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University scientists are frequently challenged to embrace stakeholder engagement in a way that departs from traditional contract-oriented relationships; this is occurring within water management a...

What is a nation? This is an essen tial question for students of American history. Answering it entails an understanding of cul ture, politics, and the "vital uni fying t emes and narrativ s of human experience" (National Council for History Education, 1997). Can eighth graders make this explo ration personally relevant by creating their own middle school nation? The story of this nation's history, United States history, is complex, confusing, and challenging to understand for everyone, including eighth graders. We wanted to engage our students in some of the issues confronting people who lived this history, particularly as it related to the development of government. "While textbook authors tend to include most of the trees and all too many twigs, they neglect to give readers even a glimpse of what they might find memorable: the forests" (Loewen, 1995). The forests for us and our stu dents became the big questions: What is a nation? How do citizens of a nation live in harmony? Solve problems? Deal with inequity? Share power? This experiment in nation building took place at Longfellow Middle School in La Crosse, Wisconsin. Longfellow, situated in a quiet residential neighborhood with a view of the Mississippi River bluffs, is a 750 stu dent school with a population of mostly Caucasian, lower to middle income students with a significant Hmong population and a smattering of other ethnic and racial groups. Longfellow has been organized into pods for the last twenty years. There are two-, threeand four teacher pods, and it is this structure, along with an enabling schedule, that allowed us to work closely to develop our nation. Purpose, Philosophy, and Structure

This article presents the main themes in both the control and autonomy aspects of the early leisure policy debate in Sweden. It is based on the study of discussions in the Swedish parliament during the early period of open state intervention into the field of youth leisure. The analysis is concentrated on the leisure and moral development of children and young people. It is shown that liberals and conservatives have been concerned with the threat to moral order posed by the ‘depravity’ of the young and that they have supported measures aimed to instil in working-class children bourgeois values and norms.