regarding the demographics indicate that the most critical factors of dropout included residency status, financial situation, quality of class and occupation.

This is a limited US sample, based on student perceptions only and not lecturer or institution perceptions.

The paper provides empirical evidence of student perspective along with institutional and learning environment factors. It includes data from students who are currently enrolled (which previous literature has not covered) by testing student–institution integration and planned behavior on student departure.

This paper reflects on the Sustainability Research Symposium (SRS), a long-term student-led initiative (seven years) at McGill University in Montréal, Canada, that seeks to foster interdisciplinary dialogue among students and researchers by using the sustainability sciences as a bridge concept. The purpose of this study is to explore the effectiveness of the SRS in fostering sustainability literacy.

Past participants of the SRS were invited to complete a survey to gauge the strengths and weaknesses of the symposia from a participants’ perspective. A mix of descriptive statistics and axial and thematic coding were used to analyze survey responses (n = 56). This study links theory and practice to explore the outcomes of symposia as tools for students to engage with sustainability research in university campuses.

Survey findings indicated that participants are from multiple disciplinary backgrounds and that they are often interested in sustainability research without being identified as sustainability researchers. Overall, the survey findings suggested that student-organized symposia can be effective mechanisms to enhance exposure to interdisciplinary research and to integrate sustainability sciences outside the classroom.

Despite being a one-day event, the survey findings suggest that symposia can offer an “initiation” toward interdisciplinary dialogue and around sustainability research that can have lasting impacts beyond the time frame of the event.

Although research symposia are widespread in university campuses, there is little published information on the effectiveness of student-organized symposia as vectors for sustainability literacy. This original contribution presents a case study of the effectiveness of an annual symposium at one Canadian university, organized by students from the Faculties of Science, Arts and Management.

Community gardens are increasingly used as interventions during the resettlement of refugees and other migrants. Little is known about how garden programs might support their mental health and wellbeing. Given the links between climate change and forced migration, community gardens are especially relevant, as they can also support climate change mitigation. This study aims to document psychosocial outcomes of gardening programs for refugees and migrants, and mechanisms leading to these outcomes.

The authors searched major databases and the grey literature up to 2021, resulting in the inclusion of 17 peer-reviewed and 4 grey literature articles in a thematic, qualitative analysis.

Four consistent themes arose from the analysis: community gardening programs promoted continuity and adaptation (81% of articles), social connectedness (81%), overall wellbeing (95%) and a sense of meaning and self-worth (67%). The results suggest that community gardens can strengthen psychosocial pillars that are key to the recovery and resettlement of refugees and migrants. The land-based and social nature of community gardening may enable connections to the land and others, nurture a sense of belonging in the host country and provide a link to the past for those from agricultural backgrounds.

Further participatory action research is needed to develop guidelines for the successful implementation of community gardens by resettlement organisations.

This review indicates that community gardens can be effective psychosocial interventions as part of a network of services supporting the resettlement of refugees and migrants.

Purpose – The purpose of this chapter is to retell the narratives of a preservice teacher and a teacher educator as they lived a story of critical literacy and curriculum-making as a curriculum of lives.

Approach – The chapter presents a year-long narrative inquiry centered on the revisioning of curriculum for an undergraduate literacy course for preservice teachers.

Findings – The researcher broadened her understanding of teacher and teacher educators as curriculum makers to include preservice teachers as curriculum makers. As preservice teachers in the literacy course were invited to reflect on their own literacy backgrounds, several crucial narratives emerged that shaped new understandings for the researcher/teacher educator and drew her into her own curriculum-making with moral purpose. One preservice teacher began a journey of narrative authority and curriculum-making as a curriculum of lives in a subsequent field experience, even through the mire of political pressure in schools.

Research implications – The preservice teacher's retelling featured children who discovered newfound understandings of social justice through literary ways of knowing and critical literacy events. She developed new understandings of how to help public school students value and define their literacies and their life events, all of which folded back into the undergraduate literacy course.

Value – Teacher educators can be encouraged to walk in relationship with their preservice teachers, valuing human experiences and lives as curriculum rather than relenting to top-down, politically driven, outside curriculum.

Notable Social Studies Trade Book (NSSTB) lists include books selected annually by the Book Review Committee of the National Council for the Social Studies in conjunction with the Children’s Book Council. These lists are excellent resources for teachers who use children’s literature to support social studies instruction in their classrooms. We report our analysis of award-winning titles for primary grades published from 2001-2011. Biographies and books that address topics about families are featured as a starting place for primary grades teachers to begin incorporating NSSTB into their social studies instruction. We conclude by suggesting ways for primary grade teachers to utilize the book lists each year.