Study Of Social Practices Research Articles

Social Behavior of University Students in the Educational Sphere in the Rostov Region and the Republic of Crimea: A Comparative Perspective

The present article examines the specificity of social behavior of students of two regions – the Rostov Region and the Republic of Crimea. The notions of education as a terminal and instrumental value, attitudes towards academic mobility practices, the implementation of such practices, and motives are studied as the foundations of differences between the regions. The methodological construct is developed based on the theoretical approaches of A.V. Lubskii on mental programs, the value approach of M. Rokeach, the neo-institutional approach of D. North, and the activity approach in the study of social practices. The comparative analysis of two questionnaires allows concluding that the specificity of social behavior of the citizens of Crimea lies in a lesser focus on high financial income as a result of obtaining education, lower attitudes towards intra-Russian mobility, the awareness of the peninsula’s closedness to international mobility due to the lack of financial capabilities, and high support for classical versus online learning. The number of educational practices realized by students is much lower in Crimea compared to the Rostov Region. This finding shows the need to introduce such opportunities for students in the peninsula’s system of higher education.

Evaluating and developing teacher instructional practices in economics using a new video-based test

Teachers’ instructional practices are important for student learning. However, there are few tools for evaluating instructional practices in social studies. To this end, we present a video-based instrument with teacher-student interactions for assessing teaching practices in a high school economics course. We investigate, using an iterative design-based methodology, the adaptation and validation of a test originally developed in Germany for use in the United States. We found that experienced economics teachers and those with more content knowledge demonstrated higher-level instructional skills, and were more flexibile with their thinking. Inexperienced economics teachers and those with low content knowledge not only struggled with the test items, but also with the test format, the content, inter-cultural understanding, and with feeling overwhelmed. The test provides an opportunity for economics teachers to obtain feedback, practice, reflection, and improvement of their instruction in a way that has not previously been available. It also illustrates the possibilities and drawbacks of video-based testing in teacher training.

Extracting Users: Regimes of Engagement in Norwegian Smart Electricity Transition

Recent efforts to involve digital technologies and renewables in the electricity grid have placed users at center stage in the legitimation of energy transitions. This move has been paralleled by an emphasis on users and energy practices in social studies of energy related to science and technology studies. This article builds on an eighteen-month Living Lab exploration of energy practices with smart electricity users in Bergen, Norway. We make two interrelated arguments. First, energy production and distribution in Norway and elsewhere is shifting toward greater automation of tasks, possibly bypassing the “active user” concept. Energy sector practices are evolving from simply extracting natural resources (Extraction 1.0) toward extraction of users’ behavioral data (Extraction 2.0), and privacy thus emerges as a key component in the stabilization of energy systems. Second, we reflect on displacements of the roles and possibilities of users (or “energy citizens”) thereby enabled, especially their normative (political and regulatory) aspects. We propose that conceptualization of energy practices be supported by the concept of regimes of engagement from pragmatist sociology. Relatedly, we argue that market, civic, ecological, and industrial regimes are being actively merged through digital innovation and what we call the techno-epistemic network of smart electricity.

Democratic Citizenship Education and its Practices in Social Studies’ Classrooms at Elementary School Level

Abstract The importance of democratic citizenship education in democratic states is beyond dispute. The general purpose of the study is to describe democratic citizenship education and its practices in social studies’ classrooms at elementary school level. The study is qualitative in nature and descriptive phenomenological research design is used for this study. The accessible population of the study is included all the social studies’ teachers of 83 boys’ public sector elementary schools in district Lahore. Purposive sampling is used for the selection of the sample in this study. The sample of the study is included 20 social studies’ teachers of 10 boys’ public sector elementary schools of district Lahore. Two social studies’ teachers, one from primary section (grade 1- 5) and one from elementary section (grade 6- 8) who are teaching social studies’ subjects are selected from 10 boys public sector elementary schools of district Lahore by using purposive sampling technique. Participant observation is adopted as a tool to observe classrooms of social studies teachers through a checklist of objectives. Data is analyzed by using SPSS (statistical package of social sciences) software. On the basis of results it is concluded that majority of the social studies’ teachers are emerging their competencies and need improvement regarding the development of democratic citizenship education at public sector elementary school level.

Объективное время: в чем преимущества реалистического подхода к исследованию социальной темпоральности?

In the article, the author attempts to substantiate an object-oriented approach for the study of social temporality. To solve this problem, the author takes several steps. First, the author justifies the need for a realistic approach, since it allows us to substantiate the constitutive meaning of social temporality, as well as to show the possibility of understanding time beyond the functions of social practices and/or social processes. Second, the author shows the origins of realism in the classical philosophical tradition and analyzes the possibilities of neorealism and critical realism for understanding social time. Thanks to this, a way of thinking about the social was shown based on social actors (the study of their morphogenesis increases the validity of this category). At the final step, the author shows that objects can act as an ontological basis from which thinking about social time is possible. Using Graham Harman's interpretation of the object, the author considers time as an interobjective phenomenon, a function of objects, their relations, order and aspirations for interaction. Interobjectivity postulates the constitutive value of various objects for the construction of the social. The agency and self-reference of objects, justified by Graham Harman and Levi Bryant, make it possible to avoid the need for an observer figure, which is characteristic of the established social theory and corresponds to the principles of “flat ontology”. Thus, the proposed approach allows us to think about social time based on fundamental ontological grounds, which contributes to the leveling of the distortions of the observer's view. Unlike the models analyzed above, relying on objects allows us to think of time not only as linear and unidirectional (which is especially important for understanding social temporality): a realistic intention remains. Due to the interpretation of the object that opposes materialism and idealism, the field of research of social temporality is expanding, and time itself can be thought beyond the material/ideal dichotomy; also, social time does not oppose the physical one, since it is impossible to distinguish only “social” or “physical” objects (material and ideal, artificial and natural, and so on). The epistemological vector can thus shift from the study of social practices or rhythms of social life to the potential for changes contained in objects and object-oriented interpretations of causality.

Social Behavior of Students in Higher Education (Based on the Results of a Sociological Study in the Rostov Region, Russia)

The transformational processes in the field of higher education in Russia, associated with the introduction of new educational practices, actualize the importance of studying changes in the social behavior of university students. The main purpose of the study was to clarify the characteristics of the social behavior of university students, conditioned by external and internal factors. The methodological construct included synthesis of socially deterministic and neoinstitutional approaches, the theory of mental programs, the theory of generations, the value approach of M. Rokeach, as well as the activity-based approach to the study of social practices. Reforms in the higher education system in Russia, which were accompanied by the emergence of a new educational environment and excessive social inequalities, were studied as external factors. Mental programs were studied as internal factors, which included ideas about education as a terminal and instrumental value, attitudes and motives of practices. The research was based on the data of the authors' questionnaire survey of 382 students from 7 universities of the Rostov region. Identifying the features of the mental programs of university students and their educational practices made it possible to identify six types of social behavior of students in the educational sphere: traditional, career, pragmatic, traditional and career, traditional and pragmatic, and career and pragmatic. The analysis of the results allows drawing conclusions about the high readiness of students to new educational practices, which are still poorly implemented. At the same time, motivation depends on mental programs, and the educational practices themselves depend on the conditions created in universities. The results of the study may be of interest to specialists dealing with the issues of social behavior of students in the context of transformations of the higher education system.

Социологический подход к оценке качества жизни населения городских агломераций

Taking into account the Strategy of Spatial Development of the Russian Federation up to the year 2025, the paper grounds the importance of the use of sociological approach to get the integral estimation of people’s quality of life in city agglomerations. A brief review of researches devoted to different parameters of the state of city agglomerations is presented. There given the algorithm of research of city agglomerations which includes six stages: revealing of spontaneous processes within the core-city and peripheral territory, the study of social practices used to meet the daily needs of residents of the territory, the analysis of quantitative and qualitative indicators based on the results of sociological surveys and interviews, as well as the consideration of the results of sociological studies for the development of legal acts, the formation of a development strategy for the city agglomerations and its practical implementation.

Impact of external assessment on teachers’ instructional practices in Social Studies in Ghana

External assessment has often times been perceived to have much influence on the teaching of social studies in the senior high schools in Ghana. A study was conducted in eight senior high schools in the Eastern Region of Ghana. According to Alderson and Wall (1993, pp. 120-121), examination influences the classroom teaching; how teachers teach the subject; the rate and sequence of teaching; the degree and depth of teaching; and the attitudes to the content, method, etc. of teaching. This assertion was confirmed by Cheng’s (1997) where he concluded that a revised public examination has to a large extent changed the content of teaching in the classroom. A structured questionnaire was designed and used to gather data from the teachers on how external assessment affects the teaching of social studies in the SHS. The study revealed that most teachers use lecture technique to teach and students are to take notes. Social Studies is noted for out-of-door activities which are practical in nature and to promote the use of non-testing procedure in assessing learners, but the emphasis on external assessment and standardized assessment has intensified the domination of what get assessed as what gets taught.

Nexus of exclusion and challenges for sustainability and health in an urban periphery in Brazil.

The urban nexus approach involves the investigation and elucidation of integrated solutions through the recognition of tradeoffs between water, energy, and food, namely resources whose shortage leads to inequalities in health. The article's central hypothesis is that the context of shortage corroborates social practices that can be synergic or contradictory in relation to the challenges of sustainability and social rights. The objective is to investigate synergies and contradictions based on social practices in the urban nexus in the neighborhood of Novo Recreio in the city of Guarulhos, Greater Metropolitan São Paulo, Brazil. The methodology consists of a qualitative ethnographic study drawing on practice theory as the reference, with direct field observations and narratives. The results featured social practices associated with systematic lack of water, precarious public lighting and transportation, and difficult access to fresh and healthy foods. The study of social practices between synergies and contradictions allowed verifying that this spontaneous process of search for solutions to local problems reveals the need to incorporate local practices and knowledge into public policies and global demands. We define nexus of exclusion as the peripheral condition of impossibility of conscious options that allow jointly orienting the reduction of shortage and iniquities through alternatives for sustainability.

Ninth‐Grade Students’ Use of Graphical Representations in Social Studies Writing

AbstractGraphical representations are frequently used but normally not explicitly taught in social studies. The authors explore how to utilize the often unused potential of disciplinary graphical representations in student writing by offering insight into a Norwegian ninth‐grade classroom where students were scaffolded to use such representations. The authors scrutinized how these students invented connections between modes as they combined and transformed different representations in their texts. The authors found high density but not necessarily critical use of visuals. Texts designed with spatial and linear structures integrated visuals and verbal differently. The students’ main challenges concerned cohesion, redundancy, and utilization of modal affordances to communicate their message to a particular audience. To build students’ graphical literacy in social studies over time, the authors recommend overt instruction with model texts, critically framed with an emphasis on affordances and functions, and giving students opportunities to use this knowledge in a social studies practice.

Temporary freedoms? Ethnoarchaeology of female herders at seasonal sites in northern Europe

ABSTRACTThis article investigates the socio-cultural role of temporary habitation sites associated with short-distance transhumance in upland and outland pastures of northern Europe. Comparing recent archaeological fieldwork with neglected ethnohistorical information, the author discusses the extraordinary social and sexual freedoms which unmarried young people – particularly young women – experienced in summer pastures of post-medieval Ireland, Scotland, Sweden, Norway and Iceland. Shieling sites and booley sites were places where female-specific traditions of work and leisure were reproduced seasonally with minimal male interference. However, this autonomy was ultimately curtailed by the economic importance of what young women were doing in the hills, namely, looking after dairy cows and ewes. Adult males maintained subtle control over the architecture of seasonal sites and formed a noticeable presence in uplands thanks to occasional industrial activities. Seasonal transhumant sites demonstrate that temporary places in so-called ‘marginal’ landscapes can greatly enhance the study of social practice in non-elite rural communities.

CONSTRUCTION OF СATEGORIES ‘STRENGTH’ AND ‘WEAKNESS’ IN RUSSIAN AND POLISH FOREIGN POLICY DISCOURSE

The study is part of the project aimed at revealing the mechanisms of discursive construction of international relations (IR). It examines the functions of the categories ‘strength’ and ‘weakness’ in discursive representations of states as political actors. The research draws on assumptions of social constructionism and CDA. The data include recent speeches by Russian and Polish Ministers of Foreign Affairs. The paper argues that the opposition ‘strength vs. weakness’ is essential in the construction of IR in discourse. We focus on how nation states and their qualities are represented in foreign policy discourse, and which of these qualities conceptualise the categories of strength and weakness. We demonstrate that the two categories constitute a relational pair; however, the category of strength is expressed more explicitly than that of ‘weakness’, and the axiological charge of ‘strength’ changes depending on the actor that it represents. An array of linguistic tools is employed in constructing the opposition, and, consequentially, the IR between the political actors. The paper suggests that social actors and their qualities can be viewed as social categories that are perpetually constructed and re-constructed in discourse. The research develops the theory of discourse and demonstrates how discourse analysis contributes to the study of social practices and helps interpret current social phenomena.

Meeting the demands of the C3 framework in elementary social studies methods

PurposeIn both elementary schools and elementary teacher education programs, social studies is marginalized while standards require increasingly more ambitious reasoning, reading, and writing in social studies than has historically been documented in American elementary schools. The purpose of this paper is to explain the challenges that elementary social studies teacher educators face in preparing elementary school teachers to facilitate the kind of ambitious social studies envisioned in the NCSS’s C3 Framework and advocate an approach to successfully address these challenges.Design/methodology/approachThis paper articulates a targeted and ambitious approach to elementary social studies teacher education. The authors describe five recommendations from the teacher education literature for supporting preservice teachers in learning disciplinary-oriented social studies teaching, recommendations that guided the redesign of the social studies methods course. The authors then highlight key aspects of the redesigned methods course and demonstrate how the authors engaged the challenges inherent in the work of elementary social studies teacher education.FindingsAlthough this paper is not arranged in such a way as to substantiate empirical findings, the purpose of the paper is to demonstrate an approach to elementary social studies education aligned with extant literature on preparing teachers to engage in reform teaching practices, specifically those disciplinary oriented practices suggested in NCSS’s C3 Framework. As such, the paper should be read as a perspective on practice.Research limitations/implicationsThe type of disciplinary-oriented approach described here is increasingly under investigation in secondary teacher education research and similar approaches are under investigation in elementary math and science education research. To the authors’ knowledge, the approach is novel in elementary social studies education. Furthermore, the authors believe it offers a direction for researchers interested in gaps in the literature related to practice based teacher education and disciplinary-oriented social studies teacher education.Practical implicationsThe approach described here offers specific guidance and resources for teacher educators who are struggling with the challenges of the contemporary social studies education landscape and/or who wish to focus methods courses in disciplinary ways.Social implicationsResearch in social studied education has demonstrated that when students are exposed to disciplinary practices in social studies, their literacy skills improve and they learn analytical skills that support their development as citizens (consumption of media, participation in public discourse, ability to discern arguments).Originality/valueAs noted above, the approach described here is novel in elementary social studies education. Combining a disciplinary approach with a practice-based frame in elementary social studies represents an opportunity for empirical research and offers new approaches to the practice of teacher education and early career professional development.

Assessment practices in social studies classrooms: results from a longitudinal survey

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to present results from three years of a longitudinal “Assessment Attitudes and Practices” survey collected from a large school district in the Southern USA.Design/methodology/approachThis paper focuses on both formative and summative “assessment practices” results from secondary (middle and high school) social studies teachers.FindingsThere was no statistically significant difference between secondary social studies teachers’ use of assessments and secondary teachers of other disciplines, nor was there a statistically significant difference in assessment use by year. Data results by assessment type were ranked in order of how often teachers claimed to use various assessment practices, and discussed in terms of assessment practices recommended by NCSS. Social studies teachers in this study were often more likely to report use of assessments of knowledge (including selected-response items) than performance-based assessment techniques (such as authentic assessments).Research limitations/implicationsThe lack of statistically significant differences in assessment practices along disciplinary lines indicates homogeneity in the use of assessments that does not do justice to social studies.Practical implicationsUsing Common Core standards or not, having a 1:1 technological environment or not, teacher respondents essentially reported using the same assessments, perhaps because high-stakes assessments did not change.Social implicationsThere is a need for professional development that helps teachers see how performance-based assessments can be used to boost student performance on high-stakes assessments.Originality/valueStudies of actual assessment practices (as opposed to ideas about how teachers should assess) are still quite rare, and provide a helpful window in understanding what is actually happening inside schools.

Studying Scale-Up and Spread as Social Practice: Theoretical Introduction and Empirical Case Study.

BackgroundHealth and care technologies often succeed on a small scale but fail to achieve widespread use (scale-up) or become routine practice in other settings (spread). One reason for this is under-theorization of the process of scale-up and spread, for which a potentially fruitful theoretical approach is to consider the adoption and use of technologies as social practices.ObjectiveThis study aimed to use an in-depth case study of assisted living to explore the feasibility and usefulness of a social practice approach to explaining the scale-up of an assisted-living technology across a local system of health and social care.MethodsThis was an individual case study of the implementation of a Global Positioning System (GPS) “geo-fence” for a person living with dementia, nested in a much wider program of ethnographic research and organizational case study of technology implementation across health and social care (Studies in Co-creating Assisted Living Solutions [SCALS] in the United Kingdom). A layered sociological analysis included micro-level data on the index case, meso-level data on the organization, and macro-level data on the wider social, technological, economic, and political context. Data (interviews, ethnographic notes, and documents) were analyzed and synthesized using structuration theory.ResultsA social practice lens enabled the uptake of the GPS technology to be studied in the context of what human actors found salient, meaningful, ethical, legal, materially possible, and professionally or culturally appropriate in particular social situations. Data extracts were used to illustrate three exemplar findings. First, professional practice is (and probably always will be) oriented not to “implementing technologies” but to providing excellent, ethical care to sick and vulnerable individuals. Second, in order to “work,” health and care technologies rely heavily on human relationships and situated knowledge. Third, such technologies do not just need to be adopted by individuals; they need to be incorporated into personal habits and collaborative routines (both lay and professional).ConclusionsHealth and care technologies need to be embedded within sociotechnical networks and made to work through situated knowledge, personal habits, and collaborative routines. A technology that “works” for one individual in a particular set of circumstances is unlikely to work in the same way for another in a different set of circumstances. We recommend the further study of social practices and the application of co-design principles. However, our findings suggest that even if this occurs, the scale-up and spread of many health and care technologies will be neither rapid nor smooth.

総合生活学習としての社会科の理論とその展開 : 久留米プラン「総合生活学習」の分析

総合生活学習としての社会科の理論とその展開 : 久留米プラン「総合生活学習」の分析

社会科授業実践に関する体系枠の構築 : 知識獲得を視点にして(研究動向「社会科教育研究のこれまでとこれから」)

社会科授業実践に関する体系枠の構築 : 知識獲得を視点にして(研究動向「社会科教育研究のこれまでとこれから」)

유아사회교육 실제에 대한 근거이론적 접근

유아사회교육 실제에 대한 근거이론적 접근

Network Ethnography

A general interest in the study of social practices has been spreading across a diversity of disciplines in organization and management research, relying mostly on rich ethnographic accounts of units or teams. What is often called the practice-turn, however, has not reached research on interorganizational networks. This is mainly due to methodological issues that call, in the end, for a mixed-method approach. This article addresses this issue by proposing a research design that balances well-established social network analysis with a set of techniques of organizational ethnography that fit with the specifics of interorganizational networks. In what we call network ethnography, qualitative and quantitative data are collected and analyzed in a parallel fashion. Ultimately, the design implies convergence during data interpretation, hereby offering platforms of reflection for each method toward new data collection and analysis. We discuss implications for mixed-method literature, research on interorganizational networks, and organizational ethnography.

Luigi Pareyson’sEstetica: Teoria della formativitàand Its Implications for Organization Studies

In this article, we illustrate some principal features of Pareyson’s philosophical aesthetics and their relevance within aesthetic organizational research and the study of social practice in organi ...