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Community psychologists have a long history of interest in understanding social systems and how to bring about enduring positive change in these systems. However, the methods that community psychologists use to anticipate and evaluate the changes that result from system change efforts are less well developed. In the current paper, we introduce readers to system dynamics modeling, an action research approach to studying complex systems and the consequences of system change. We illustrate this approach by describing a system dynamics model of educational reform. We provide readers with an introduction to system dynamics modeling, as well as describe the strengths and limitations of the approach for application to community psychology.

Purpose – The aim of this paper is to explain how errors in policymaking contribute to the minimal impact that structural, curricular and cultural changes have made on teaching practice in American schools. Design/methodology/approach – Drawing on the author's research legacy, the paper extends an historical analysis to explore and explain current dilemmas of change in schools and schooling. Findings – Over the last century, educational reforms have most often led to first order classroom change, represented by the development of hybrids of old and new teaching practices. Second order change at the classroom level has proven elusive. Factors at the policymaking level that explain the minimal impact on classroom practice include a misplaced trust in structural reform, an understanding of schools as complicated rather than complex systems, and the tendency not to distinguish teacher quality from the quality of teaching. Originality/value – The paper proposes that the lack of impact of reform on classroom practice is explained in large part by errors in assumptions and thinking that policymakers commit, a focus seldom explored in research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper directs itself to the impact of American social science on the writings of Alva and Gunnar Myrdal on the role of education and social science in "modern" industrial democracy. After a brief sketch of the Myrdals' role in the development of Swedish welfare reforms and of their intellectual contacts in the United States during the 1930's, the paper outlines four theoretical "dilemmas" of "modernity" to the solution of which education and social research was seen to contribute: the relationships between facts and values, the individual and the collective, child rearing and social change, and theory and practice. The paper concludes by tracing the articulation of these themes in the Social Democratic Party school reform proposals of 1948. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the role of the work of Nobel laureate James Buchanan on education played in the formation and evolution of his constitutional thinking. It mentions Buchanan's constitutional economics always considered as a tool for social and political change and decisions of the U.S. Supreme Court to desegregate public schools. It also mentions emergence of the Samaritan dilemma in the context of student unrest in the early 1970s.

Objective: Scant research has focused on the role of sociohistorical changes in shaping intersecting early-life selection mechanisms and their impacts on racially stratified effects of education on health across cohorts. Method: Drawing from the Health and Retirement Survey, this study fitted negative binomial regression models to assess the impacts of childhood socioeconomic status (SES) on the relationship between education and functional limitations for Black and White adults across birth cohorts (n = 16,269, born 1931–1959). Results: The disparities between Black adults and White adults in impacts of childhood SES on both education and functional limitations were more pronounced in recent cohorts. The racial stratification in the impacts of education on functional limitations was documented across cohorts. However, after adjusting for childhood SES, this stratification narrowed considerably in recent cohorts. Discussion: This study underscores the role of a sociohistorical context in shaping the effects of education on health at the intersection of race and cohort. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses issues related to subjective powerlessness in the U.S. The paper focuses on changes since 1952 in citizen efficacy or feelings of control over government for various sub-groups in the U.S. population such as blacks, blue collar workers, Southerners, Jews, young and old people. As with most issues in the study of social change, there is widespread disagreement on trends in citizen efficacy for industrial societies such as the U.S. Most theory predicts trends in objective powerlessness, rather than subjective powerlessness, although it is possible that trends in objective powerlessness do not match trends in subjective powerlessness. Within the U.S. at each point of observation, powerlessness does not vary much by stratum, except when education and race are used as indicators. And within the white population, some of the differences are heavily explained by educational differentials. It therefore seems fair to conclude that white subordinate interest groups are not oriented toward government as a result of what would seem to be objective powerlessness but more on the basis of their educational achievement.

Derrick Bell's interest convergence thesis is a seminal framework to analyze social change within critical race theory. While interest convergence's influence has grown, two foundational questions have been raised: do interest groups act rationally; does interest convergence also offer a change prescription or only an explanation of prior events. By revisiting Bell's early influences, via the concept of hegemony, the article intervenes in these two formative debates by offering a reimagined analytic framing that I term “hegemonic interest convergence.” The article then applies this concept to analyze how broader political economic shifts shaped the struggles within which the 1968 Bilingual Education Act arose. I demonstrate that support for bilingual education stemmed from a seeming interest convergence among policymakers and Latino activists based on economic, rather than cultural, concerns regarding poor urbanizing Latino communities. In doing so, policymakers promoted the bill as a concession to redirect focus from other Latino demands for economic uplift and a tool to promote ideas of cultural deficit that reimagined job automation and outsourcing into linguistic and racial “handicaps.” These findings are significant in illuminating how hegemonic interest convergence functions, thereby providing a novel historiographical analysis of the Bilingual Education Act as well as suggesting a possible strategy for future change. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Recent evidence from the United States suggests that the reversal of the gender gap in education was associated with changes in relative divorce risks: hypogamous marriages, where the wife was more educated than the husband, used to have a higher divorce risk than hypergamous marriages, where the husband was more educated, but this difference has disappeared. One interpretation holds that this may result from cultural change, involving increasing social acceptance of hypogamy. We propose an alternative mechanism that need not presuppose cultural change: the gender-gap reversal in education has changed the availability of alternatives from which highly educated women and men can choose new partners. This may have lowered the likelihood of women leaving husbands with less education and encouraged men to leave less educated spouses. We applied an agent-based model to twelve European national marriage markets to illustrate that this could be sufficient to create a convergence in divorce risks. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

We examine the use of an interdisciplinary film series, '2015 Sexism | Cinema: 50 Years on the Silver Screen,' as a space for discussion where attendees can discover allies, express critical thought, and advance their thinking. A film series is a useful response to the widespread problem of campus sexual assault in three critical ways: (a) a theater provides an informal, recreational space for discussion of feminist thought; (b) the content of the films highlights the insidious nature of sexual violence and gender inequality in our culture; and (c) there exists a degree of separation that subverts defensiveness while inspiring a critical dialogue. We discuss the utility of a film series as an accessible approach to the cultural antecedents of sexual violence on college campuses. We offer our own experiences of the film series and recommend film as a feminist pedagogical tool to address sexual violence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Diversity is a fundamental element of the AOTA Centennial Vision and a critical aspect for the visibility, growth, and sustainability of the occupational therapy profession. In this article, the authors suggest that, while the profession has been aware of the need for a diverse workforce and has taken steps to increase diversity and cultural competency, a more structured, comprehensive, and action-oriented approach must be considered to address an issue which impacts professional roles and client engagement, satisfaction, and well-being. Informed by the value-added and mutual accommodation models of cultural diversity, the authors provide specific strategies and actions which promote diversity and inclusion at the personal, institutional/organizational, and professional levels. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article assesses the causes and consequences of weak federal enforcement of school and housing desegregation since the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Political actors who acknowledged that state action played a central role in school and residential segregation, and argued that federal, state, and local governments had an obligation to rectify this situation, were uncommon. In examining the efforts of two such individuals-Housing and Urban Development Secretary George Romney and Connecticut Senator Abraham Ribicoff-this article begins to untangle the story of why school desegregation policies rarely reached beyond the most blatant perpetrators of racial separation, and why housing desegregation policies barely got off the ground. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Conventional sociological accounts of the rise and fall of academic fields have been challenged by accounts based on the idea of market-responsive change. In this article, we focus on the period 1980-2000, the period during which, according to its proponents, the market model of change became dominant in academe. We find changes in the student market to be strongly associated with increased institutionalization of academic fields. We also find the preferences of donors to be associated with increased institutionalization of academic fields. By contrast, we find relatively little support for labor market signals or changes in federal funding priorities as important influences on the institutionalization of academic fields. We find that higher-status institutions are more market responsive than lower-status institutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay elaborates on the necessary relationship between social discourse and social policy. By analyzing the 1973 Supreme Court decision in San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriguez, I seek to complicate the assumptions that sometimes guide post-civil rights narratives about equality in education. Legal precedent and public policy often reflect "official" frameworks for defining equal rights that are substantially different from public and social discourse. And because the public discourse on American education is important historically to the civil rights movement and continues to be foundational to present-day debates on race, class and equality, Rodriguez serves as an important case study for examining both contemporary American sociopolitical norms as well as efforts toward social change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The relationship between religion and educational ideals in Taiwan is explored using the Taiwan Social Change Survey (1990, 1995, 2000, and 2005). Religion seems to influence the overall level of educational ideals. Both before and after controls, Taiwanese Protestants have the highest educational ideals for both boys and girls; the nonreligious have the second highest ideals. Members of the new religious movement Yi-Guan-Dao and Catholics have the lowest ideals, while folk religionists/Taoists and Buddhists are in the middle and not significantly different from each other. We discuss possible mechanisms of influence and how our findings speak to the available literature on religion and education in the United States and elsewhere. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

According to the 'reproductive polarization' hypothesis, family-policy regimes unfavourable to the combination of employment with motherhood generate greater socio-economic differentials in fertility than other regimes. This hypothesis has been tested mainly for 'liberal' Anglo-American regimes. To investigate the effects elsewhere, we compared education differentials in age at first birth among native-born women of 1950s and 1960s birth cohorts in seven countries representing three regime types. Women with low educational attainment have continued to have first births early, not only in Britain and the USA but also in Greece, Italy, and Spain. Women at all other levels of education have experienced a shift towards later first births, a shift that has been largest in Southern Europe. Unlike the educationally heterogeneous changes in age pattern at first birth seen under the Southern European and Anglo-American family-policy regimes, the changes across birth cohorts in the study's two 'universalistic' countries, Norway and France, have been educationally homogeneous. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents abstracts on city planning-related topics, including visions of waterfront development in postindustrial Philadelphia, the construction of a town planning perception of Colombo, and city planning and the U.S. census.

To understand the relationship between social position and social change, this essay examines the multipositionality of the black schoolteacher, and through it the relationship between race and power. The autobiographical writings of black teachers who worked in the American South between 1890 and 1950 uniquely reveal the complex relationship between power and culture in this phase of American history, and illustrate the ways in which subordinated people used varied tools in order to shift the vectors of power, and thus the limits of their social status as subaltern citizens. The result is a more textured view of black teachers, which rejects simple constructions of teachers as uni-dimensional individuals capable of a 'single' consciousness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For women who have escaped political crises, NGOs can provide a healing space. This study explores nonformal and informal educational processes that occur in NGOs founded and staffed by refugee women who have resettled in the United States. Interviews and documents demonstrate that the refugee women gain knowledge and skills through participation in the NGO, find their voices through the supportive environment of the NGO and networking with others, and take opportunities to make social change. The results of this research indicate that women gain political capital through NGO participation and that increased support of NGOs can therefore result in increased democratisation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Critical literacy is akin to a sociological imagination as it involves the ability to distinguish between private troubles and public issues and the competency to use such distinctions to facilitate and engage in social change. This article is a case study of low-income rural Whites' personal interpretations of health and income inequalities with a concern for understanding the potential effectiveness of a community action program (CAP) designed to enhance their critical literacy. Findings reveal that low-income rural Whites predominantly use ideologies of individualism to interpret the inequalities experienced by others, they employ a pseudostructural level analysis tempered by individualism to interpret their experience of health and income inequalities, and they respond collectively along racial and national lines when considering overall inequalities. Based on these findings, I provide suggestions on how CAPs can more effectively elevate the critical literacy of low-income rural Whites. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The authors state that U.S. Latina/o students often experience coursework that is unchallenging, resulting in a denial of opportunity to develop the critical voices and intellectual capacities necessary to do something about it. They note that to be taught silence and avoidance of independent and critical thinking is dangerous for any student and minimizes the ability to effect social change toward an egalitarian society. They propose an educational model based on a critically compassionate intellectualism, which implements an educational trilogy of critical pedagogy, authentic caring, and social justice curriculum. These promote respectful student-teacher relationships, dispel ideological notions of racial inferiority, and inspire young Latinas/os to better themselves and their community.

The article explores advertisements as a source for historical ethnography. It argues that ads serve this purpose well because they preserve the cultural repertoire of their intended audiences. By means of cigarette advertisements the article examines identity politics among a new, "middle" ("effendi") stratum in Egypt—the cultural understanding of the "effendiya" is better tuned to inter-group distinctions and intra-group contradictions than earlier, more rigid economic and political definitions of an emerging middle-class. The analysis of contemporary smoking patterns in ads further reveals the methodological benefits of studying their "contextualized" meaning. In Egyptian culture the cigar was associated with elite and modern consumption patterns, the water-pipe with a lower class and traditional lifestyle, and the cigarette with the new group which was negotiating ways to be modern but authentic/local at the same time. Advertisers used such negotiations of binary oppositions to promote their cigarette brands to men; in their ads, cigarette smoking retained the earlier social etiquette of the water-pipe, while simultaneously being considered up-to-date and future oriented. The conservative nature of the business led advertisers to treat women's smoking as a "veiled" activity, to be taken in public only under the tutelage of men. Because smoking was associated with adult power, youth as a particular consumerist age was too contested to be openly promoted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article I discuss James Conant's ideas about the democratic role of the comprehensive high school and address just how those ideas have been treated by history. I consider the historical context of the post-World War II United States, focusing on several issues: (a) race and the growth of school segregation, (b) the rise of a youth culture and the movement for students' rights, and (c) the changing national economy, especially with respect to rising educational expectations. Drawing on the work of Amy Gutmann and other treatments of democratic education, I assess bow these factors changed the prospects for democracy in American high schools. I also examine major policy statements and commission reports concerning secondary education from the 1970s and 1980s. Altogether, it appears that these major historical events converged in the postwar period to make Conant's vision of the democratic high school problematic, at least in the nation's large metropolitan areas. Thus the future of democratic education is an open question for the great variety of U.S. youth to be educated in the coming century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the reasons for optimism about the development of legitimate scientific and engineering base for science education in the U.S. The demand for flexibility and ability to continue learning has become so little in engineering that institutions have been forced to enhanced the educational process by implementing new technologies. On the other hand, to assure equal opportunity in the engineering field, public education must provide a foundation for all children that can allow them to enter the scientific and technological field.

The article discusses the implications of current social changes in rural sociology and its role in a society. It mentions some of the achievements to indicate the growth of rural sociology in the U.S. in 20th century. In 1921, a section on rural sociology was established within the American Sociological Society. An institutional structure for the support of rural sociology has been developed and it is getting financial support also. Books on rural sociology, being used at college level, are increasing in numbers. Some of the developments in the United States are being experimented in other countries also. Rural Sociology is going through some changes as growth of rural nonfarm population, adjustments in educational systems, high involvement of the United States internationally and changes creating an image of the declining importance of agriculture and rural life. These changes have some implications for rural sociology. The first implication is that rural sociology should be concerned not only with farm people and agriculture but with the problems of small community. Research and extension must be more closely wedded. Students must be appreciated to take interest in rural sociology.

Focuses on the lifestyle trends and social changes in the U.S. and other countries based on several articles published from December 2004 to February 2005. Changes in education over the next 20 years; Impact of the widening gap between those with education and those less well-educated; Popularity of Ayurveda, the ancient Indian art of healing, in medical schools in the U.S.; Action taken by publishers in the U.S. to increase newspaper readership.