Spur Change Research Articles

Research and Policy: Grassroots Inquiry: Reconsidering the Location of Innovation

This column explores a grassroots approach to educational innovation as an alternative to the dominant entrepreneurial model, whereby market solutions are thought to be the best mechanism to spur change. We contend that there is a need to delink automatic connections between innovation and entrepreneurship and to reimagine the location and nature of innovation. Drawing on postcolonial theory and various examples of grassroots communities of inquiry, we highlight how practitioners, parents, and students develop creative ways to address issues relevant to their immediate contexts of teaching and learning. Our model of grassroots innovation espouses cooperation, rather than merely competition, and involves inquiry processes that value a diversity of perspectives, especially from those most directly impacted by educational policies and practices.

WORKING WITH THE DIFFICULT PAST: EXAMPLES FROM THE UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND

Over the past decade there has been a heightened awareness of the importance of colleges and universities being engaged in communities. Civic engagement is based on the premise that all citizens can contribute to improving society. People can work individually or collectively on issues of public concern to promote quality of life. The University of Maryland is considered one of the national leaders in civic engagement programming among institutions of higher learning and the Department of Anthropology is playing a an important role in this effort. A general description of the department's engaged programs follows as well as a more detailed synopsis of how using examples from a difficult past can help spur change in communities today.

The Pros and Cons of New Media and Media Freedom

In Asian Countries media freedom is a controversial issue, on one side right to information and freedom of expression is provided on other side media regulations and Press laws are ready to curb the media freedom. New media often get involved in struggles for new freedoms. This article is to discuss issues of new media in the governance of freedom of press. The Internet is an indispensable source of information today. At the same time, the freedom of new media - like other media - is dynamically related to the overall societal context as regards press freedom dispensations. Old and new media realms do have different issues, and there are particular matters for developing countries. But there is also much in common between old and new media, and between developing and developed countries, and all have interdependent interests in a free environment for journalism. With the creation of various types of new media, the Internet has become the broadest gateway and platform of spatial knowledge to interaction, and even turns to be the formation of a far and wide public field. The emergence of new media which breaks the original concept and rules of traditional media communication makes expression of freedom of the press more influential. There are brand new challenges to media freedom. The Internet, social media and blog posts -- these are among the tools being used so creatively, especially by the vanguard of young people, to help spur change in their societies.

Campaigns against acid violence spur change

Bangladesh is one of a number of countries trying to prevent acid violence through legislation while providing specialized care for victims, but attitudes to women need to change for there to be further progress. Patralekha Chatterjee reports.

Transforming Public Schools: A Synthesis of Research Findings from UCLA'S Center X

This article describes how one university-based center, UCLA's Center X, has worked to prepare and sustain urban educators over the past 16 years. Synthesizing findings from more than 20 articles, papers, books, and dissertations that report on Center X's work, we argue that three key activities are necessary to spur change and ensure a high-quality, stable workforce: (1) Firmly embed teacher learning and development in the context of urban schools and communities; (2) Recruit and prepare a diverse local workforce of social justice educators for urban schools; and (3) Support the continual learning and career development of educators working to make a difference. The article concludes with implications for other university-based teacher learning centers seeking to recruit, prepare, and sustain powerful educators in the schools that need them most.

Righting History: Redemptive Potential and the Written Word in Malory

The written word in Malory's Morte Darthur, in the form of tomb inscriptions and letter writing, has the power to affect redemption among the characters, author, and readers of the text. (JB) The written word carries particular potency in Malory's Morte Darthur. Writing communicates personal and public messages, memorializes, professes prophecy, spurs change, and even, as I argue here, assists in redemption. Malory incorporates throughout Le Morte Darthur examples of how-in the forms of tomb engravings, letter writing, and even in his own pseudo-epitaph at the end of the book-the written word has potential intercessory power for the character, the text itself, the readers, and even the author. I focus particularly on the redemptive potential of stone inscription in the Morte, most often on tombs, and the power of stone writing to spur reform and change as well as to memorialize, but I also consider the power of the written word to affect redemption in specific examples of letter writing in the Morte. Tombs are sites of interaction between the living and the dead-places meant to teach a secular lesson to the living who pass by about the development and propagation of a chivalric way of life.1 In this view, the function of these tombs is three-fold: first, they commemorate past deeds; second, they predict future ones; and third, they write history in a way that is almost prescriptive, and is certainly instructive, demonstrating the evolution of chivalry. In addition to this combination, there is one further function of these tombs previously ignored by scholars: the redemptive potential of the messages on the tombs, not just for the deceased, but as an active interchange between the reader of the tombs and their occupants. The idea that the written message of the tomb-even the very existence of the tomb itself-can aid redemption is one that is readily present in medieval theology. In fact, the moment of encounter with a Christian tomb is meant to elicit not only memory and consolation, but also pathos and prayer. Elizabeth Valdez del Alamo and Carol Stamatis Pendergast explain how this moment of encounter implies intercession through prayer on the part of and on behalf of both the living and the deceased: The affect of the tomb reliefs reminds visitors and the monastic community to recall the [deceased] in prayer. Through their prayers, the living recall the deceased and ensure their salvation. The dead in heaven intercede on behalf of the living. The salvational exchange between living and dead is fully illustrated here.2 The term 'salvational exchange,' as Valdez del Alamo and Pendergast use it, is perhaps a bit broadly stated. After all, the actual salvation of souls, according to medieval Christian theology, lies not in the hands of either the living or the dead, but in God's judgment alone. Presumably, the dead already have received their judgment and either are damned, serving penance in Purgatory, or blissfully already in Heaven. It is crucial, however, that a potential for exchange exists between the living and the dead. The exchange that occurs as a result of prayer prompted by tomb inscription, then, functions as a means of speeding those in Purgatory on their path toward redemption. Once redeemed, the saved, in exchange, may intercede on behalf of the living so that they may be guided through a righteous life to their own salvation. The ability of the souls of the living and the dead to interact is a crucial part of Christian practice, based in the complex concept of the communio sanctorum as it is found in the Apostles' Creed:3 I believe in the Holy Ghost, The Holy Catholic Church, the communion of saints, The forgiveness of sins, The resurrection of the body, and Life everlasting.4 Simply put, the communio sanctorum, or the communion of saints, represents the Body of the Church, or all of the faithful (read the living and the dead)5 who participate (or have participated) in the Eucharist and receive baptism. …

RITUAL, RELATIONSHIP, AND RELIGIOUS LIBERTY IN LAOS

Abstract Laos has been listed by the US Commission on International Religious Freedom as a country that should be officially designated a “country of particular concern” (a legal status making it potentially subject to sanctions) for egregious violations of religious freedom. However, such denunciation alone cannot spur change in group-oriented societies such as Laos and can often escalate religious repression of Christians. The Lao perceive Christian minorities as threatening because they often do not participate in group rituals. Thankfully some Christian leaders are developing important relationships within the Lao government and are contributing to the alleviation of misperception and repression of Christians. International political pressure must be coupled with relationship-building that takes into account the social realities within the target country.

Second-Language Studies and College-Level Chinese-Language Textbooks in the United States

Second-language Studies and College-level Chinese-language Textbooks in the United States Cynthia Y. Ning (bio) The interface between research and practice in foreign-language teaching has been a slippery slope. Studies in second-language acquisition (SLA) as often as not use a scientific, positivist methodology, first positing hypotheses and then testing for them by using experiments that, in order to target specific criteria, must so finely control the experimental environment that it ceases to resemble any real teaching context. As a result, most classroom foreign-language teachers (and textbook writers, who generally emerge from the ranks of classroom teachers) are hard-pressed to find the connection between SLA studies and the exigencies of the Monday morning language lesson. Add to this disconnect the further unhappy reality that SLA studies focus predominantly on European languages, and it is not surprising that teachers of Chinese as a foreign language have for the largest part (with some exceptions) dismissed SLA studies entirely as being irrelevant to and incompatible with their own work. A majority of the textbooks for Chinese as a foreign language currently on the market in the United States continue to support vocabulary and grammar drills, generally by presenting first a text (a dialogue, narrative, report, or essay: in the lower levels these tend to be teacher-made concoctions tightly controlled in terms of how many vocabulary items are included; at the higher levels they may be extracts from the Chinese press), followed by a vocabulary list, followed by grammar explanations and drills. At least two generations of Chinese-language pedagogues since the Cold War have been nourished on this approach and continue to adhere to it, at the same time cautioning that Chinese is a very difficult language that is best tackled only by elite students with a long-term commitment to learning it. In the face of a growing populist demand in the era of internationalization, and of an increasing volume of output from SLA researchers (which influences administrators both of academic departments and of funding sources, if not always classroom practitioners), Chinese-language teachers, like their counterparts in other languages, are under tremendous pressure to change. But change can be excruciating, and is sometimes only implemented, if at all, at what appears to be glacial speeds. Even in desperate situations, anecdotally happening more and more often around the country, in which a classroom teacher is told by a principal or a department chair, "Change or be fired," the teacher has to fight her own convictions in order to try to change, or may be willing to, but simply does not know how. This review is driven by an acknowledgment of the present reality, and a desire to spur change, however glacial. [End Page 34] Current Pedagogic Principles At least since the late 1970s, individual SLA researchers and foreign-language pedagogues such as James Asher, H. Douglas Brown, Theodore Higgs, Stephen Krashen, Diane Larsen-Freeman, Michael Long, David Nunan, Jack Richards, Wilga Rivers, Sandra Savignon, Richard Schmidt, Earl Stevick, and Tracy Terrell among many others have written positively about approaches to language teaching that are compatible with what are called learner-centered, communicative, and task-based principles. Subsequently, organizations such as the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages and the Modern Languages Association have themselves promoted and further influenced funding agencies such as the U.S. Department of Education's Office of International Education and the National Endowment for the Humanities to support a general approach to language teaching that has come to be loosely called "performance-based instruction." For the purposes of this essay, I will here provide in broad strokes a rough outline of the type of curriculum generally promoted by current SLA research. For a finer-grained discussion of nuances and specificities, I refer the reader to some key works listed in the bibliography. What follows are some primary principles of "performance-based instruction." These are elements of an interlinked, interrelated, interdependent framework, but are useful to consider individually, as long as one keeps in mind that each element has an impact on and is affected by every other. Contextualization. Chapter 3 of Alice Omaggio's Teaching Language in Context, titled "The...

Fostering Creativity in the New Millennium

Better education, an encouraging environment, natural leadership, and multidisciplinary teamwork will be paramount. The conditions under which a society can enhance its creativity-and therefore its innovative capability-will be key to succeeding in the next century. The most powerful tools to stimulate a creative society include creative education, an encouraging environment, natural leadership, and multidisciplinary teamwork. My intention here is not to make predictions about future technological eras, but to identify some of the critical paradigms that will affect our lives beyond 2000, and to suggest some changes that could help to foster a creative society ready to meet the technological challenges of the future. The world is experiencing unprecedented change in many areas, not only science and technology but also in our societal, cultural, and environmental paradigms. The rate at which critical discoveries are made, the dramatic decrease in the time it takes for knowledge in a particular field to double, changes in the value components of products, and the rapid growth of communication are having a profound effect upon technology development. While these changes alter the way we comprehend our world, so far they have been incremental in nature. People have mostly been able to adjust and cope with them simply by increasing their efforts to learn (e.g., using such conventional techniques as speed-reading, mega-memorizing), electronic learning, and information management (1,2). In the future, however, such changes within will be continuous rather than incremental. As a result, society's conversion to, and adoption of, change will require non-traditional approaches to secure and maintain the rate of change. These new approaches will further spur change and can be expected to ignite an explosion in innovation. Thus, the new century has the potential to experience a significantly more dramatic rate of critical discoveries than the 20th century, just as that century dramatically outpaced the record of 19th century achievements (Figure 1 ). Creativity Education Because today's advanced nations depend heavily upon novel technologies, it will be important to develop an encouraging environment that will allow society's creative minds to flourish. Some professional societies already have recognized this; they have established special programs to support education for the 21 st century (3) and are predicting the transformation of formal education (4). Educational programs geared toward developing creativity should start as early as kindergarten. Young minds should be exposed to creativity classes (similar to today's creative writing classes) to foster innovative thinking. This is a must for tomorrow. Education should also include experiences that involve application of multidisciplinary knowledge, even at the early educational levels, and this should continue throughout the entire educational process and into the workplace. For instance, in engineering, manufacturing experience should be obligatory. Although conventional wisdom has always held that creativity is the purview of the young, more recently that notion has come into question as innovation emerges from every age group. In fact, the creative mind knows no age limit, although creativity is best developed early. In many companies, the same people are recognized over and over for their innovations, just as the Edisons and Ketterings of the past were known for lifelong inventiveness. This was not a coincidence. These individuals were open to new knowledge that would stimulate their minds-they were curious about everything. Innovative people might not have a possible solution in mind when they go in search of an innovation, but they have an approach to how to look for a solution. Inventors like Edison and Kettering learned early how to approach problems creatively and draw on their experience to convert creativity into innovation. …

Change and Development in a Pluralistic World: the View From the Classics

The study of the classics in our field is important to the themes of this special issue because (1) the classics have shaped the world we live in; (2) studying the classics enlarges our theoretical alternatives; and (3) the critique of taken-for-granted assumptions enshrined in the classics can spur change, development, and pluralism. We briefly review a selection of classic writings to illustrate how change and pluralism have been presented as threats, as opportunities for the management of innovation, and as intrinsic aspects of management.

The March on Washington, At Home and Abroad

On August 28, 1963, as participants in the historic March on Washington made their way to the Lincoln Memorial, individuals in several countries around the world took to the streets and marched in support. U.S. citizens abroad and citizens of other nations, some with ties to the U.S. civil rights movement and many without, thousands marched to show their solidarity with those demonstrating in Washington. March on Washington activities in Europe were in large part due to the efforts of James Baldwin and other African Americans in Paris. Baldwin called a meeting at a Paris nightclub that ultimately led to a petition drive that quickly spread all over Europe. Hoping to support the civil rights movement although living in Paris, African American jazz musicians, actors and others circulated a petition in the international editions of U.S. papers. In Paris, one week before the Washington March, they held a walk to the U.S. Embassy, and over 560 people deposited petitions in support of the March. That same day, U.S. citizens and others called upon U.S. diplomatic posts in other European cities, registering their support for the March. The focus on U.S. diplomatic posts was not simply due to the fact that these were U.S. government offices abroad. It was also due to the fact that these activists believed that race discrimination harmed U.S. foreign affairs, and they hoped that the international impact of the civil rights movement would spur change at home. Apparently unrelated to these efforts, and uncoordinated with each other, on the date of the March on Washington, the Mayor of Kingston, Jamaica led a march of 2500 in that city. 1200 to 1400 marched on the U.S. Consulate in Amsterdam. In Oslo, Norway, one hundred people marched through heavy rain to present a petition to the U.S. Embassy. Demonstrators with picket signs protested at the U.S. Embassy in Ghana. The Nassar government ensured that no large demonstration would take place in Cairo, Egypt. Hundreds of police officers were stationed in the city early in the morning, and they stopped all but two of the thirteen marchers willing to face this police presence from approaching the U.S. Embassy. These actions pleased U.S. government representatives. As an Embassy officer put it, the government's handling of this protest was in line with the assurances to the Embassy. The U.S. government reacted to the March on Washington by trying to affect the message projected by the marchers, and the way that message was perceived overseas. Efforts to manage the international impact of the March were consistent with broader U.S. efforts during the cold war to turn the story of race in America into a story of the superiority of democracy as a system of government. Accordingly, through efforts to influence the content of speeches, and a pre- and post-March propaganda campaign, the Administration did its best to cast the March as a story about democratic political participation, rather than as a critique of government inaction on civil rights.

Recent sediments, sediment accumulation and carbon burial at Goban Spur, N.W. European Continental Margin (47–50°N)

To quantify recent sediment accumulation, carbon fluxes and cycling, three N.W. European Continental Margin transects on Goban Spur and Meriadzek Terrace were extensively studied by repeated box- and multicore sampling of bottom sediments. The recent sediment distribution and characteristics appear directly related to the near-bed hydrodynamic regime on the margin, which at the upper slope break on the Goban Spur results in along-slope and periodic off-slope directed transport of particles, possibly by entrainment of particles in a detached bottom or intermediate nepheloid layer. From the shelf to the abyssal plain the surface sediments on the Goban Spur change from terrigenous sandy shelf sediments into clayey silts. 210Pb activity decreases exponentially down core, reaching a stable background value at 10 cm (shallower stations) to 5 cm (deeper stations) sediment depth. 210Pb profiles of repeatedly sampled stations indicate negligible annual variability of mixing and flux. The 210Pb xs flux to the sediment shows a decreasing trend with increasing water depth. Below about 2000 m the average 210Pb xs flux is about 0.3 dpm cm −2 y −1, a third of the fluxes measured on the shelf and upper slope stations. Sediment mixing rates (D b) correlate with macro- and meiofaunal density changes and are within the normal oceanic ranges. Lower mixing rates on the lower slope likely reflect lower organic carbon fluxes there. Mass accumulation rates on Meriadzek Terrace are at maximum 80 g m −2 y −1, almost twice as high as at Goban Spur stations of comparable depth. A minimum accumulation rate of 16.6 g m −2 y −1 is found at the Goban Spur upper slope break. Organic carbon burial rates are low compared to other margins and range from a lowest value of 0.05 g m −2 y −1 at the upper slope break to 0.11 g m −2 y −1 downslope. A maximum organic carbon burial rate of 0.41 g m −2 y −1 is found on Meriadzek Terrace. Carbonate burial rates increase along the northern transect from the shelf (13 g m −2 y −1) via a low (9.3 g m −2 y −1) on the upper slope break to the deep sea (30.7 g m −2 y −1). Carbonate burial is highest on Meriadzek Terrace (44.5 g m −2 y −1). The N.W. European Margin at Goban Spur and Meriadzek Terrace cannot be considered a major carbon depocenter.

Market, Environmental Pressures Spur Change In Fine Chemicals Indus

Makers of fine chemicals have much in common with other parts of the chemical industry. Although ways of doing business may be somewhat different, the major concerns—including markets, new product development, process economics, environmental stewardship, and attention to core technologies—are the same. For the fine chemicals industry, these issues were ratcheted to a new level of intensity at ChemSpec Europe '94, the international meeting of fine chemicals producers held last month in Manchester, England. Indeed, developments surfacing in Manchester create a picture of an industry not only responding to change but generating it as well. From a business standpoint, for example, the fortunes of the fine chemicals industry are especially sensitive to changes in the pharmaceutical industry, which consumes about half the fine chemicals industry's output. One development about to make its mark is the growing emphasis on chiral drugs. Single enantiomers of chiral drugs have long been a focus of medicinal ...

Readers spur change at

Readers spur change at