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Gang affiliation in youth is associated with increased criminal recidivism and an exaggeration of various criminogenic needs; affiliation also meets a variety of youth's personal and social needs. The purpose of this paper is to describe a study of the self-reported reasons for joining and leaving gangs, as well as the difficulties faced by Singaporean youth offenders in leaving youth gangs; it also explores the relationship between gang affiliation and family connectedness, educational attainment and early exposure to gangs.

This prospective study involved structured interviews and administration of questionnaires with 168 youth offenders in Singapore. Univariate and multivariate analyses were conducted to examine the research questions.

Gang-affiliated youth cited a desire to establish and maintain friendships as their primary reasons for joining a gang. Youth who left their gang reported maturing beyond this need and the activities of their gang, particularly in light of the deleterious impact of their gang-related activities on familial relationships and employment and financial status. Early exposure to gangs through family and neighborhood influences, and poor educational engagement increased the likelihood that youth would join a gang.

This study highlights the need for clinicians and other service providers to better understand the universal human needs that are met through gang affiliation and the correlates of affiliation.

Few studies have directly examined the factors relating to gang affiliation in a non-western context; this study may be relevant to professionals working in the juvenile justice and offender rehabilitation arenas.

WE seem to be immediately facing a drive for much more technical education and for many more technical colleges and schools to produce it. In the condition of the world today this is an inevitable, an indispensable, process. The reasons are loudly proclaimed and patent to every librarian, and the library must come strongly, as it always has, into the picture but perhaps now more universally and with greater intensity. Dr. Chandler, who is proceeding at a rare pace to specialize his departments, has created a new local council to unify the information work that has already been done at Liverpool. Every technical book costing over five shillings is bought, and the usual collections of periodicals and other material of technical and industrial interest are being increased and a bulletin of additions is being issued soon after the end of each month. The Technical library is one that combines lending and reference activities, telephone and postal services; in fact all the orthodox activities that have been standard in the larger towns since Glasgow began them in 1916, and possibly new and extended ones. The William Brown Library which was destroyed in Air Raids is being reconstructed and the enlarged Technical Library will be developed in it. This is one city only; every large city reports some increase in the services rendered, for example the Telex service is now available at Manchester. It is essential that public libraries everywhere realize the part they may play; if they do not, the suggestion made recently that the lending of technical books should become an activity of the Technical Colleges may become a reality.

As Ratnam makes clear, a cultural–historical perspective on teacher/faculty excessive entitlement is indispensable if we are to use this concept to work with, rather than undermine, education practitioners. In this chapter, a networked relational model of activity is proposed as a tool for understanding excessive entitlement from a cultural–historical activity theory (CHAT) perspective, so that the transformative potential of both entitlement and the modeling of it may be harnessed. The networked relational model, which represents CHAT activity systems as a hand-draw or painted network of relationships between actors and artifacts, allows its creators, in their capacity as researchers or academics, to use it as an imaginative artifact in the Wartofskian sense. That is, by representing activity systems of academic performance as networks of interacting entities, the emergence of excessive entitlement can be traced to, and perhaps mitigated through the relationships that they represent. In this regard, the why, what, and how artifacts proposed by Engeström are taken up as useful means for enhancing the functioning of the networked relational model not just as a tool for analyses of entitlement but also a means for envisioning alternative countercultures into being.

The impact of climate disasters (e.g., floods, storms, or landslides), which are generally of low intensity and high frequency, should not be overlooked in developing countries. Global experiences related to the damage due to these disasters indicate that such events can be devastating in communities that are vulnerable to hazardous impacts. Cumulative effects of climate disasters are a sign of a potential catastrophe. Moreover, the recent increase in these events poses additional issues that increase the cost of local public administration, including emergency operation and infrastructure recovery. This chapter explains key problems related to climate disasters that are increasing, particularly in the local area of developing countries, and clarifies the need to incorporate climate disaster risk reduction into public development planning and practice. The chapter also provides descriptions of the research location, approaches of the study, and the structure of this book.

This chapter weaves together the voices of five teachers and teacher educators (two first-year classroom teachers and three teacher education faculty) collaborating to better understand socially just outcomes in the field of English language arts teacher preparation. Building from the premise that it is the seeking of multiple perspectives and the notion of voice that lie at the heart of socially just pedagogy, this collaboration aims to tell one story – a research narrative – through many voices. As White, female educator-researchers who experience privilege along a multitude of dimensions (e.g., socioeconomic status, language, race, ability, sexual orientation), the authors embrace activist-ally identities that seek to understand systemic injustices; act with an empowered and critically self-reflective sense of agency; and mobilize their resources in concert with others. This chapter narrates the authors’ learning of how activist-oriented teaching and research is (and might be) conceptualized and realized in the contexts of their work in one public high school, one K-12 charter school, and one teacher education program. Each author will share the inspirations, successes, and barriers she encountered while purposefully eliciting the perspectives, questions, and voices of multiple stakeholders, including K-12 students, cooperating school personnel, families, and other community members. Through the telling of this story as a collage of many voices, the authors hope to encourage others to act as allies for social justice on the ground – that is, in the teacher education and K-12 classrooms where we learn to teach as we consider how that learning impacts those it most directly affects.