In a world in which social divisions are widening not lessening, it is essential for community development, or any other practice committed to social justice and sustainability, to understand how power works at every level, from grassroots projects to movements for change. This exciting and practical book is filled to the brim with useful ideas for busy practitioners. Building on the work of Paulo Freire, theories are presented in interesting and straightforward ways to provide an everyday reference for practice. Contained in these pages is all you need to give your practice a critical edge!
Most contributions to this volume originated as papers given at an inter national conference on Integrative Perspectives on Youth Development held in Berlin (West) in May, 1983. This conference was part of a 6-year longi tudinal research program on the causes of substance use among adolescents in Berlin, which is now in its fourth year. The conference title deliberately did not refer to substance use. However, its relevance to an explanation of drug-related problem behavior was made evident to everyone invited to the conference. The search for integrative perspectives in youth development originated in a dilemma that became obvious during the planning of intensive research on concomitants of substance use. In the methodology for research on youth development, there were two lines of thought that seemed completely unre lated to each other: One line of thought was oriented toward the person, leaving situational aspects aside, while the other concentrated on ecological or situational determinants and thus neglected the aspects of development and internal processes. The integration of both these directions seemed to be an unusually promising approach for any project that aimed to understand changes in the individual within a rapidly changing urban setting. The best way to come closer to a resolution of that dilemma seemed to be an intensive exchange between the American and European scientific communities on this issue.
This best practice guide to teaching in the Further Education and Skills sector, and professional organisational learning contexts, examines the key concepts underpinning effective teaching and learning and combines this with case studies which demonstrate meaningful connections between theory and practice. Each chapter also contains discussion questions, learning activities and reflective points, allowing you to further engage with key research and relate it to your own teaching. Offering pragmatic advice on learning design, support and delivery, coverage includes: Identifying learning needs and objectives Selecting and developing appropriate content Using technology to enhance learning Assessment, evaluation and reflection This is an indispensable resource for anyone preparing to teach in Further Education, current Higher Education lecturers and work-based learning trainers in private and public-sector organisations. Lyn Ashmore is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Education and Professional Development and Denise Robinson is Director of the Post Compulsory Education & Training Consortium, both are based at the University of Huddersfield.
This volume presents the reader with a stimulating rich tapestry of essays exploring the nature of action and intentionality, and discussing their role in human development. As the contributions make clear, action is an integrative concept that forms the bridge between our psychological, biological, and sociocultural worlds. Action is also integrative in the sense of entailing motivational, emotional, and cognitive systems, and this integration too is well represented in the chapters. Action is defined, and distinguished from behavior, according to its intentional quality. Thus, a constantly recurring theme in the volume involves the dialectic of action-intentionality, and specifically the questions of how and when these concepts are to be distinguished. For action theorists, action—as distinguished from behavior—constitutes the fundamental mechanism of human development. This commitment is detailed in several essays that explore the life-span implications of action. This timely volume will be must reading for all who want to learn about, or stay current with, contemporary action theoretical approaches to human development. – Willis F. Overton, Temple University The present volume advances the view that we cannot go far in understanding development over the life span without paying heed to self-reflective processes. In a reciprocal way, self-reflection links developmental change in the ways in which the person constructs his or her own development over the life span. Development, action, and intentionality exist, then, in an intimate relationship: As development forms the social and historical settings within which intentional activity is embedded, thus become indispensable categories for developmental theory and research. Due to their potential to integrate culture, history, and personality, action-theoretical concepts have made strong inroads in many areas of social and behavioral research. Within the field of developmental psychology, researchers have come to recognize that developmental patterns, and their variation across historical and social contexts, cannot easily be reduced to invariant laws. Instead, they reflect the agency of both the culture and the person. Issues of intentional self-development gain particular importance within the developmental settings of modernity. Under conditions of cultural acceleration, globalization, and pluralization of life forms, normative "scripts" and timetables of development have become blurred, and people are increasingly forced to take a planful, self-monitoring, and optimizing stance toward their own behavior and development. As will become evident throughout this ground-breaking book, an action perspective on development covers a broad spectrum of theoretical approaches. Concepts such as "personal goals," "personal projects," "life themes," "meaning," "life planning," "compensation," or "intentional self-development" have become the nuclei of innovative research programs. The chapters collected in this volume, by scholars on the forefront of action theory and research, provide an indication of the promise that these notions hold for life-span developmental psychology, motivation research, and research on aging.
This book presents theories and clinical practices for dealing with children diagnosed with pervasive developmental disability or PDD. These are children who have a wide range of disabilities that affect their participation in even the most routine events of daily life, such as eating, dressing, bathing, and so on. Unlike many who are diagnosed with classic autism, however, these children seem to have normal social behavior, normal physical appearance, the ability to learn, hear, see, and move their bodies at will-in other words, none of the well-known reasons that cause autistic and other children to develop differently. These children have the use of all their senses, but their brains are unable to process the information that is fed through them. While much new research is being done in genetics and neurobiology to explain why something in these children has gone fundamentally wrong with their development, clinicians and therapists who deal with them on a daily basis have needed to develop practical therapies based on how the children react to their environments. Movement and Action in Learning and Development suggests that when therapists plan treatment strategies, children's experiences and interactions with the world should be given the same consideration as the limits of their biological makeups. Too often children diagnosed with PDD are lumped into therapy groups for the classically autistic, where the focus tends to be on the distance senses-hearing and vision. Case studies presented in the first half of the book suggest that for children with PDD, there is a disconnect between the brain and the tactile-kinesthetic senses that involve body movement and physical interaction with the world. Movement, in turn, seems to be connected to perception, interpretation of the world around, and ultimately, the acquisition of knowledge. For children with PDD, "normal" learning seems to be limited not only by their tactile-kinesthetic sense but also by the lack of collaboration between all the senses. The second half of the book demonstrates how these new theories translate into clinical practices.
This practical textbook explains the sport development process from a practitioner’s viewpoint, showing what actually works, how, and why. Focusing on the development of sport, the book considers the efforts of sport organisations to revitalise their sports at a community level to ensure their future relevance, growth, and sustainability. Full of real-world cases and data, as well as the voices and reflections of a wide range of practitioners, Sport Development in Action explains how to research and draw up a development plan, how to design and implement programmes and establish delivery networks, and how to monitor and evaluate initiatives. This is essential reading for any sport development course, and useful reading for courses in sport management, sports coaching, or sports studies. It is also an indispensable reference book for practitioners.
Drawing on in-depth empirical research spanning a number of countries in Africa, Booth and Cammack's path-breaking book offers both an accessible overview of issues surrounding governance for development on the continent, whilst also offering a bold new alternative. In doing so, they controversially argue that externally imposed 'good governance' approaches make unrealistic assumptions about the choices leaders and officials are, in practice, able to make. As a result, reform initiatives and assistance programmes supported by donors regularly fail, while ignoring the potential for addressing the causes rather than the symptoms of this situation. In reality, the authors show, anti-developmental behaviours stem from unresolved - yet in principle soluble - collective action problems. Governance for Development in Africa offers a comprehensive and critical examination of the institutional barriers to economic and social progress in Africa, and makes a compelling plea for fresh policy thinking and new ways of envisioning so-called good governance.
First published in 1978, Development Economics in Action is a renowned study of policies in Ghana, one of Africa's most closely watched economies. In this new edition three additional chapters provide a detailed account of 1978-2008.
Summary BDD in Action teaches you the Behavior-Driven Development model and shows you how to integrate it into your existing development process. First you'll learn how to apply BDD to requirements analysis to define features that focus your development efforts on underlying business goals. Then, you'll discover how to automate acceptance criteria and use tests to guide and report on the development process. Along the way, you'll apply BDD principles at the coding level to write more maintainable and better documented code. Purchase of the print book includes a free eBook in PDF, Kindle, and ePub formats from Manning Publications. About the Technology You can't write good software if you don't understand what it's supposed to do. Behavior-Driven Development (BDD) encourages teams to use conversation and concrete examples to build up a shared understanding of how an application should work and which features really matter. With an emerging body of best practices and sophisticated new tools that assist in requirement analysis and test automation, BDD has become a hot, mainstream practice. About the Book BDD in Action teaches you BDD principles and practices and shows you how to integrate them into your existing development process, no matter what language you use. First, you'll apply BDD to requirements analysis so you can focus your development efforts on underlying business goals. Then, you'll discover how to automate acceptance criteria and use tests to guide and report on the development process. Along the way, you'll apply BDD principles at the coding level to write more maintainable and better documented code. No prior experience with BDD is required. What's Inside BDD theory and practice How BDD will affect your team BDD for acceptance, integration, and unit testing Examples in Java, .NET, JavaScript, and more Reporting and living documentation About the Author John Ferguson Smart is a specialist in BDD, automated testing, and software lifecycle development optimization. Table of Contents PART 1: FIRST STEPS Building software that makes a difference BDD—the whirlwind tour PART 2: WHAT DO I WANT? DEFINING REQUIREMENTS USING BDD Understanding the business goals: Feature Injection and related techniques Defining and illustrating features From examples to executable specifications Automating the scenarios PART 3: HOW DO I BUILD IT? CODING THE BDD WAY From executable specifications to rock-solid automated acceptance tests Automating acceptance criteria for the UI layer Automating acceptance criteria for non-UI requirements BDD and unit testing PART 4: TAKING BDD FURTHER Living Documentation: reporting and project management BDD in the build process
This book is open access under a Creative Commons license. This authoritative book presents the ever progressing state of the art in evaluating climate change strategies and action. It builds upon a selection of relevant and practical papers and presentations given at the 2nd International Conference on Evaluating Climate Change and Development held in Washington DC in 2014 and includes perspectives from independent evaluations of the major international organisations supporting climate action in developing countries, such as the Global Environment Facility. The first section of the book sets the stage and provides an overview of independent evaluations, carried out by multilateral development banks and development organisations. Important topics include how policies and organisations aim to achieve impact and how this is measured, whether climate change is mainstreamed into other development programs, and whether operations are meeting the urgency of climate change challenges. The following sections focus on evaluation of climate change projects and policies as they link to development, from the perspective of international organisations, NGO’s, multilateral and bilateral aid agencies, and academia. The authors share methodologies or approaches used to better understand problems and assess interventions, strategies and policies. They also share challenges encountered, what was done to solve these and lessons learned from evaluations. Collectively, the authors illustrate the importance of evaluation in providing evidence to guide policy change to informed decision-making.
