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This chapter examines the goals and outcomes of intergroup dialogue through the evaluation of a dialogue program between city and suburban high school students located in Syracuse, NY. The Community Wide Dialogue to End Racism, Improve Race Relations and Begin Racial Healing (CWD) organizers share with a wide range of conflict theorists and practitioners the impulse to bring citizens together to talk about complex social conflicts. Two of the main goals of this program, to build participants’ understandings of institutional racism and white privilege, are examined here. Drawing on in-depth interviews with a small sample of dialogue participants, a framework is developed for categorizing participant awareness and understanding of institutional racism and white privilege. The analysis suggests that relatively modest levels of understanding of both concepts should be anticipated from participants both before and after completion of a dialogue of this type. While dramatic changes resulting from the dialogue are not found, the data indicate that the dialogue does have demonstrable impacts on the ways participants think and talk about institutional racism and white privilege. The central challenges faced by participants in understanding the concepts, specifically ability to personalize white privilege and capacity to adopt structural ways of thinking about institutional racism, are identified and described. This research helps to clarify the range of outcomes we can feasibly expect when bringing citizens together to talk about social conflicts by providing a qualitative framework for measuring awareness and understanding of white privilege and institutional racism.

This paper aims to examine how a collaborative narrative inquiry focused on cultivating critical English Language Arts (ELA) pedagogies supported teacher agency, or “the capacity of actors to critically shape their own responsiveness to problematic situations” (Emirbayer and Mische, 1998, p. 971).

Situated in a semester-long inquiry group, eight k-16 educators used narrative inquiry processes (Clandinin, 1992) to write and collectively analyze (Ezzy, 2002) stories describing personal experiences that brought them to critical ELA pedagogies. They engaged in three levels of analysis across the eight narratives, including open coding, thematic identification, and identification of how the narrative inquiry impacted their classroom practices.

Across the narratives, the authors identify what aspects of the ELA reading, writing and languaging curriculum emerged as problematic; situate themselves in systems of oppression and privilege; and examine how processes of critical narrative inquiry contributed to their capacities to respond to these issues.

Collaborative narrative inquiry between teachers and teacher educators (Sjostrom and McCoyne, 2017) can be a powerful method to cultivate critical pedagogies.

Teachers across grade levels, schools, disciplines and backgrounds can collectively organize to cultivate critical ELA pedagogies.

Although coordinated opportunities to engage in critical inquiry work across k-16 contexts are rare, the authors believe that the knowledge, skills and confidence they gained through this professional inquiry sensitized them to oppressive curricular norms and expanded their repertoires of resistance.

This research draws on social identity literature and intersectionality to examine the social construction of race, gender, and sexuality within hip-hop music and how this shapes the identity development of college students. Data were collected from 26 college students through semi-structured interviews. Participants described men as being portrayed as hyper-masculine and identified lyrics that supported toxic masculinity. Participants reported that the dominant theme in hip-hop today centered on “trappin” or selling drugs and glamorized that life. African American men, in particular, described how this theme in music shaped the narrative around race and masculinity, how others saw them as Black men, and how they had to counter that image and stereotype as college students. Participants described the negative portrayal of women in hip-hop. However, women participants were more conflicted in their perception of women in hip-hop and said that when women were the artists this illustrated more agency and was liberating even if the images and lyrics were sexualized. Participants were adamant that constructions of gender and sexuality within hip-hop music and videos shaped expectations within relationships. Despite the criticisms of hip-hop, participants described how raising consciousness through hip-hop affected their own identities. This research contextualizes the findings with a discussion of how popular culture shapes identity around race, gender, and sexuality and shapes the expectations within relationships. Further, the research concludes with a discussion of intersectionality and how this provides a better understanding of the effects of identity development among marginalized groups.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the perceptions of graduate students about the need for a multicultural education course at doctoral level in a mid-sized higher education public institution in Southwest Florida.

A qualitative case study method was applied with multiple sources of data collected, including semi-structured interviews, observations and students’ written papers, online discussions and assignments that aimed to prepare educators to teach culturally diverse students and challenge their own perceptions about culture, race and other multicultural education-related topics.

The findings indicate that, even though the multicultural education course promoted an eye-opening transformational experience for students through their interactions and learning from each other, the students still need further training in multicultural education because of their limited culturally responsive teaching skills.

Limitations of the study are that both the researchers were deeply involved with the material and the class, as the class professor and one of the students, which might have affected the authors’ perception about the students’ journey in learning about multicultural education. The researchers’ dual-role (as researchers and course professor and graduate assistant) might have influenced the participants’ responses, as they knew they were part of a research project. Thus, the participants’ spontaneity in sharing their opinions and beliefs about multicultural education may have been hampered, perhaps responding what the researchers expected rather than with their authentic perspectives on the topics.

The implications of this study to teachers, educators and practitioners are that it invites the readers to reflect on their academic preparedness to work with culturally diverse students. For policymakers, the study indicates the need for creating standards that aim to examine in-service graduate student teachers about their self-efficacy, readiness and dispositions to work with culturally diverse students.

Because of the limited publications on doctoral students learning multicultural education, the authors’ study offers an important insight into the transformational experience of doctoral students learning multicultural education and the implications for improving graduate courses in multicultural education.

The purpose of this paper is to summarise the Making Safeguarding Personal (MSP) programme in 2014/2015.

Review of Council contacts in relation to MSP 2014/2015.

Councils participated at varying levels in the MSP programme during 2014/2015.

An independent evaluation of the 2014/2015 Making Safeguarding work has been commissioned and will be published later in 2015.

MSP requires cultural, practice, workforce and technical changes. A range of challenges have been identified in taking forward the changes, which Councils are responding to in different ways.

A person-centred outcome-focused approach to safeguarding adults can benefit people who are at risk of or experience harm or abuse.

MSP is a LGA-commissioned programme.

In this chapter, I focus on stigmatization exercised and experienced by local residents, comparing two socially-diverse areas in very different contexts: the Cabrini Green-Near North area in Chicago and the La Loma-La Florida area in Santiago de Chile.

Data for this study were drawn from 1 year of qualitative research, using interviews with residents and institutional actors, field notes from observation sessions of several inter-group spaces, and “spatial inventories” in which I located the traces of the symbolic presence of each group.

Despite contextual differences of type of social differentiation, type of social mix, type of housing tenure for the poor, and public visibility, I argue that there are important common problems: first, symbolic differences are stressed by identity changes; second, distrust against “the other” is spatially crystallized in any type and scale of social housing; third, stigmatization changes in form and scale; and fourth, there are persisting prejudiced depictions and patterns of avoidance.

Socially-mixed neighborhoods, as areas where at least two different social groups live in proximity, offer an interesting context for observing territorial stigmatization. They are strange creatures of urban development, due to the powerful symbolism of desegregation in contexts of growing inequalities.

The chapter contributes to a cross-national perspective with a comparison of global-north and global-south cities. And it also springs from a study of socially-mixed areas, in which the debate on concentrated/deconcentrated poverty is central, and in which the problem of “clearing places” appears in both material (e.g., displacement) and symbolic (e.g., stigmatization) terms.

The Internet and social media have fundamentally transformed the ways in which individuals find jobs. Relatively little is known about how demand-side market actors use online information and the implications for social stratification and mobility. This study provides an in-depth exploration of the online recruitment strategies pursued by human resource (HR) professionals. Qualitative interviews with 61 HR recruiters in two southern US metro areas reveal two distinct patterns in how they use Internet resources to fill jobs. For low and general skill work, they post advertisements to online job boards (e.g., Monster and CareerBuilder) with massive audiences of job seekers. By contrast, for high-skill or supervisory positions, they use LinkedIn to target passive candidates – employed individuals who are not looking for work but might be willing to change jobs. Although there are some intermediate practices, the overall picture is one of an increasingly bifurcated “winner-take-all” labor market in which recruiters focus their efforts on poaching specialized superstar talent (“purple squirrels”) from the ranks of the currently employed, while active job seekers are relegated to the hyper-competitive and impersonal “black hole” of the online job boards.

Purpose – At the turn of the 21st century, popular claimsmakers made a series of claims about the benefits of volunteer work for youth: that volunteering would reduce youthful self-absorption with peer groups, introduce youth to people different from themselves, foster macro-level understandings of social problems, and connect youth to the community. This article examines youths’ experiences of volunteer work in order to determine which claims are realized and how.

Methodology/approach – I conducted in-depth interviews with 45 youth, aged 15–23, who engaged in volunteer work with a wide variety of organizations.

Findings – Youth did not always realize these claims and when they did, many did so through mechanisms different than those suggested by popular claimsmakers.

Research limitations/implications – Because this is an exploratory study which uses a purposive sample, the findings provide direction for future researchers to more fully investigate how youth realize the benefits of volunteering and under what conditions.

Practical implications – In order to make volunteering a valuable experience for as many youth as possible, volunteer coordinators need to be cautious of uncritically absorbing public claims.

Originality/value of paper – Youth speak for themselves about the value of volunteering and challenge popular claims made about youth and volunteerism.