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Article

Diversity and Inclusion and Special Education  

Chris Forlin and Dianne Chambers

Special education has undergone continued transformation since societies began to provide an increasing number of specialized, segregated facilities for children with like needs during the 20th century. Since then, there has been a worldwide movement against a segregated approach and toward greater inclusion of students with disabilities into regular schools. The provision of a dual special education and regular school system, nevertheless, remains in existence, even though there has been a strong emphasis on a more inclusive approach since the latter half of the 20th century. As regular schools become more inclusive and teachers more capable of providing appropriate modifications for most students with learning needs, simultaneously there has been an increase in the number of students whose needs are so severe that schools have not been able to accommodate them. While these children and youth have special needs, they are invariably not related to an identified disability but fall more into a category of diversity. In particular, students who are excluded from schools due to severe infringements, those who are disenfranchised from school and refuse to attend, and those with severe emotional, behavioral, or mental health issues are not being serviced by the existing dual system. For these students neither existing special schools that cater to students with disabilities nor regular inclusive schools provide an appropriate education. The provision of a complementary and alternatively focused education to cater to the specific needs of these marginalized students seems to be developing to ensure sustainability of education and to prepare these new groups of students for inclusion into society upon leaving school. This tripartite approach highlights a new era in the movement toward a sustainable, inclusive education system that caters to the needs of all students and specifically those with the most challenging and diverse requirements.

Article

The History of Educational Inclusion of the Disabled in Italy  

Simonetta Polenghi

The early integration of disabled pupils in Italian schools and the parallel disbanding of special schools have given this country a pivotal role as an example of total inclusion, to be studied and imitated or criticized for its weak points. A better understanding of the singularity of the Italian case can be gained from studying the history of this process. In the 1970s, Italy arrived at revolutionary legislation that was driven by democratic values but also by a utopian, as well as courageous, spirit. The Italian state had long ignored the rights of disabled children and adults, recognizing the rights of only the war disabled. In the first decades of the republican state, after World War II, segregation and exclusion dominated the seducational and psychiatric scenarios. But researching the history of Italian special education leads to the discovery of a tradition of excellent special schools and institutes and of pedagogical and medical theories and practices, quite advanced for their time, that respected the dignity of the person and aimed to integrate them through work. In spite of the great names of doctors and educationalists, both Catholic and secular, such as De Sanctis, Montessori, Montesano, and Gemelli to name just a few, and their high level of specialization, society struggled to keep pace. The state did not support special education, leaving it to priests and doctors. Rich northern cities were able to provide better structures for disabled children. Moreover, children with sensory and physical disabilities, who were considered clever and therefore educable, received attention and had highly specialized schools in the 19th century. Only at the beginning of the 20th century were the needs of children with mental disabilities properly addressed through a pedagogical and medical approach. The great scientific advancements, however, got partially lost in common practice, and after World War II the school and welfare systems struggled to cope with a rising number of institutionalized children. The changes brought about by a new generation of psychiatrists, led by F. Basaglia, and educationalists who were antifascist and could not tolerate the segregation and exclusion of institutes; the radical spirit of 1968; and a new widespread consciousness of the shame of segregation for a democratic state produced revolutionary legislation that aimed at genuine inclusion. The history of Italian special education is quite recent; hence, it still draws on local and national studies. But the work done so far allows us to reconstruct the path of this process, which has not been linear, and shows the tensions, the continuity, and the innovation, as well as the steps backward. An inclusion policy concerns universal anti-discriminatory legislative measures, but this article, while refererring when necessary to other categories, focusses on disabled persons and their educational inclusion.

Article

Dino Pacio Lindín and “The School in Apartments,” and a Learning-Service Program in Loisaida, New York  

Xosé Manuel Malheiro-Gutiérrez

In the early 1970s, a University of Rochester sociology professor of Galician origin carried out an interesting experiment in the Lower East Side of Manhattan with a group of university students. This experiment consisted of a solidary exchange through which the students taught English to the members of a marginalized community of Hispanic immigrants with few economic opportunities and who did not speak the English language. In exchange, the immigrants lodged the students in their houses. “The school in apartments,” a community learning-service program, was the basis for subsequent projects.

Article

Where Is Equity in Integrated Approaches for Water Resources Management?  

Jeremy Allouche

The challenges of integrated approaches and equity in water resources management have been well researched. However, a clear division exists between scholars working on equity and those working on integration, and there is remarkably little systematic analysis available that addresses their interlinkages. The divide between these two fields of inquiry has increased over time, and equity is assumed rather than explicitly considered in integrated approaches for water resources management. Historically, global debates on water resources management have focused on questions of distributional equity in canal irrigation systems and access to water. This limited focus on distributional equity was side-lined by neoliberal approaches and subsequent integrated approaches around water resources management tend to emphasize the synergistic aspects and ignore the political trade-offs between equity and efficiency. The interlinkages among equity, sustainability, and integration need deeper and broader interdisciplinary analysis and understanding, as well as new concepts, approaches, and agendas that are better suited to the intertwined complexity of resource degradation.

Article

Multiple Document Comprehension  

M. Anne Britt and Jean Rouet

Multiple document comprehension refers to people’s acquisition of information from more than one document for the purpose of achieving their goals. Comprehending single documents involves constructing a long-term memory representation in which text contents get integrated with the reader’s prior knowledge. Both text structure and readers’ goals are important in determining which information is included in the reader’s memory representation. In multiple document comprehension, documents are associated with distinct source features and they do not have to follow the coherence and cohesion principles that define single documents. Thus, multiple document comprehension involves several additional challenges, including selecting documents, making strategic reading decisions, and sourcing. The documents model framework (DMF) proposed two additional representations beyond those of single-document comprehension: an intertext model based on identifying and interpreting the document sources and an integrated situation model based on representing conceptual connections across documents organized around the structure of the interpreted task. The RESOLV model extended the DMF by proposing that readers formulate their reading task within a larger physical and social situation (a context model), creating goals and methods to achieve those goals (a task model). One such task situation that has received research attention presents people with documents that describe discrepant accounts of some event. The discrepancy-induced source comprehension (DISC) hypothesis predicted that readers would use source information via an intertext model to resolve the contradictory information in their situation models. Several issues that are the focus of current research include understanding the factors that influence coherence across documents, creating interventions to help students become aware of multiple document challenges, and improving our understanding of the developmental trajectory for learning these skills and how they build upon more basic literacy skills.

Article

Health Status of Refugees and Asylum Seekers in Europe  

Rachel Humphris and Hannah Bradby

The health status of refugees and asylum seekers varies significantly across the European region. Differences are attributed to the political nature of the legal categories of “asylum seeker” and “refugee”; the wide disparities in national health services; and the diversity in individual characteristics of this population including age, gender, socioeconomic background, country of origin, ethnicity, language proficiency, migration trajectory, and legal status. Refugees are considered to be at risk of being or becoming relatively “unhealthy migrants” compared to those migrating on the basis of economic motives, who are characterized by the “healthy migrant effect.” Refugees and asylum seekers are at risk to the drivers of declining health associated with settlement such as poor diet and housing. Restricted access to health care whether from legal, economic, cultural, or language barriers is another likely cause of declining health status. There is also evidence to suggest that the “embodiment” of the experience of exclusion and marginalization that refugee and asylum seekers face in countries of resettlement significantly drives decrements in the health status of this population.

Article

Post-Hegemonic Regionalism  

Pía Riggirozzi and Diana Tussie

The concept of post-hegemonic regionalism describes the scenario that has characterized Latin American regionalism in the last two decades. It first builds from Amitav Acharya’s work, in which he envisaged the end of United States hegemony and a world order of multiple leadership and power competitions, a scenario that he calls a “multiplex world.” To a large extent, post-hegemonic regionalism grew at odds with U.S. regional and hemispheric ambitions of market-led governance and in a context of weakened U.S. hegemony in Latin America. As a concept, denotes the region as a political space in which transborder governance is anchored in a new consensus about what cooperation and diplomacy is and is for, giving way to a reorganization of the regional scenario and the emergence of diverse efforts in new areas of cooperation. With this in mind, post-hegemonic regionalism is both a theory-based concept, contributing to a debate and a research agenda that branched out in the study of southern regionalism, as much as a manifestation of governance that re-signified and valued the regional space as one of action and contestation.

Article

Education and Cultural Navigation for Children in Refugee Resettlement Contexts  

Jieun Sung and Rachel Wahl

According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), over half of the 25.4 million refugees worldwide are children under the age of 18. Given the instability and precariousness that displaced persons may experience, the provision of education for these children is of significant concern. Interaction between the culture of the host society and the cultures of immigrants, including experiences related to education, is a key aspect of transitioning to a new national environment. These interactions may be particularly salient for displaced populations, considering the particular circumstances and life trajectories that are characteristic of refugees and generally not shared by other immigrant groups. Empirical research on refugee children’s education in resettlement countries highlights the significance of acculturative processes for experiences and outcomes of schooling, as well as the importance of educational settings in facilitating cultural interaction—that is, the interlocking and complementary nature of acculturation and education. Education and cultural navigation are linked in significant ways, such that even as education facilitates the cultural exposure and integration of newcomer individuals to a receiving society, acculturation itself is associated with adaptation to the school context and academic experiences. In other words, educational and acculturative processes can facilitate and reinforce each other. Additional research that examines more specifically processes of cultural navigation by refugee children in particular can further illuminate the factors that shape their experience of education in resettlement contexts.

Article

Technology Proficiency in Teaching and Facilitating  

Norazlinda Saad and Surendran Sankaran

Technology proficiency is the ability to use technology to communicate effectively and professionally, organize information, produce high-quality products, and enhance thinking skills. In classroom settings, technology proficiency refers to the ability of teachers to integrate technology to teach and facilitate, as well as to improve learning, productivity, and performance. These abilities are needed to participate in a technological world. Technology proficiency enables teachers to identify and explore a wide variety of technological tools and devices in order to determine and select those that best respond to teaching and learning contents. Among teachers, basic proficiency in information technologies is typically used to communicate electronically, organize activities and information, and create documents in schools or higher-education institutions. Proficiency in using technological tools and devices can be achieved through experience and instruction. It is necessary to introduce experimentation into teaching practices and maintain accessible technological tools and devices. Technology proficiency seems relevant to many aspects of the teaching profession, such as lesson preparation and development of teaching kids. Other aspects that impact teacher decisions to introduce technology into teaching and learning activities are teachers’ beliefs about the way the subject should be taught and the skills associated with teacher competence in managing classroom activities using technology tools and devices. Therefore, teachers must be able to apply the technological knowledge and skills required in professional job roles and responsibilities in order to achieve the expected outputs. As an educator in the 21st century, it is imperative to integrate technology into the curriculum for a variety of reasons. Students need to be exposed to and be familiar with technologies in order to compete in the world marketplace, and they need to be able to integrate them in dynamic social environments. The world is dominated by technology in all forms, and to be successful, students must possess 21st-century skills. In addition, technology proficiency improves efficiency in teaching and facilitating. Being more efficient usually means that teachers have more time, and it allows additional space for innovation, planning, conversing, thinking, and creativity. Technology can be instrumental in making teachers more efficient.

Article

Leadership for School Desegregation  

Randall B. Lindsey, Delores B. Lindsey, and Raymond D. Terrell

School desegregation efforts begun in the 1960s through to the 1980s persist into the 21st century. School leadership for desegregation began in the late 20th century. School leadership efforts began in the early 1960s with compliance-based responses focused on court-ordered and government directives in pursuit of equality with an eye to societal integration. Leadership for desegregation is a legal response to de jure and de facto segregation as practiced in social, political, and economic systems throughout U.S. history. Efforts at more equal opportunities for historically marginalized students have, over time, evolved into an equity focus that holds a value for educating children and youth whether in integrated settings or not. By the turn of the 21st century, leadership efforts for equity began to recognize the need to provide access and opportunity to all students in all settings. Four distinct chronological periods of school desegregation have evolved: desegregation leadership experiences, 1950s–1970s—mandated, minimum compliance; school desegregation leadership experiences, 1970s–1990s—supported by Emergency School Aid Act; school desegregation leadership experiences, 1990s–2015—Emergency School Aid Act and resegregation; and school desegregation experiences, 2015 to the present and predictable future.

Article

Islam and Islamic Studies in Scandinavia  

Susanne Olsson and Simon Sorgenfrei

Islam in the Scandinavian countries—Denmark, Norway, and Sweden—has a long history. There are evidences of contacts between Scandinavia and the Muslim world at least since the Middle Ages. The presence of Muslims in Scandinavia is however of a later date and more established from the 1950s, when immigrants arrived, mainly due to the needs in the labor markets; they successively established congregations and mosques, as they realized that they were to stay in their new countries. Following this period, Muslim migrants have arrived due to geopolitical factors, such as war, which have increased the number of Muslims and their presence and visibility in public space and public debate, which in turn has affected the media image of Islam and Muslims and influenced research. The research on Islam and Muslims has a long history in Scandinavia as well. With the increase of Muslim inhabitants in Scandinavian countries, scholarly interests have also related more to the present and to the study of their own Muslim populations, as well as case studies related to Islamophobia, media images, Muslims in the school systems and labor market, and specific incidents, such as the cartoon crisis and its aftermath.

Article

Adult Education for African Victims of Human Trafficking  

Antonio Alfaro Fernández and Beatriz Villora Galindo

For decades and due to the dire situations that exist in many African countries, the migratory phenomenon to Europe has witnessed an unprecedented increase. The desire to seek a better future, to flee from poverty, hunger, and war, among other reasons, has caused the victims to employ legal or illegal means to leave their country and reach Europe. The receiving countries have increased the restrictions to welcome immigrants from African countries, which means the arrival of migrants by illegal means has grown spectacularly. Likewise, this situation has caused trafficking in persons, especially women, to become a common phenomenon in Europe. Spain, due to its geographical location, is one of the countries where the greatest number of people are exploited. The eradication of this problem involves the identification of the exploited and liberation from their captors. But the problem does not end with their release; psychological and educational intervention is essential to achieve their integration. The importance of designing and developing educational programs are main objectives, including language learning, professional training, establishing good habits of nutrition and hygiene, and providing alternatives for leisure and free time. These education programs, designed for adults, should be initiated in shelter houses where the victims are first placed. Multidisciplinary teams formed by professionals in education, psychology, nursing, and social work can cooperatively help the victims, offering the best method for successful integration. The final objective is to provide competences to the people included in the program, who can then leave the shelters, join the local community, and live autonomously and independently in the host society.

Article

European Union: Integration, National, and European Identities  

Stephen M. Croucher

The European Union (EU) is an economic, political, and social conglomeration of 28 member nations. These member nations work together via a system of supranational institutional and intergovernmental-negotiated treaties and decisions by member states. While the EU has been able to continue its development in various stages since the 1950s respectively, a key issue continually facing the EU has always been integration at different levels. Integration of new member states, integration of individuals and cultures within member states, and most recently integration of immigrants (newcomers of different designations) into the EU. While the EU has strict guidelines regarding the integration of new member states into the EU, no policies/procedures are in place regarding the integration of individuals into the EU. Issues of national sovereignty are critical to EU member states when discussing how to integrate newcomers. Most recently during the heightened wave of refugees entering the EU through its southern and eastern borders, the issue of how to integrate newcomers into the EU has come to the forefront of national and EU policymakers. Key questions facing the EU and its member states include: What are the national integration policies, and how do they differ? What is the future for the EU in response to increased legal, illegal, and irregular migration?

Article

Innovation Challenges  

Yao Sun and Ann Majchrzak

Starting from early 21st century, companies increasingly use open innovation challenges to generate creative solutions to business problems. This revolution in business models and management strategy reflects the evolution supported by new technology. Employing this new strategic model, companies seek to innovate in a wide variety of areas, such as clothes designs, photography solutions, business plans, and film production. Contrary to closed innovation through which companies develop creative ideas internally, innovation challenges are catalyzed by socioeconomic changes such as the rapid advancement of information technologies, increased labor division, as well as ever-expanding globalization. Going hand in hand are trends such as outsourcing, occurring in parallel in the management area, which makes companies more agile and flexible. Multifaceted and multidimensional, open innovation challenges consist of various activities such as inbound innovation (acquiring and sourcing), outbound innovation (selling and revealing), or a compound mix of these two forms. It also pertains to complementary assets, absorptive capacity, organizational exploration, and exploitation. In an attempt to determine how to best support such an important component of society, scholars and practitioners continue to pursue effective innovation challenge architecture (the art or practice that guides participants’ interactions and exchange) that allows open collaboration among the crowd, as well as an approach for incorporating such architecture into technological platforms in order to improve the crowd’s creativity. This issue is addressed by focusing on existing research that delineates various types of effective architecture of innovation challenges. A theory-based framework guides this examination, and work from various scholarly perspectives of innovation challenges, knowledge management, motivated knowledge sharing, and crowdsourcing are integrated into this framework.

Article

Schooling, Educational Technology, and Teachers’ Everyday Practice in Norway  

Rune Johan Krumsvik and Øystein Olav Skaar

Research shows that for decades, there have been attempts to implement information and communication technology (ICT) in schools, but it has had a weak uptake among teachers thus far. One of the reasons for this lack of integration is that teachers perceive ICT as an additional load on their everyday practices that would increase the complexity of their roles. Teachers are therefore often cautious and sceptical about ICT implementation because it is often not properly attached to deeply entrenched school structure. Adaptive learning tools have provided new opportunities to facilitate this integration. Adaptive learning tools are expected to contribute to the customization and personalization of pupil learning by continually calibrating and adjusting pupils’ learning activities to their skill and competence levels. However, it is important to discuss whether adaptive learning tools need to be sufficiently anchored in the curriculum, in formative assessment, in adaptive education, and in homework to achieve their potential. In this way, we can obtain an understanding of how a systematic implementation of adaptive learning tools influences the learning outcomes, learning environment, and motivation of pupils in school, when such tools are attached to the deeply entrenched structures in school. In such implementation processes it seems like we need to reconsider the value of homework to achieve, for example, sufficient volume training and root learning with adaptive learning tools, thus freeing up time for practical mathematics and deep learning at school. Importantly, this requires a digital competence among teachers, where the critical factor is the teacher’s ability to create a teaching doctrine in which technology use is justified by didactic choices.

Article

Human Rights and Asian American Literature and Culture  

Crystal Parikh

Asian American literature and art have had an illuminating effect on the significance of human rights in the United States and in national culture. Americans are often assumed to enjoy exceptional liberties and rights, which they seek in turn to deliver to other people, in other parts of the world. However, Asian American cultural critique provides an incisive perspective on the limits of citizenship and national belonging as the basis for the granting of fundamental human freedoms, rights, and protections to all persons. The legal exclusion of Asians from immigration and naturalization, as well as from other forms of social and economic security such as property ownership, has long been justified through the construction of Asian racial difference. Reforms in immigration law after World War II, which did eventually transform Asian American life in the United States, took place in the context of a “global Cold War,” and during the same period that saw the institution of an international human rights regime. “Integration” proved as essential a mandate in US domestic and foreign policy as did “containment” in this global conflict. As a result, not only has the Asian American population grown significantly and become more heterogeneous since the late 20th century, the nation has seen the flourishing of Asian American literary and cultural production. Asian American writers and artists have been especially keen to investigate the political, legal, and ideological tensions and contradictions that pervade the postsocialist world and the war on terror. Their works explore the political precarity faced by those caught between the contradictions of neoliberal multiculturalism, the logics and technologies of state security, and the legal tethering of human rights to citizenship.

Article

Frameworks for Priority Setting in Health and Social Care  

Marissa Collins, Neil McHugh, Rachel Baker, Alec Morton, Lucy Frith, Keith Syrett, and Cam Donaldson

Health and social care organizations work within the context of limited resources. Different techniques to aid resource allocation and decision-making exist and are important as scarcity of resources in health and social care is inescapable. Healthcare systems, regardless of how they are organized, must decide what services to provide given the resources available. This is particularly clear in systems funded by taxation, which have limited budgets and other limited resources (staff, skills, facilities, etc.) and in which the claims on these resources outstrip supply. Healthcare spending in many countries is not expected to increase over the short or medium term. Therefore, frameworks to set priorities are increasingly required. Four disciplines provide perspectives on priority setting: economics, decision analysis, ethics, and law. Although there is overlap amongst these perspectives, they are underpinned by different principles and processes for priority setting. As the values and viewpoints of those involved in priority setting in health and social care will differ, it is important to consider how these could be included to inform a priority setting process. It is proposed that these perspectives and the consideration of values and viewpoints could be brought together in a combined priority setting framework for use within local health and social care organizations.

Article

citzenship and mobility, legal aspects of  

Claudia Moatti

While migration and mobility have become crucial themes in the study of the Roman world, their relationship with citizenship has been underestimated and understudied. Yet, migrants were not only foreigners who came to Rome voluntarily or by force. Citizens moved too: those, peasants or new citizens, who had come to settle in the city, or those who emigrated from Rome to a colony in Italy and, later, to a provincial city. What was the impact of this mobility on the conception and practice of citizenship? What did the Romans think of these citizens who travelled or lived abroad?

Such questions make it necessary to distinguish between the period when Rome was still one city among others (6th–3rd centuries) and the period of its conquests, when Rome extended its hegemony through the Mediterranean and became a so-called imperial republic (3rd–1st centuries) before becoming an Empire (27 bce–476 ce). In the first period, apart from the double movement of immigration and emigration of citizens, various measures concerning mobility shed light on the very close link between citizenship, property, and territory (loss of citizenship by emigration, recall of citizens every five years for the census, right to return, privileges granted to the Latins who settled in Rome, expulsions of non-citizens, etc.). In the second period, new practices (like the end of civic exclusivism) led, on the one hand, to limits on the immigration of new citizens to Rome, and, on the other hand, to efforts to facilitate emigration to the provinces (these included, in particular, the recognition of legal domicile outside of Italy, and the development of controls and protections for absentees). All these practices suggest the image of a rather fluid world, one which did not end in Late Antiquity. However, this freedom of movement has to be considered alongside the multiple rules aimed at controlling certain categories of people. Over time, mobility and migration progressively became a significant topic within Roman law, as is shown by the semantic evolutions of the main terms designating migrants.

Article

Interdisciplinary Curriculum and Learning in Higher Education  

Karri A. Holley

Interdisciplinary curricula provide students the opportunity to work with knowledge drawn from multiple disciplines. Following suit, interdisciplinary learning requires interaction of knowledge from different disciplines; integration of knowledge from different disciplines; and an overarching topic, theme, or problem that shapes the learning experience. Since the university curriculum is commonly structured by academic disciplines, and faculty are socialized to their respective disciplinary norms, interdisciplinarity is a complex endeavor for colleges and universities. These endeavors include developing interdisciplinary courses, sustaining interdisciplinary initiatives, and financing interdisciplinary programs. Given the multiple challenges facing 21st-century society, the question of interdisciplinarity is urgent. How knowledge is defined and disseminated; how and what students learn; and how higher education can be responsive to its external environment are crucial issues facing educators. Responding to these issues does not diminish the role of the discipline in education, but rather acknowledges that knowledge is unbounded and potential discoveries lie outside compartmentalized structures.

Article

Cuba and Integration Processes in Latin America and the Caribbean  

Carlos Oliva Campos and Gary Prevost

The uniting core of all the Cuban revolutionary government’s unfolding politics toward Latin American and Caribbean countries has been based on three foundational tenets: the staunch defense of a unified perspective that spans national to regional; the recovery of the historic principles of regional integration defended by Simón Bolívar and José Martí, and the unalterable anti-imperialist position of its international relations. Unlike the enormous negative impacts that the demise of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) and Eastern-European socialism caused Cuba, the new political and geo-economic scene of the post–Cold War turned out to be very favorable for a Cuban government that shifted to redefine its relationships with Latin America and the Caribbean. This was strengthened by the victory of progressive and leftist governments in influential countries such as Brazil, Argentina, and Venezuela. The new regional circumstances have been the most propitious for the development of the integrationist vision historically supported by the Cuban Revolution.