How community development programmes can foster re-engagement with learning in disadvantaged communities : leadership as process

Family and community capacity building projects in Tasmania are attempting to address the disadvantage of communities marginalised by socio-economic and other influences. Collaborations between the projects, community members and groups, and education and training organisations, have resulted in a leadership process which has fostered reengagement with learning in these disadvantaged communities. This study uses an ethnographic research methodology to examine the experiences of a number of new students or trainees, and the partnerships and collaborations which evolved between community development programmes, community members and groups, and educational and training organisations. Such collaborations may develop into dynamic leadership processes, enhancing social capital formation — thereby fostering genuine community development — while also facilitating re-engagement with learning.

Serving community : prosocial engagement in educational administration

The rise of managerialism in the 1990s entrenched bureaucratic practices as core education and training for educational administrators. As the educational divide between those who achieve and those who fall short continues to problematize the success of educational reforms, the work of administrators becomes critical to review. The current challenge for educational administration is to provide an environment that genuinely serves the interests of complex diversity and social justice in education systems by building the frameworks that respects differences, protects the weak, and regulates the strong. By taking a more prosocial stance with issues relating to cultural diversity, equity, and democracy, educational administration can transform society, the school, and the classroom, through humanistic and interpretive management practices, and influencing pedagogy, curriculum, educator training, and the socio-political system.

Re-engagement in education through community partnerships in south west Victoria

This case study provided policy direction for post-compulsory education. It highlighted the need for a mandated responsibility for the provision of on-going transition advice and re-engagement programs for young people who have left school. It confirmed the complexity of the work of networks formed in order to improve educational pathways.

The work-based predictors of job engagement and job satisfaction experienced by community health professionals

Background: Job engagement represents a critical resource for community-based health care agencies to achieve high levels of effectiveness. However, studies examining the organisational sources of job engagement among health care professionals have generally overlooked those workers based in community settings.
Purpose: This study drew on the demand-control model, in addition to stressors that are more specific to community health services (e.g., unrewarding management practices), to identify conditions that are closely associated with the engagement experienced by a community health workforce. Job satisfaction was also included as a way of assessing how the predictors of job engagement differ from those associated with other job attitudes.
Methodology/Approach: Health and allied health care professionals (n = 516) from two
Australian community health services took part in the current investigation. Responses from the two organisations were pooled and analysed using linear multiple regression.
Findings: The analyses revealed that three working conditions were predictive of both job engagement and job satisfaction (i.e., job control, quantitative demands and unrewarding management practices). There was some evidence of differential effects with cognitive demands being associated with job engagement, but not job satisfaction.
Practice Implications: The results provide important insights into the working conditions that, if addressed, could play key roles in building a more engaged and satisfied community health workforce. Further, working conditions like job control and management practices are amenable to change and thus represent important areas where community health services could enhance the energetic and motivational resources of their employees.

Health status and participation in a range of activities in an Australian community

Introduction: The aim of the research was to determine the relationship between levels of participation in a community and self-assessed health status of people in a rural and regional setting.
Method: A cross-sectional design, using a mailed, self-administered questionnaire was used. Questionnaires were mailed to a random sample of people aged 18 years and over who were registered on the electoral roll of a regional city and rural area, the Barwon and Otway regions of Victoria, Australia. The sample consisted of 1752 participants: 990 females (57%), 739 males (42%) and 23 sex undisclosed (1%). The range of participants was 18-98 years, and the mean age was 50.53 years (SD = 17.19).
Results: Self-assessed physical and mental health were measured using the SF-12 scale. Participants with low incomes, and those with low self-assessed physical and mental health scores, were significantly more likely than other participants to agree with one or more of the social isolation items, indicating that they experienced some social isolation. Low levels of participation in social, sports, leisure or support activities were associated with low self-assessed physical and mental health. Disengagement with the local community was associated with low levels of self-assessed mental health. While younger people were more likely than older people to participate in social, sports, leisure or support activities, they were less involved as members of their community. Females were more likely than males to have been involved in five or more sports, leisure or support activities. Participation in civic activities was associated with high income. Levels of participation in the four different types of activities were combined (social activities, sport, leisure or support activities, community and group activities, and civic activities). Participants classified as low participators were more likely to be older participants, to have a low income and to have low scores for both physical and mental health.
Conclusions: An association was found between health and community participation in a range of activities, and between health and engagement with the community in this rural and regional population. These findings are consistent with those reported from similar research with a metropolitan population sample. The current research suggests that the groups of people of most concern in terms of low participation rates, are people who have low incomes, people aged over 65 years, people who may be defined as possessing poor physical health and people who may be defined as possessing poor mental health. The relationship between age, community participation and health is complex and needs further exploration because it is not known whether poor health reduces community participation or whether reduced community participation results in poor health. However, current research suggests that developing and implementing strategies to promote people's engagement with and involvement in their local community is one important way of promoting the health of the community as a whole.

Home, school, community and their role in the provision of music education

The Department of Education, Science and Training (DEST), is supporting under the Australian Government Quality Outcomes Programme, a National Review of School Music Education. The review, which is intended to submit its report in mid 2005, is interested in investigating the current quality of teaching and learning of music in both primary and secondary schools. It aims to provide examples of best practice of teaching and learning of music, along with a set of recommendations for the development of future approaches and directions to improve the quality of music education offerings in Australian schools. This paper puts forward some proposals for consideration that will be forwarded to the Review and aims to generate debate about future approaches to the delivery of music education in Australian primary schools.
It argues that the home, school and community all have an important part to play in the music education of children, but that at present these three entities are insufficiently connected on a number of fronts, not least being an understanding about the purpose of young people’s engagement with music. There is no doubt that interest in the arts amongst Australians generally is high. A recent Australia Council report revealed that 85 per cent of its respondents agreed the arts are and should be an important part of the education of every young Australian and that what was needed was better arts education and opportunities for all young people. However, the opportunities need not be confined to those offered by the school sector. Engagement with out-of-school music includes both music encountered in the home, which may be affected by family influence, and music provided by the diversity of community organizations, which serve a real and complimentary role to classroom learning and achieve learning outcomes that schools often do not have the resources to foster. A number of proposals for action are suggested for consideration by those involved in education as a means of progressing the discussion. It asserts that there is much valuable activity occurring within the three locales of school, home and community, but a firmer relationship could be forged across all three to ensure young people’s on-going, life-long enjoyable engagement with music.

What makes continuing education effective : perspectives of community pharmacists

Objective To explore how different aspects of the professional environment for Australian community pharmacists are perceived to be influencing the effectiveness of continuing education models in improving practice.

Setting Australian community pharmacy.

Methods A convenience sample of practising community pharmacists (n = 15) was recruited using the 'snowballing' technique to participate in one of four focus group teleconferences. Each focus group examined continuing education experiences from different professional perspectives and training needs (recent graduates, experienced practitioners, specialist practitioners and rural/remote practitioners).

Key findings Facilitation of professional development by accreditation bodies, and new challenges resulting from the introduction of cognitive services were seen to promote a favourable environment for continuing education engagement. Complex continuing education delivery models combined with high costs and excessive workloads made it more difficult to engage with continuing education systems or try to apply knowledge to the workplace.

Conclusion Results support findings from previous research that practice development requires a multifaceted approach with continuing education as just one component. Affordable and integrated models of continuing education are required in order to optimise efficacy for participants.

Community development and environmentalism : the dilemmas of being a good ecological citizen

This paper explores some of the dilemmas in operating as both a good community development practitioner and a good ecological citizen. It begins with a brief casestudy of an experience of community development engagement with nongovernment organisations (NGOs) concerned about illegal logging in a South East Asian country. This is followed by a discussion of the different ways of understanding and evaluating the threats to the natural environment today and the various strategies that might be invoked. The paper then considers why operating as a 'good ecological citizen' can be a challenging task for community development practitioners and it discusses some ways forward.

Building a connected community of learners : the postgraduate peer mentor program

Student peer mentor programs are recognised as a valid component of a multi-faceted strategy to improve student engagement within higher education. This paper reports some preliminary results from research investigating how such programs help support diverse student needs in a multicultural environment. Our results are from a study of a pilot postgraduate student peer mentoring program set up to support new students in the Faculty of Business and Law at Deakin University, Australia. The postgraduate student body at Deakin is quite diverse and includes a large proportion of international students. We present examples to show how a peer mentoring program can improve the social engagement of students, help overcome cross-cultural communication barriers and contribute to the development of academic skills.

Engagement and learning through social software in finance : the trading room experience

The introduction of a social software blog space called “The Trading Room” in an undergraduate Finance unit for an assessment task generated a great deal of activity to support student learning. A subsequent evaluation of this pilot demonstrated that students perceived high value in the opportunity it provided for them to reaffirm theories, obtain individualized feedback and benchmark their work against others. Whilst assessment is generally seen as both the carrot and the stick of learning, and certification; students in the study reported that they would still participate in reading and posting to the “Trading Room” blog even if there was no assessment requirement! Additionally they did not see any value in the environment as a purely social space, reporting that they saw it primarily as a professional educational community. It would appear that just as there are different communities in the real world social space, there are also different types of communities in the online space. Context, structure and activity design, perhaps are the most important facets of online interaction for learning.

Staff behaviour and resident engagement before and after active support training

Background Identifying the factors associated with greater increases in resident engagement has the potential to enhance the effectiveness of active support (AS).

Method Observational data from Stancliffe, Harman, Toogood, and McVilly's (2007) study of AS were analysed to evaluate amount of staff help, effectiveness of staff help, and staff use of praise.

Results Lag analyses showed that antecedent staff help was consistently followed by resident engagement at pre-test. This strong association did not increase significantly at post-test. Resident engagement was more likely to follow staff help than the other way around. There was an increase from pre-test to post-test in help and praise by staff. The higher absolute amount of praise was largely the result of the increase in staff help.

Conclusions The amount of staff help, its effectiveness, and use of praise by staff may each be important in increasing engagement. These factors should continue to be the focus of research attention and applied efforts to help ensure active support is consistently effective.

Consumer participation in designing community based consumer-directed disability care : lessons from a participatory action research-inspired project

User participation has been embraced worldwide as a means to provide better consumer outcomes in health and community care. However, methodologies to achieve effective consumer engagement at the programme design level have remained under-explored. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the impact of a Participatory Action Research (PAR)-inspired methodology used to develop a consumer-directed community care/individualised funding service model for people with disabilities. A retrospective analysis of case notes and internal reports for the first 6 years of an ongoing project were examined. The findings suggest that PAR methodologies need to take into account community development, group support, and capacity building as well as succession planning and risk management issues in order to facilitate the often lengthy policy and project development process. Drawing on these findings, this article discusses five lessons and their methodological implications for PAR in a health or social policy/programme design context.