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This paper presents findings from an investigation of nature-based practices, from the perspectives of 10 academics/educators from six nations. Participants engaged in a focus group exploring the prevalence and inclusion of nature in social work practice and education. While the study focused on individual members' experiences and perspectives, the findings highlight important context-specific factors for including nature within social work to reconnect humans with nature for health, well-being, healing, and justice. An Integrative Environmental Model for social work is proposed to assist future practice and education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper expands upon a hitherto underexplored finding by Rich and Banerjee's 2015 model which finds that Taiwan has done comparatively better with non-democracies in Africa. The paper proposes that democratisation makes an African state more responsive to domestic economic imperatives and thus more likely to form relations with the demographically and economically larger People's Republic of China because of the prospective trade, aid and investment gains to be made once such a switch is affected. Seven case studies conducted over the 2001–2018 period yield results which are in line with this hypothesis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This corpus-based study examines the widely-used discourse marker well in Chinese-speaking learners' speech and compares its frequencies in native speaker data and Swedish learners. While Swedish learners overuse well, Chinese-speaking learners (predominantly at the upper-intermediate level) significantly underuse it. The positions and functions of well are further examined using a functional framework. One-fourth of the Chinese-speaking learners who use well manipulate its positions in utterances in a similar way to native speakers. In terms of functions, well is employed for speech management much more frequently than for attitudinal purposes. The greater use of the former does not generally create negative effects, but the under-representation of the latter may suggest that Chinese-speaking learners sound too direct in certain contexts. The paper concludes by considering pedagogical implications for different first languages and proficiency levels and their possible applications to the instruction of well. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After their defeat in the Chinese civil war, in 1949 the exiled Kuomintang (KMT) government fled to Taiwan and endeavoured to educate the baby-boomer generation on the island to become ‘true Chinese’. Geography education was one of the fundamental vehicles used by the KMT to construct a Chinese identity and to create a longing for a Chinese motherland. This paper explores the ways in which a KMT-versioned ‘sense of place’ was constructed in elementary education during the period between 1945 and 1968, and investigates how the concepts of ‘home’ and ‘homeland’ were introduced and presented in school textbooks. By examining the geographic knowledge taught in Taiwan’s elementary schools (both through the content of textbooks and the design of the curriculum), this paper investigates how the foundations of a China-centric identity were laid, and also the ways in which a Chinese homeland was constructed through geography education. However, in the process of reinforcing a sense of Chinese-ness, the relationship between the island and its inhabitants was sacrificed. The island became distant, insignificant and absent in school education and was turned into a meaningless flatscape. This paper argues that the rise of Taiwanese awareness in the 1990s has proven that an arbitrary construction of an inauthentic Chinese identity is both problematic and unsustainable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Whether China will become democratic is an interesting question with significant practical implications. This paper draws on the experiences of other Confucian societies (mainly Taiwan and South Korea) to show that it will be very difficult for China to become democratic anytime soon. Basically, in a Confucian society, people live in collectivities with stringent hierarchical structures. Such a feature is not conducive to democratization. In the cases of Taiwan an South Korea, cultural change, the emergence of a pluralistic social order following economic development, and foreign influence may have all contributed to their transition to democracy; however, more important is the quasi-pluralistic social order -- namely, ethnic and national identity cleavages in Taiwan and regionalism in South Korea in clearing the hurdle placed by the Confucian culture, Unfortunately, in China, no ready-made quasi-pluralistic social order exists, and other factors conductive to democratization may not be forthcoming soon, rendering the prospect of democratic transition in the foreseeable future quite bleak. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]