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The kindergarten teachers of the Religious Kibbutz movement (RK) as a unique group are connected both to the educational approaches of the kindergartens in the general Kibbutz Movement and the state religious kindergartens. A qualitative study included semi-structured interviews with 15 RK kindergarten teachers in order to explore their self-identity. The identity of the RK kindergarten was designed to be an encounter between four axes: the connection to Jewish tradition, the kibbutz community, nature and agriculture, and a constructivist approach. The study findings brought to light the RK kindergarten teachers' unique educational approach, which includes both similarities and differences with the general kibbutz movement kindergartens and the state religious kindergartens. The study contributes to highlighting a specific group of early childhood (EC) educators, reflecting both the diverse mosaic of EC educational approaches among different groups in Israel and the potential that these groups have for enriching each other.

As experiments and models of participatory, sustainable living, ecovillages demonstrate how to enact just, cooperative, and regenerative economic and social constructs, as alternatives to 'unsustainable' capitalist economies and consumerist/individualistic lifestyles. Work is central to these enactments, which provides an opportunity to examine the learning that happens in these spaces, and how that learning may be applied for broader eco-social change. This paper reports on case studies of learning through enterprise work in two ecovillages in the USA. Analysis focuses on what is learned and how it is learned, the role of the learning environment and interactions within the ecovillage on learning outcomes and processes, as well as barriers to learning, and the transferability of learning outside the ecovillage context. Findings evidence a high degree of informal 'on the job' learning, resulting in both job-specific skills and knowledge, and general competencies in eco/ethical business management. Furthermore, participants imbue activities with shared values of ecology and equality, while interacting with oppositional broader market logics, and thus learn to 'trade off' - taking on some aspects of the mainstream economy (e.g. competitiveness, profitability, (self)exploitation), in exchange for 'the greater good.'

Autobiographical theatre usually brings to the forefront personal experiences that have been hidden or silenced, while the autoethnographic approach emphasises their social dimensions. This article looks at "Night Watchers" (an autobiographical/autoethnographic piece) featuring three artists who, using acting, painting, and poetry, tell the story of their communal sleeping as children in the kibbutz, revealing its emotional sequels until today. Children's communal sleeping was customary in the kibbutz in Israel, from their establishment until the 1980s. The article takes this piece as a case-study to explore the potential of autobiographical/autoethnographic performance to achieve therapeutic transformation while also contemplating the social context.

This paper aims to present two potential instruments that will address the lack of knowledge in regard to the context of students' reality from teaching professionals in a specific school, these being: a local historiography (record of "yesterday"), based on oral history; and a reality inventory (record of "today"), elaborated from the assumptions of action research. Moreover, the objective is to argue the potential they have so as to avoid, on the part of school professionals, the mistake of not knowing the reality of the context of students. To achieve this, we present a brief description of the experiences we have had with these instruments in an area of ??agrarian reform with the Landless Workers Movement (MST), in southern Brazil. The study concludes with certain characteristics that are involved in the process of creating these instruments in order to achieve their potential, that is the support of local leaders, collaboration with the community, and the connection with the research.

This article explores learning processes that underpin ecovillages as place based 'sustainability initiatives'. Through the theoretical lens of place- based transformative learning (PBTL), developed in earlier work (Pisters et al., 2019, 2020), empirical data from life-story interviews and photovoice sessions from three ecovillages is analysed and discussed. The results support, illustrate and deepen the meaning of the four dimensions of the theoretical framework: connection to place, compassionate connection, creativity and transgression. They show how the co-existence of 'community' and 'disruption' is essential in PBTL where community brings connection, cohesion and stability to a change process whereas disruption paves the way for disrupting old structures and experiment with new ones. This article shows how a change in inner consciousness is related to alternative practices and structures that re-define relationships with ourselves, other humans and the material, more-than-human world.

The idea of a sign language town, or a Deaf utopia, where Deaf and signing people can come together to live in a geographical or figurative homeland has long persisted in US Deaf life, letters, and literature. In the wake of the Milan Congress of 1880, Alexander Graham Bell's alarming rhetoric concerning "a deaf mute variety of the human race" and the "campaign against sign language," the idea of a homeland, and a Deaf commonwealth took on additional resonance. However, in the absence of geographical sign language towns, utopian and figurative homelands then became an important possible alternative through a communal shared space formed through language, culture, and customs. Homelands for Deaf people can extend to both physical spaces like Deaf schools and Deaf clubs or metaphorical and creative spaces, as in Deaf literature itself. Additionally, this article uses the proclaimed "first Deaf culture novel," Douglas Bullard's "Islay: A Novel" (1986), about a fictional Deaf republic, as a brief case study of several different overlapping cultural, social, artistic, and literary movements; written Deaf literature before and after this novel is, in some ways, markedly different, and in other ways, much the same due to the ways in which language and modality schemas are invoked in imaginative literature written in English. This study provides additional literary and cultural context for "Islay" as well as a brief history of Deaf creative writing in prose in relation to key mid-to-late twentieth century Deaf cultural and social movements.

Bedouin early childhood education lacks substantial resources and budgets, and so the adjacent Jewish education seems more appealing. Given the existing tensions between Arabs and Jews and the need to change the obscure future of co-existence, this paper examines the integration of Bedouin children into the early childhood education of a kibbutz, and the attitudes of the Jewish parents toward this integration. Fifteen Jewish parents whose children attend the kibbutz kindergarten were interviewed individually, and content analysis was performed on the interview transcripts. Findings show that the interviewees had positive attitudes toward the educational integration, which they expected would promote coexistence. However, there was clear evidence of a patronizing attitude toward the Bedouin children, who were perceived as the beneficiaries of the integration and not as legitimate partners. Genuine future integration should initiate programs in order to close gaps in general, and gaps in education in particular, by allocating finances and resources to developing infrastructure and services, so that choosing Jewish education will be on an ideological basis, and not for considerations of receiving a better education.

The Camphill Movement is one of the largest independent providers of social care for people with a learning disability: there are 119 communities located throughout the world. From the start, the principal aim of the Movement--co-founded by Dr. Karl König and his wife Tilla (née Maasberg) in Aberdeen--was to build communities in which children and adults with a learning disability could live, learn, and work with others in healthy social relationships. Karl König was born in Leopoldstadt, Vienna on the 25 September 1902 and died on the 27 March 1966 in a Camphill community in Brachenreuthe, Germany. Mathilde Maasberg was born in Gnadenfrei, Silesia, on the 9 March 1902 and died on the 17 September 1983 in the Camphill community of Fairways in South Africa. The paper focuses primarily on the lives of Karl and Tilla König and highlights the key points in their respective biographies. Whilst it is usually the name of Dr. Karl König that is associated with the Camphill Movement, a case is presented here that his wife significantly shaped the essential character of the Camphill way of life. She had been born into a Moravian Brethren settlement and latterly wove a strong, discernible and enduring element of Moravian practice into the fabric of Camphill life and work. Since the deaths of Karl and Tilla König Camphill communities have continued to seek the creation of environments where the economic, social and spiritual aspects of the community life complement one another. The paper identifies six key constituents that it is argued are central to the essence of Camphillness: mutuality, rhythmicity, spirituality, tranquillity, ecological sensitivity and economic sustainability. The paper ends with reflections on the 21st Century relevance of Camphill communities.

This paper attempts to analyze the educational work of Stanislav Shatskii which was aimed at the formation and development of pupil government. His first pedagogical experiments were carried out in the early twentieth century. He made a great contribution to the development of pedagogical theory and practice. The Russian educator Stanislav Shatskii paid a lot of attention to the formation of a children's team, the development of pupil government in the learning process. He organized educational and research work in experimental school-colonies. Its purposes, structure and functions were one-of-a-kind in the world. The educational model of Stanislav Shatskii can serve as a basic matrix for the specialized education of modern Russia, as it contains the grounds, means and mechanisms for the implementation of learning and educational strategies that meet the interests of society, mentality and social basis of the Russian people.

In this article I aim to establish a relevant connection between John Dewey's educational philosophy and the hippie communes of the United States during the nineteen sixties and seventies. After an assessment of Dewey's philosophy against the background of the countercultural sixties, I summarize and organize Dewey's philosophical thought around the concepts of growth, experience, education, democracy, and occupations. I then look closely at seven memoirs describing life in five different hippie communes, and draw on them to present illustrations of the main tenets of Dewey's educational philosophy and of its contemporary significance.

Ramanathan (2013a, 2013b) urged scholars to expand the notion of citizenship beyond its typically bounded understandings, towards conceptualizing it as "being able to participate fully" (p. 162). This view highlights the "processual" aspects of citizenship, shifting away from the more categorical meanings that underpin the term (Ramanathan, 2013a; Ramanathan, 2013b; Ricento, 2013). Dis-citizens' ability to participate in different processes is more limited. This theoretical perspective casts new light on the opening statement of an influential Indian language policy report, "The Teaching of English" (NCERT, 2006), which contended, "English is in India today a symbol of people's aspirations for quality in education and a fuller participation in national and international life." India's premier educational research body's imagining English as a benchmark of "participation" in Indian life merits further analysis. This ethnographic case study explores this concept of participation through the examination of the English literacy experiences of students in an English-medium village school. Involving eight focal children from an "anathashram" (orphanage) in suburban New Delhi, the data draws on extended fieldwork at the school in 2011, entailing participant observation supplemented with audio- and videorecording, and interview exchanges. The analysis reveals how the English literacy practices are implicated in the production and reproduction of discitizenship, in order to demonstrate how "English-medium" schooling functioned to exclude the focal children from "fuller participation in national and international life.

This study explores the impact of residential environment (urban vs. kibbutz community) and use of information and communication technology (ICT) on loneliness among the elderly in Israel. The quantitative study surveys four sub-populations of people above the age of 65: (a) kibbutz residents who use ICT, (b) kibbutz residents who do not use ICT, (c) urban residents who use ICT, and (d) urban residents who do not. Findings confirm the hypotheses that urban residents will report greater loneliness than kibbutz residents, and ICT users will report lower feelings of loneliness than non-users. A significant effect of residential environment is found. A significant impact of ICT use is also found, but the effect size is small. Furthermore, there is interaction between the variables: Kibbutz residents using ICT report greater loneliness than those who do not, while among urban residents, ICT users report a lower level of loneliness.

Modern historical research challenges religious education by undermining the arguments in favour of the existence of a supreme power who is responsible for patterns of reality. This article explores how the new generation of history textbooks of Religious Zionism, one of Israel's ideologically most influential populations, cope with this dilemma. Two international models of faith-based history teaching that we characterize the 'national-religious' and the 'divine', analyse the novelty and singularity of these textbooks. The analysis reveals that the new Religious-Zionist textbooks surmount the gap between faith in divine responsibility for human events and professional research and analysis of these events by creating a hybrid learning process that has two parallel interpretive dimensions. The first presents a historical process that remains formally true to the principles of reason and the discipline, although segueing to tendentious content at sensitive junctions. The second explores a metahistorical dimension in which these principles are bracketed with and subjugated to a theological, metaphysical, interpretation of history. The findings concerning both the two international models and the unique historiosophical stance of the Religious-Zionist textbooks provide fertile soil for future research on faith-based history teaching in a variety of theological, political, and social contexts and circumstances.

In this article, we explore the concept of African communitarianism and reflect on its potential value for ecojustice education as a localised response to the wider ecological crises that impacts on African communities. We argue for an African eco-communitarian perspective and propose that this perspective extends ecojustice education. Such extension occurs firstly through foregrounding and emphasising the establishment of harmonious and co-constitutive relationships that is characterised by intersubjectivity and secondly, by extending community to beyond humans (and ancestors) to be inclusive of the "more-than human" world. We contend that ecojustice education, framed within an African eco-communitarianism, constitutes a localised response to the ecological crises in the form of critical place-based education, that it enables co-constitutive dialogue and interaction between the human and non-human elements of an eco-community and is an ethico-political praxis characterised by an African environmental ethic.

"Life reform" is an umbrella term used for describing the movements critical of modernisation whose main features were the desire to return to nature and naturalness, to self-healing and finding lost integrity again. They also have close ties to the educational reforms of the time. These movements were particularly active in the German, Austro-Hungarian monarchy from the end of the 19th century. At the beginning the movement focused mainly on healthy eating and lifestyle but with its decades-long history it finally formed its unique image around the turn of the century, at the time focusing on alternative medicine, spiritual orientation and vegetarianism. The national character is specific to the reception of the Hungarian efforts at life reform, and in this context the role of folk art is particularly appreciated. Our study examines the development and trends of these specific forms of movement in this "golden age" of the monarchy. We also attempt to demonstrate its effects on lifestyle and cultural and educational reforms at the time. The last part of our article also deals with the life-reforming roots of Zoltán Kodály's music pedagogy.

The security risks posed by the Anthropocene requires peace education strategies aimed at developing the skills necessary for the emergence of regenerative social forms, based on sustainable synergies between humans and nature. This article explores how community-building and regenerative ecology frameworks developed in ecovillages can contribute to that goal, through the case study analysis of the peace education initiative carried out in Israel and the West Bank by Tamera -- Healing Biotope I, an ecovillage located in southern Portugal. The findings illustrate the difficulty of creating regenerative social forms through the reproduction of whole system ideal models for sustainable human settlements, due to the vulnerability of intentional communities to the internal reproduction of ethnopolitical loyalties and conflicts. They also illustrate how a combination of local embeddedness and transnational connections contribute to the diffusion of social innovations produced in ecovillages. However, local ethnopolitical organizations and movements tend to promote resistance to the adoption of externally produced frameworks for the development of competences of collaborative sociability and non-violent conflict resolution. The article concludes with an appeal to a transdisciplinary collaboration among scholars, practitioners and public institutions in the development of synergistic models of peace education that are multipliable, but context-sensitive.

This study focuses on the cultural characteristics of Ahiska Turks in Wheaton, Illinois in the United States. By trying to understand the culture of the participants, I sought to shed light on how the Ahiska Turks managed to cope with the hardship they experienced and yet preserved their ethnic identities. In this multicase study, I interviewed six male Ahiska Turks. As a result of my analyses, eight themes emerged: family, religion (i.e., Islam), language (i.e., Turkish), communal life, endogamy, authoritarianism, oppression against the preservation of culture and identity, and education for upward mobility. The Ahiska Turks' agrarian way of life, the preservation of their language, and their preference of integration to the larger society for acculturation make them who they are today.

This paper focuses on the "Junkyard" ("chatzar grutaot")--a unique educational environment and practice developed in kindergartens on the Israeli kibbutz in the 1940s and 1950s, and still in wide use today in kibbutz kindergartens. The Junkyard, consisting of artefacts of the adult world that are no longer in use, is an ever-changing set-up in which children's free play is encouraged, with minimal rules for use of time, space, objects, and social relations. Anchored in the writings of its two founding educators, as well as in writings of and interviews with its advocates and instructors over the years, this paper shows how the Junkyard drew on widespread ideas about early childhood development and education, at the same time as it responded to local conditions and concerns. The paper argues that a unique conjunction of factors--material and structural, educational and pedagogical, ideological and cultural--facilitated the process by which the Junkyard was inserted relatively smoothly into the kibbutz educational landscape, in lasting ways.

Stories are a central component of how we understand ourselves and our societies in our world. This is especially true in the case of oral cultures. Stories, how they are used, how they are reframed, and how they change over time, are also an important record of learning. Randall (1996) and Kenyon and Randall (1997) have called this process restorying. This article explores how a social movement in Ada, Ghana, has been using stories to both learn and share that learning through several phases of struggle over the past six years. This movement aims to defend the 400-year-old communal artisanal salt production practice that is the livelihood of over 60,000 people. Women make up the majority of these practitioners. The aim of this paper is both to reveal the power of these stories for popular education and to explore how in restorying these stories over time the movement reveals the ongoing depth of learning. This paper also discusses how the alliance between the movement and the local community radio contributes to this restorying and learning.

In the 1920s,in the environment of emerging brutal capitalism, exclusion and ghetto benches, on the initiative of avant-garde architects from the Praesens group and Polish socialists built a housing estate in Zoliborz, the ambition of which was to teach people how to dwell. Soon it turned out that the founders of the housing cooperative were, as we would call them today, activists. This housing estate, initially designed for working class, thanks to the engagement of the intellectuals, who were familiar with the concept of "sociology in action", benefited from a wide range of experimental forms of education, from the first co-educational secular school in Poland to the emancipated dimension of women's activities, or Free Workers University. The youth of Zoliborz was raised in a secular spirit of pacifism. The estate can be seen as a case study of "architecture in action", and dwelling as a process rather than form. I wish to recall the experiment in Zoliborz in order to show how in a particular radical housing estate there were shaped the attitudes of an "enlightened citizen" (Alfred Schütz). The performative perspective allowed to see "architecture in action", and dwelling as a process rather than form. A dweller-citizen is presented as a subject applying revolutionary and liberating initiatives (social, political, economical, educational). A critical perspective, however, as being related to performative, allows to see an unusual power of rebellion and need for change, which results from the connection of mind and action, thanks to the concept of culture as praxis.

This project examines the communal process of music learning as it occurs in a Byzantine chant learning group at a Greek Orthodox Church. The goal of this project was to investigate the act of music making, as situated in a particular sociocultural context, in order to address the question: Through what processes do individuals share music knowledge and learn together in an informal learning group? These learning practices and this music community allowed me to question and explore how the phenomena of echo (imitation or reflection) and embodiment (internalization) manifest. By contextualizing learning processes socioculturally in a case study, I offer alternative educational theories through examining and understanding music learning as a communal process of knowing and doing, rather than one centered on individual performance and output. [This paper was presented at the 9th International Symposium on the Sociology of Music Education (2015).]

This article examines the need rural teachers felt for solitude and the place it took in their emotional world. Solitude was not seen by the teachers as a substitute for social life but, rather, considered as enriching it. Unlike loneliness, solitude was sought after and craved as it represented voluntary self-fulfilment in an environment that was considered culturally and often emotionally unfriendly, at times even hostile. Solitude became at the same time a barrier against bigoted and conservative local societies and a symbolic emotional space in which cultural craving could find a place. Teachers felt the need to preserve substantial distance while at the same fulfilling a kind of beneficial "mission civilisatrice". Expressions of teachers' solitude, common to various rural environments at that period, will be examined through the test-case of Hebrew settlements (= moshavot) in Galilee, where the interpretations of the idea of solitude seem an appropriate reflection of similar attitudes in larger rural European scopes. The article will explore the following issues: the origins of teachers' solitude as mental response to social tensions, the appearances of intimacy, apparently spontaneous but in fact totally controlled in order to preserve the symbolic hedges of solitude and intimacy, different expressions solitude could take and the way offences were considered as attacks on solitude as an emotional refuge. Finally, the article will go through the solitary worlds of one such teacher, Yehuda Antebi.

This article examines the westward imposition of specific kinds of land use by focusing on the Harmony Society's transformation of Posey County, Indiana. The German pietistic society carried their vision of proper land use from Europe to Pennsylvania and, in 1814, to what was then considered the West: Indiana Territory. During their decade in Indiana, the Harmonists attempted to exploit, control, and beautify the natural environment. The goal of "improving and embellishing the Wilderness"--as well as survival and profit--provided the justification for clearing forests, draining wetlands, mining subsoil, planting crops, creating pastures, altering waterways, and hunting local fauna; all of these activities greatly transformed the ecosystems of southwestern Indiana. Ultimately, the Harmonists' notions of land use were transmitted, learned, and, eventually, codified.

This paper examines the attempts made by the renewing kibbutzim to maintain their way of life as much as possible through the adjustment of their gating mechanisms. In this type of a rural gated community, sorting procedures and admittance criteria of nonmembers are the most notable elements. Background material and interviews with informants at eight kibbutzim on Israel's northern periphery enabled us to outline the overt and covert aspects of these procedures from the gatekeepers' viewpoint. In the context of a segregated society, sorting procedures are maintained, reinforced, and challenged by locally-led and state-sponsored regulations. Our findings show how sorting powers allow kibbutzim to exercise tight control on their own behalf. To minimize foreseeable frictions and to maintain some recognized ethnic and socio-cultural fundamentals (middle-class, Jewish, secular), recruiting "people like us" and excluding others has become the accepted practice. Social enclosure is implemented and maintained not simply by mechanisms of self-selection but by careful monitoring this distinct territorial entity by the gatekeepers. In fact, their practices assist in turning a unique type of a gated community into a typical neoliberal gated community. (Contains 1 figure.)

Like other adult education providers such as the Workers' Educational Association, the educational settlement movement was beset with political controversy during the 1920s. This article considers the relationship between the Educational Settlements Association (ESA) and its affiliated institutions, relating these to the competing political traditions that were represented in the movement. In particular, there were differences between the Liberal members of the ESA executive committee and the Labour-supporting settlement wardens, many of whom were active in local politics. The article considers disputes concerning the funding of settlements, the political activities of wardens, and student representation within the institutions. It shows that, although wardens campaigned for greater democracy within the ESA, they resisted democratic control of their own settlements. The article focuses on the settlements in Sheffield and Walthamstow, and the John Woolman Settlement in Islington. It is based on the records of these settlements, and of the ESA itself. (Contains 150 footnotes.)

The present research explored how mothers' own childhood experiences are linked to their perceptions of their children's sleep regulation. It focused on collective sleeping; a practice used in the past in the Israeli kibbutz, and used a quasi-experimental research design to examine whether mothers who were raised in collective sleeping arrangements differed from mothers who were raised in home sleeping. Two typically developing cohorts: infants (n = 68; ages 9-15 months; M = 12.2, SD = 2.2) and preschool children (n = 113; ages 48-55 months; M = 51.5, SD = 1.85) participated in this investigation. Sleep regulation and temperament were reported for infants and children, whereas for mothers data were collected on separation anxiety and appraisal of the ecology in which they were raised. Collectively raised mothers evaluated their upbringing significantly more negatively than home-raised mothers, expressed higher separation anxiety with regard to an alternative caregiver, but were not different in their views of their child's sleep difficulties. For infants, it was maternal separation anxiety that contributed uniquely to the explained variance in maternal view of sleep regulation difficulties. For preschool children, it was maternal evaluation of own childhood ecology and child's temperament that contributed uniquely to the explained variance in maternal view of sleep regulation difficulties. These findings suggest that mothers' representations of their sleep-related early experiences, rather than their childhood ecology in and of itself, influenced their perceptions about their child's sleep, which, in turn, affect child's sleep patterns. Implications to caregiving are discussed. (Contains 4 tables.)

This study examined modeling and compensatory processes underlying the effects of an early paternal model on father involvement in child care. Drawing on social learning theory, it was hypothesized that father-son relationships would moderate the association between a father's involvement and his own father's involvement. A sample of 136 kibbutz father-son dyads completed extensive questionnaires. Findings provided evidence for modeling effects on the socioemotional care dimension, whereas imitation of highly involved fathers occurred simultaneously with compensation for relatively uninvolved fathers on the physical care and responsibility dimensions. As predicted, imitation was more likely in close father-son relationships. These findings shed light on the role of paternal model and attest to the importance of differentiating various forms of involvement. (Contains 4 tables.)

The purpose of this conceptual paper is to analyze the potential for collaborative relationships in schools in Ukraine. In this paper, I examine the nature of teacher collaboration in schools within a framework of postmodernism as a constructive social theory. To better grasp the deep meaning of collaborative interactions in schools, I use cultural and micropolitical perspective. Further, I turn to the discussion of the potential for collaboration in Ukrainian schools, utilizing the notion of a collective that prevailed in Soviet society and system of education. Implications for establishing collaborative school cultures in Ukraine conclude the paper.

In this paper the origin of the Camphill Movement will be outlined. Particular attention will be paid to the influence of the Moravian Brethren educational model in the development of the Camphill Schools. A key influence which helped to shape Camphill philosophy and practice was the writing of Jan Amos Comenius (1592-1670), a bishop in the Moravian Church, who is widely viewed as the founder of modern education. The paper briefly describes the development by Camphill School Aberdeen and the University of Aberdeen of the BA in Social Pedagogy which takes a holistic--Comenian--approach to the education and care of children and young people. The question is posed whether the social pedagogic impulse can be sustained in the present economic climate when deep cuts are being made in educational and social welfare expenditure.

The aims of education, and the appropriate means of realising them, are a recurring preoccupation of utopian authors. The utopian socialists Robert Owen (1771-1858) and Charles Fourier (1772-1837) both place human nature at the core of their educational views, and both see education as central to their wider objective of social and political transformation. The greatest philosophical difference between them concerns human nature: whereas Owen saw character as plastic and open to creation, Fourier saw it as God-given and liable to discovery. The most striking practical difference concerns their institutional recommendations: whereas Owen saw schooling as taking place in largely conventional spaces, Fourier sought to integrate education into the community--his ideal society contains no schools and no teachers. Both authors had some (limited and often indirect) practical influence on educational practice, despite the failure of their wider ambitions for social reform.

With the likelihood of future changes in climate and climate variability, it is important to understand how human systems may be vulnerable. Rural communities in Saskatchewan having agricultural-based economies are particularly dependent on climate and could be among the most vulnerable human systems in Canada. Future changes in climate are likely to have significant impacts on rural livelihoods, and rural populations will face the challenge of coping with climate change in light of a multitude of other changing socio-economic and environmental conditions. The Rural Municipality of Rudy No. 284 was chosen as a case study due to its access to irrigation, a key tool in climate adaptation for the agricultural system in the area against one of its most notorious climatic features--severe multi-year droughts. Further irrigation development would continue to reduce climate vulnerabilities. Even with irrigation however, the compounding effects of climate and other socio-economic changes will likely require modifications in current practices and policies in order to secure adequate livelihoods. Climate change adaptation in the RM must ensure equitable access to water and potentially irrigation, reduce barriers to collaboration when addressing communal problems, and provide more certainty in government programs. (Contains 9 figures.)

More than 300,000 diaspora Jewish young adults and tens of thousands of their Israeli peers have participated in structured, cross-cultural encounters--"mifgashim"--in the context of an experiential education program known as Taglit-Birthright Israel. Drawing on field observations, interviews, and surveys, the formal and informal components of the encounters are described, and the meanings participants attach to the experience are analyzed. For North Americans, the encounters enable a personal and seemingly authentic experience of "the real" Israel, and make them feel welcome in the Jewish homeland. For Israelis, the encounters foster national pride, as well as identification with the transnational Jewish collective. Although program sponsors hoped the encounters would also create a forum for learning by Israeli participants about life in the Jewish diaspora, this latter goal was not typically achieved. This article explores the mechanisms by which the encounters generate identification with the homeland and the transnational Jewish collective, as well as the limitations of the encounters as a vehicle for reciprocal learning about diaspora culture and society. (Contains 10 footnotes and 4 figures.)

The changes in the kibbutzim went through a transition from a collectivistic society to an individualistic one, with an emphasis on family units. Parents found themselves in a new role that was not passed to them by inter-generational transfer, while caregivers lost their socialisation roles, expressed by exhaustion and low professional self-esteem. This crisis gave rise to the "integrative psycho-pedagogical model", which merges theories from child and parent developmental psychology with organisational, systemic counselling and ecological theories. This model provides a new professional horizon for women who work in the EC field and increases their professional self-esteem. Due to its success it has been adopted by educational systems outside of the kibbutzim in Israel. (Contains 4 figures.)

Finding and cultivating a sense of authentic self is an important life goal for emerging adults. In collectivist cultures, youngsters might need to distance themselves to find and discover their authentic selves separate of the expectations of society and significant others. Creating an autonomous time bubble that focuses on the present allows youngsters to forge a sense of personal meaning and authenticity that subsequently paves the way to reintegration into long-term life goals. The results focusing on Israeli emerging adults demonstrate that a sense of authentic self plays a central role in their well-being and socioemotional functioning.

The study has three aims: (1) to compare the effect of the Qassam attacks in two types of communities: development town and kibbutz; (2) to examine the relationship between posttraumatic stress (PTS) and posttraumatic growth (PTG); and (3) to examine the contribution that level of exposure, cognitive appraisal, and sense of belonging to the country make to PTS and PTG. The sample consisted of 134 residents, 67 living on two kibbutzim and 67 living in the development town of Sderot. Results revealed that the development town residents reported more PTS symptoms and more PTG than did the kibbutz residents, and the association between PTS and PTG was positive. In addition, the findings show that most of the predictors contribute to either PTS or PTG, or predicted them differently. The discussion examines the results in light of the current literature on PTS and PTG.

Theorists agree that the risk of folding changes as organizations age, but there is little consensus as to the general form or generative processes of age-dependent mortality. This article investigates four such processes (maturation, senescence, legitimation and obsolescence), which have been taken as competing accounts. Using two analytical levers--elaborating on the time shapes of these processes and distinguishing aging of organizations from aging of their templates (designs)--this paper differentiates these four processes and tests them jointly. Analysis of mortality rates for American communes from 1609 through 1965 strongly supports the proposed effects of maturation and senescence at the organization level and legitimation at the level of organizational templates. Results give weaker evidence that obsolescence of templates influenced mortality and that environmental drift exacerbated obsolescence. (Contains 2 tables, 3 figures, and 14 notes.)

Intentional communities--groups of unrelated individuals who choose to live together, sharing such things in common as wealth, property, labour, food and a sense of identity and fellowship (Kamau 2002)--continue to serve as powerful points of resistance to the larger culture of consumption that permeates our modern world. Grounded in recent research on the Bruderhof movement (now Church Communities International) and supported by a broad search of the educational and anthropological literature, this article attempts to provide some insights that might aid adult educators who are attempting to encourage others to better understand and actively resist consumptive practices.

This paper considers features of domestic and social life aboard sail training vessels, exploring the particular character of life at sea, and how these features contribute to the distinctive character of sail training experience as a context for learning. Methodologically, the study lies in the sociological tradition of ethnography, focusing on the actions of participants and on the meanings ascribed to participation. Learning that takes place as a consequence of the residential and communal living dimensions are claimed by proponents as key elements of the sail training experience, and this account seeks to illuminate such claims and to make comparison between the experiences of participants and the accounts of practitioners and advocates of sail training. Space, movement and privacy are considered, alongside the inescapability of the setting, and the impact of domestic and working routines. These features are shown to create conditions that should be understood as those of a "total institution" aboard ships. It is argued that the claims in respect of learning arising from communal domestic life are generally borne out by the empirical evidence. Situated learning is considered as a framework for understanding the processes taking place, and it is argued that it is the institutional character of life aboard a sail training vessel that creates its particular power as a learning experience.

In 1992, even before a formalized agricultural extension system existed, the Farmer Field School was introduced in Vietnam as a farmer education methodology aiming at enhancing farmers' agroecological knowledge, critical skills and collective action to support sustainable agricultural development. Over the years, the model saw a wide range of applications and adaptations to serve different development needs, while preserving the underlying principles to capacitate, empower and organize farmers. The training experience has proven to be effective and is appreciated by farmers who benefit from learning to gather information, make informed decisions and manage their farms independently in a liberalizing and rapidly changing development climate. Despite convincing impact at the farmer level, the model has not been widely mainstreamed into the agricultural extension system, due to several reasons explored in this paper. Lessons learned should be more thoroughly evaluated and documented to influence future policy-making. (Contains 2 tables and 4 notes.)

In this article, the author discusses Richard Shusterman's defense of popular culture and intends to show that the entertainment industry has a dark side which Shusterman tends to ignore. Richard Shusterman is a pragmatist aesthetician who promotes art as an integral part of the ever-changing stream of life, believing that popular culture provides ways of giving art a place in everyday existence. Just like his predecessor John Dewey, Shusterman stresses man's active involvement with art. He maintains that the entertainment industry speaks on behalf of the common man. Shusterman has not only been influenced by Dewey, but also by a host of other thinkers. One of them is the well-known French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu who famously maintained that the elite distinguished itself from the multitude by having a different taste; they called their own taste "refined" and the taste of the masses "vulgar." The elite stresses form, not function, and asserts that only a formalistic approach to art is legitimate; focusing on its function in everyday life is vulgar. The elite looks down upon popular culture and commerces with art in an intellectualist fashion. Shusterman counters these claims and takes on highbrow criticism of popular art which he treated roughly in terms of six charges: the ones of (a) spuriousness; (b) passivity; (c) superficiality; (d) the lack of autonomy; (e) the lack of form; and (f) the lack of creativity. While Shusterman's criticism of charges is quite convincing, he ignores an important charge, which the author labels as the charge of danger--that popular culture, especially visual entertainment, could be a danger to education, high culture, and civilization in general. In this article, the author defends this charge by systematically responding to three of Shusterman's explicit and implicit assertions: (1) popular culture is rather a bringer of culture than a threat to it; (2) since popular culture is no threat to culture, it is by implication not a threat to higher culture; and (3) popular culture strengthens communal living. (Contains 34 notes.)

In order to test the hypothesis that retirement would be particularly stressful for this highly motivated cohort, forty retired members of Israeli kibbutzim (22 men, 18 women) were interviewed in an open-ended fashion, concerning their early history, their decision to join the kibbutz, their working life, and their post-retirement adaptation. Little evidence of significant psychopathology was found, and those instances were for the most part traceable to traumatic rearing in the family of orientation, rather than to current, post-retirement losses and insults. These findings are discussed in terms of the Habitat-Niche model developed by Gutmann. (Contains 1 table.)

This study examines teachers' perceptions of classroom motivation and achievement among students displaying culture-based classroom behaviors. Sixty-two elementary school teachers read scenarios of hypothetical students who behaviorally manifested themes purported to be consistent with a European/mainstream cultural ethos (competition, individualism) or Afrocultural ethos (communalism, verve). Teachers then rated students' motivation and achievement as if they were in their classrooms. Motivation and achievement ratings were significantly higher for students displaying competitive and individualistic classroom behaviors than communal or vervistic behaviors. These findings suggest that the value teachers assign to academic success should not be understood in the absence of cultural considerations.

The present research examines 110 released prisoners who were sent for rehabilitation to the Kibbutz Movement by the Israeli Prisoner Rehabilitation Service between 1983 and 2001. The research examines several measures of their adjustment towards normative life during and after their stay at the kibbutz. The research was based on interviews with each of the offender's adoptive families and with the released prisoners themselves. Program participant's reincarceration rate was 22.7%, which is much lower than the 63% reincarceration rate in the general population of released prisoners in Israel. Findings show that the most significant predictors of successful rehabilitation were length of stay in the kibbutz, work and social integration, and adherence to kibbutz norms. (Contains 4 tables.)

Meaning matters in the way people form social ties. Adopting an unconventional analytic technique--the Galois lattice analysis--I show how network researchers can uncover relational meanings using conventional research techniques (i.e., closed-ended network surveys). Galois lattice analysis also inspires new ways of conceptualizing relational meanings in terms of the duality of persons and relationships, that is, how actors' understandings of each other as persons define the understandings of their relationships with them, and vice versa. The co-constitution of these dualistic meanings thus defines a "network culture." Comparing two communal settings in which the meaning of "love" is constructed, I demonstrate that different network cultures produce different meaning structures that guide how actors relate to one another, resulting in different degrees of group stability. (Includes 1 table, 6 figures, and 30 endnotes.)