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Start Over Topic foreign countries Publication Type News Region canada
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1. Social Work Research: International Actualities and Trends. Occasional Paper No. 22.

Author

Snyman, Ina

Abstract

This report is based on data and insights obtained during a study tour of the United States and Canada. The purpose of the tour was to combine attending three conferences on social work and social welfare held in Montreal, Canada in the summer of 1984 with visiting various institutions in Canada and the United States. In the first section of this paper, "Aspects of the Crisis," a general review refers in the first instance to the vast differences between countries, including those normally labelled as being equally deprived. The most important aspects of the crisis are subsequently dealt with under the headings: arms race (particularly the nuclear arms race), health, education, housing, food, human rights, poverty and employment, and social security. From these crisis aspects participants in the working paper formulated the following forum topics and prepared brief introductions that were included in the paper. These are: sociocultural shifts, economic choices, technological upheavals, demographic dilemmas, environmental tightrope, political and organizational technocracies, children's needs and rights, youth's future, aging concerns, family survival, feminist affirmation, uprooting and migration, discrimination and segregation, and integration of the disabled. A bibliography, notes on the three conferences, and the study tour itinerary conclude the document. (BZ)

Published
1986

2. The Seduction of the Subject/Citizen: Governmentality and School Governance Policy.

Author

Spencer, Brenda L.

Abstract

Traditional educational policy analysis is typically evaluative, focusing on degrees of success or failure, often obscuring how particular forms of knowledge and power reproduce social inequity. A Foucauldian, postmodern framework is particularly appropriate for analyzing educational policy because, in part, the Foucauldian concepts of "discipline,""power,""the subject," and "governmentality" can reveal how significant policy problems related to social inequity are embedded in the discourses of democratization and of responsibility and accountability. Several texts were analyzed, including policy documents and other materials available on the Ontario Ministry of Education and Training Web site. As in other places, Ontario's new reforms reflect a fixation on reforming schools to improve economic competitiveness. Key findings from this investigation include the observation that reforms intended to empower all educational stakeholders are limited by a larger political and economic context. As in other Western nations, the devolution of authority implied by Ontario's reforms, designed to invest all stakeholders in carrying out successful reforms tailored to local realities, is fundamentally limited by the continuing realities of centralized control of funding and accountability processes. The populist-sounding discourse of devolution, decentralization, and participation work to align the self-regulating subject/citizen to the desires of the state in ways that undermine social equity. Further research is needed to assess how the discourses embedded in policy documents are perceived, used, and resisted by local school council members. (Contains 46 references.) (TEJ)

Published
2001

3. kwayask e-ki-pe-kiskinowapahtihicik = Their Example Showed Me the Way: A Cree Woman's Life Shaped by Two Cultures.

Author

Minde, Emma, Ahenakew, Freda, Wolfart, H. C., Minde, Emma, Ahenakew, Freda, and Wolfart, H. C.

Abstract

Emma Minde (nee Memnook)was born in 1907 in Saddle Lake, Alberta. In 1927 she was given by her father in an arranged marriage to Joe Minde, who lived in Hobbema, Alberta. In this recorded autobiography taped in 1988 when she was 81 years old, little is said about her parents and her life as a child other than that she spent 7 years at a Catholic-run boarding school. She begins her narrative (with text on facing pages in Cree and English) by telling about the ways of the past when her people were self-sufficient in obtaining food and clothing by hunting, fishing, making leather, gathering berries, and sewing moccasins and clothes. She points out that this relationship with the land is no longer possible and that her people have had to adapt to the white man's ways in order to live. She tells about her arranged marriage to her husband, his drinking, his hard work, his good nature, and his kindnesses to others. Throughout the book, her narratives often turn to didactic summaries of both Cree and Catholic teachings of hard work, doing good, the sanctity of marriage and the home, raising children properly, doing one's duty, charity, and following Christian teachings. Emma describes in great detail the two women who shaped her life: her mother-in-law, Mary-Jane Minde, and her husband's uncle's wife, Mary. She relates how they taught her to do beadwork, clean house, garden, cure meat, dry berries, cook, and help out with farm animals and crops. But most of all, they set an example of how to live an obedient, hard working life guided by firmly held beliefs. An introduction comments on the education of a Cree woman, the convergence of Cree and Catholic values in Emma's world view, and linguistic aspects of Emma's Cree narrative. Over a third of the book consists of a Cree-English glossary and a selective index of English equivalents to each Cree stem. (SAS)

Published
1997