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This research examines a group of UK Catholic charities working in the field of homelessness and social exclusion in order to understand how their Catholicity is constituted and how this impacts on their practice. I argue that their Catholicity is primarily found in how their practices enact, test and extend Catholic social vision rather than in institutional alignment. I demonstrate that the charities have an ecclesiological specificity which official Catholic texts fail to recognise. They operate across the porous boundaries of the visible Church, drawing into their work people who share elements of the social vision articulated in Catholic thought and tradition. Theologically, they enact the Catholic intuition about the meaning of social bonds and reciprocal human flourishing by working to counter social exclusion and vulnerability and point social realities towards the Kingdom. Their location on ecclesial boundaries, their inclusiveness, and their embeddedness in secular structures of social welfare and politics, are necessary conditions of social mission. I use the concept of the common good as a hermeneutic in order to read the charities as a case study testing how Catholic social teaching's methodological strategies propose shared moral horizons. Using Thomas Bushlack's concept of civic virtue in conversation with normative Catholic social teaching about the common good enables fresh insights into the practices which enact this principle. The charities discover the meaning of the common good by recognising and wrestling with the absence of the conditions that enable people to seek fulfilment. Their asymmetrical relational work, shaped by their narratives, renders an abstract and elusive concept as a real and practical task. Their communally held and inclusively enacted intuitions disclose pragmatic coherence with Conciliar ecclesiology and validate its orientations. The charities act as agents and inventors of mediated social mission, illuminating an expansive Catholicity.

This practicum project evaluated the effectiveness of a peer counseling, mentoring, and tutoring program to enhance the transition of students from elementary to middle school by reducing behavior problems and absenteeism, and by enhancing students' ability to deal with academic or peer difficulties. The problem of adjustment to the transition from elementary to middle school was documented through school and teacher records, especially the number of teacher referrals for behavioral, emotional, and social problems and the number of student-generated help forms asking for assistance in resolving academic and social problems. The 8-month intervention consisted of a peer counseling, mentoring, and tutoring program. The tutors were seventh and eighth graders in the same school. The Pause, Prompt, and Praise tutoring method was taught to student mentors and tutors. Sixth graders were matched to a mentor/tutor and they met twice weekly to become acquainted and to work on academic and other concerns. Both tutors and tutees maintained journals detailing the problems, discussions, and possible solutions for each session. The process was monitored to identify potential serious student problems. Evaluation findings indicated that there was a reduction in student-generated help forms requesting assistance with an academic problem, teacher-generated referrals for problem behaviors, and absenteeism. In addition, students were able to write transition problem statements with resolution strategies and achieve a passing 1.0 or better report card grade. (Seven appendices include forms used in the intervention. Contains 60 references.)

This practicum was designed to increase the use of study skills of sixth-grade students in the social studies. Study skills pretests were administered to students with results showing student difficulties in acquiring the concepts of social studies and achieving passing scores on tests. A unit on study skills was integrated within each chapter with emphasis on using resource materials, interpreting data, and creating outlines for use as study guides. Individual projects, group activities, and games were used to reinforce each skill. Posttests at the end of the study skills unit indicated the majority of students learned how to effectively use resource materials, interpret data, and write outlines. Chapter test mean scores during implementation showed improvement of students' abilities in acquiring social studies concepts and in achieving higher test scores. (EH)

This thesis was based on five multi-agency, urban Partnerships at the heart of the Accommodate Project: An initiative that set out to stimulate grassroots resolution to the problem of refugee housing, settlement and integration, at a time when large numbers of people were arriving seeking asylum in the UK. Refugee Community Organisations (RCOs) were engaged by the Housing Associations’ Charitable Trust (hact) to work alongside housing providers, local authority partners and others, for three years in five cities where refugees were struggling to find permanent housing. My original contribution to knowledge concerned study of the Partnerships from the perspective of organisations working with the most socially excluded, the RCOs. The Partnerships created a structure where power could be brokered. Research was conducted in a critical realist tradition in order to discover the relationship between emerging themes. Connections made between structural barriers and local interaction meant this approach presented a bigger picture view that other methodologies might have overlooked. A longitudinal methodology tracked progression from the marginalised position that was the starting point for many RCOs, struggling to survive and fill the gaps in service provision for community members. By the end of the Project, RCO partners had changed attitudes, improved access to housing services and transformed institutional relations between social housing providers and refugees. Hact’s support for RCO capacity building was fundamental to their being able to influence the agenda, define the solutions and participate in policy decision-making. The Accommodate Project created a learning space that countered marginalisation by actively involving community groups in cross-sector partnerships. This study demonstrates that community empowerment is an accumulative yet uneven process. A participatory approach allows less engaged groups to learn quickly from those that are better established. If the intention of community empowerment is to lead to fundamental change, the role of active management strategies by a catalyst such as hact is paramount. The thesis deploys and develops theories of community empowerment and network management to conceptualise the social inclusion of marginalised groups.

Water resources located in more than one country are complex systems governed by customary international law embodied in a rule known as equitable and reasonable utilisation, a recent development in international law not yet been applied by an international tribunal to resolve a dispute or to allocate transboundary water resources between countries. Water scarcity on a global scale has reached critical proportions with 1.1 billion people without access to sufficient safe water for personal and domestic use; over half that number depend on transboundary watercourses that will disappear over the next century. Conflicts of use over shared water resource have the potential to escalate into armed conflict; certainty in the peaceful means to avoid and resolve disputes is needed. The thesis examines international procedural practice and jurisprudence applying equitable principles in a case study to illustrate how equitable and reasonable utilisation may be applied by an international tribunal. The survey of international practice will inform States about procedural options for dispute avoidance and resolution in disputes over the use of transboundary water resources.