No description available.

Bullying within our schools is a serious social problem requiring extensive and holistic prevention programs to effectively address the problem. This present study set out to gain a better understanding of the child's experience after participating in a Friends and Neighbours (F.A.N.) Club puppet show on bullying. Eight children were interviewed and the results indicated that the program is well received by the children but the F.A.N. Club needs to be more systemic in its approach to include more school and parental involvement. In addition, further focus is needed on the role of bystanders to bullying. The F.A.N. Club is effective in teaching assertiveness skills to the victims of bullying but is missing a teaching opportunity with the bullies and the bystanders to bullying. Further findings are discussed with reference to the ecological perspective and the implications for social work.

Somalia has undergone a prolonged period of civil war, lawlessness and turmoil, which has resulted in many people becoming displaced, and a number of those displaced people have migrated to New Zealand as refugees. This thesis is a study of communication and collaboration between Somali refugee families and their children’s schools in Christchurch, New Zealand in the light of their experiences pre and post-resettlement in New Zealand. This was to take into account recommendations of the UNHCR Handbook for best practice. Informed by interviews with 40 Somali parents, 15 Somali secondary students, two school principals, and 15 teachers, the thesis examines collaboration with schools in the context of the families’ experiences in their home country, the flight process, the refugee camps and the migration and resettlement in New Zealand. Data were gathered using questionnaires, individual interviews, focus groups, observation, and document analysis, and subjected to a qualitative analysis. The study revealed a remarkable degree of heterogeneity among Somali refugee families who have been settling in Christchurch over fourteen years. Many diverse factors were identified such as gender, previous socio-economic status, urban versus rural origins, level of English language, poverty, employable work skills, and refugee experiences such as the level of trauma, all of which have impacted on the capacity of individuals and families to adjust during their resettlement. Many refugees were identified as having undergone major trauma during the civil war and refugee flight process. These experiences have affected the integration of many into their new society, but this study found that those with the greatest apparent level of recognised need and vulnerability were those with the poorest communication skill. This resulted in their having a poor relationship with schools and left them quite alienated. For many such families the only interface with their local school was being summoned to discuss the infractions of their children and any subsequent disciplinary measures. Therefore, one of the greatest needs to improve communication and collaboration was identified as the ability to learn the English language. Other barriers to successful communication and collaboration included issues associated with racism, cultural awareness, teacher workload, lack of acknowledgement of refugees’ special needs in school policies, teachers’ low expectations of refugee parents, intimidating school environments, ambiguous information, the Somali oral culture, parents’ financial hardship, parents’ lack of transport, parents’ workload, inadequate housing and the families’ high mobility. There are currently neither national policies nor adequate resources to facilitate refugees improving their English language skills, nor to support schools in other aspects of their communication and collaboration with refugee families, and this study suggests that the absence of guidelines and resourcing is another key factor behind the poor engagement between the families and schools. Schools and their teachers also need good professional development that takes account of the diverse needs of these families in order to help build and strengthen better working relationships with refugee families. The thesis goes on to discuss the current models of parent-school collaboration, and it concludes by presenting a proposed new empowerment model of parent-school collaboration which is tailored to help support refugee families. Key tenets of the proposed new model are that there must be principals who provide committed leadership and support, by meeting and welcoming parents when children are enrolled, providing follow-up meetings after enrolment, and developing structures, policies and guidelines to promote parent-school collaboration. They need to provide adequate resources to educate school personnel and mainstream parents about the refugees’ culture and experiences, and a designate a co-ordinator with responsibility for creating an inclusive environment with positive ethnic relations, while conducting monitoring and evaluation of the effectiveness of these measures on communication and collaboration. The model also suggests that there should be greater inter-agency co-ordination and co-operation between the schools and organisations such as health services, social services, WINZ, NZIS and the Police. Implementing the proposed model would build on existing social capital to result in adults and children who are more actively involved not only in education, but also in health care and social and recreational activities where the school is the hub for empowering those families which are most at risk.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

Debate has been reignited about whether genocide occurred in Canada. The residential school system has garnered attention as a system of attempted genocide, involving the forcible removal of Indigenous children from their families and communities with the goal of assimilating those children into Anglo-European culture. The residential school system began to wind down in the 1960s, but the introduction of provincial child welfare services on reserves and the migration of many Indigenous families to urban centres led to increased apprehension of children from their families by the state. Most of these children were placed with non-Indigenous foster and adoptive families, often out-of-province and sometimes out-of-country. This period of apprehension and relocation of Indigenous children came to be known as the Sixties Scoop. In this paper, I examine the continuities between the residential school system and the Sixties Scoop era of the child welfare system using a relational genocide framework to analyze attempted group destruction. The main finding of this thesis is that the forcible removal of Indigenous children from one group to another threatened the survival of Indigenous communities and the ability of groups to reproduce themselves according to their own cultural codes.

There is no abstract available for this dissertation.

There is no abstract available for this dissertation.

In 1999, Indiana's General Assembly enacted law requiring every Indiana school"% corporation to designate a Safety Specialist. A training and certification program was established which required the designated Safety Specialist to attend six days of training in 1999-2000, and to attend subsequent annual training.In this study, a survey was conducted among the 294 Safety Specialists from the first group of trainees to determine the impact the Safety Specialist program has had in Indiana school corporations in such areas as school climate, student behavior, administrator/teacher behavior, safety awareness, and the implementation of "best practice" programs. Variables such as school size, location, occupation of the Safety Specialist, number of buildings in the corporation, and full-time vs. part-time status of the Safety Specialist, were considered. The survey return rate was 73%.Data were analyzed using ANOVA, Pearson correlation, and a t-test. ANOVA indicated that school size, location, and the occupation of the Safety Specialist were significant (F scores greater than 1.0) in determining changes in overall safety awareness and "best practice."School corporations with more than 2000 students showed greater safety awareness and implemented "best practice" programs more often than corporations with fewer than 2000 students; urban schools indicated higher levels of safety awareness and utilized "best practice" programs more often than suburban or rural schools; schools where the Safety Specialist is the superintendent, assistant superintendent, or "other" had "best practice" programs in place and had more safety awareness than schools where the Safety Specialist was the principal, assistant principal, or teacher.Pearson correlation testing indicated little correlation between the number of school buildings and any of the research topics. However, a positive correlation of .806 did exist between school climate and administrator/teacher behavior.The t-test revealed no differences in any category between part-time and full-time Safety Specialists; mean scores in each category were similar.A follow-up case study conducted in five schools of varying size and location revealed results similar to the survey: Safety Specialists in the majority of schools considered the training to have, been worthwhile, its overall impact positive, and their schools to be safer than ever before. / Department of Educational Leadership