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The purpose of this paper is to discuss opportunities to analyze religious position statements calling climate change action a moral imperative.

In a lesson suited for the secondary history classroom, students will analyze how religious leaders, theologians and ecological and religious academics use passages from sacred texts to establish a moral urgency to mitigate climate change.

After analyzing these interpretations of sacred writings from five global faiths (Hinduism, Judaism, Catholicism, Islam and Anglicanism), the lesson centers on a dialogical question, “How might climate change action be influenced by religious texts?”

Implications emphasize why social studies teachers should not teach climate change as a controversial issue.

This project presents an opportunity for high school social studies teachers to infuse content on the federal budget, national debt, and budget deficit into civics-courses. The federal budget influences countries’ decisions about domestic and foreign policy, making the study of the topic a necessity for understanding economic interdependence, as well as active and engaged citizenship. The national debt plays an important role in efforts to balance competing interests concerning taxes, entitlement programs, and government spending. Social studies teachers have the opportunity to create connections between economic and public policies about the federal budget, national debt, budget deficit, and the content commonly taught in high school civics classes across the United States. Our two-day lesson, Examining the role of citizens in the U.S. budgetary process: A case study, can be infused into the civics curriculum to help high school students begin to understand the federal budget, national debt, and budget deficit. We model an inquiry-oriented approach for citizen participation about these topics in high school civics classes.

The paper aims to examine high school students' use of social networking to participate in teledeliberative democratic dialogue and explicates the implications of this dialogue for democratic education that is inclusive of all students.

The case study analyzes the comments of 111 high school students over ten days following what they perceived to be an injustice committed by the administration against one of their fellow classmates.

Analysis of student commentary led to the development of three categories of teledeliberative citizenship: the demagogue, the proselyte, and the egalitarian. Together, these categories serve as a spectrum of sophistication along which democratic discourse can be classified.

The primary limitation of this research is a product of the online medium in which it occurs. Though “observing” students' interactions on Web 2.0 application was beneficial for cataloguing conversations, social cues like body language and tone of voice had to be inferred.

Web 2.0 provides students with an opportunity to build a community of shared belief that crosses gender, racial, religious, and cultural divisions.

Teachers could use Web 2.0 as a forum for teledeliberative democratic dialogue in a multicultural democratic educational framework to engage students and encourage a sophisticated, active citizenship.

The world is facing unprecedented potential disaster with the impending climate crisis. Research within social studies education surrounding the integration of ecological issues, while still on the fringes, has seen a recent surge. This is a review of practitioner-oriented research published in the last ten years on teaching these issues in social studies classes.

This study reviews practitioner-oriented articles on teaching ecological issues in social studies classes. The author searched databases and did a manual review using specific search terms. The author’s first level of analysis was to analyze the year of publication, whether the article was (co) written by a practicing teacher and whether the article featured a lesson plan/resources. The author then analyzed the content/focus of each article.

In total, ten articles were (co)written by a practicing teacher, 23 articles included lesson plans and the article themes could fall into one of six themes (water issues, pollution, climate change, climate activism, sustainability and economic growth and ecological citizenship/ethics).

The author was unable to review one year of articles from the Ohio Social Studies Review due to the COVID-19 pandemic and only having remote institutional access to library materials.

In reviewing the practitioner-oriented articles, the author hopes to not only strengthen the curricular justifications for teaching these issues in social studies classes but also show what research has been done and provide critiques and show what could be done in the future.

The purpose of this paper is to propose an initial, exploratory and tentative theoretical construct related to the current consumption of landscape as a key symbolic and physical element in territorial representation and evocation, and for the deployment of place branding strategy. It constructs a line of argument to support what shall be referred to as “landscape branding”, that is, the paradigmatic role of landscape in place branding. It is, therefore, of interest to define the value of landscape as a social and cultural construction, which is why the paper awards importance to the specific analysis of their capacity for visual and/or aesthetic evocation within the context of a general branding strategy for geographical spaces.

To develop a sufficient proposal for sustaining “a theory of landscape branding”, the paper deploys a meta-analysis, that is, an extensive review and interpretation of the literature related to visual landscape and place branding, to propose a tentative initial approach to landscape-infused place branding theory.

The relationship existing between landscape images and texts and their possible situating and subsequent interpreting within the context of the political, cultural and economic logics of contemporary society give rise to a renewed analytical framework for cultural geographies (Wylie, 2007). At this point, place branding becomes a recurring argument for the consumption of carefully staged places, representing, to use Scott’s terms (2014), the arrival of a cognitive-cultural capitalism characteristic of post-Fordism.

From a practical perspective, the landscape branding approach provides several benefits. First of all, regardless of the fact that many commentators have argued that logos, slogans and advertising campaigns are relatively ineffective in place branding, practitioners still seem to be focussed on these visual design and advertising tools. The landscape branding approach facilitates an identity-focussed perspective that reconfirms the importance of linking reality with perception and hence reinforces the need to link place branding to policy-making, infrastructure and events.

Landscapes’ imageability facilitates visual storytelling and the creation of attractive symbolic actions (e.g. outdoor events/arts in attractive landscape and augmented reality or landscaping itself). This is the type of imaginative content that people easily share in social media. And, of course, landscape branding reiterated the importance of experience. If policymakers and publics alike understand this considerable symbolic value of landscape, it might convince them to preserve it and, hence, contribute to sustainability and quality of life.

The novelty lies not in the familiar use of visual landscape resources to promote places, but in the carefully orchestrated construction of gazes, angles, representations, narratives and interpretations characteristic of geographic space, which somehow hijack the spontaneous gaze to take it to a certain place. Everything is perfectly premeditated. According to this, the visual landscape represents a critical point as a way of seeing the essence of places through a place branding strategy. In this sense, that place branding which finds in visual landscape a definitive argument for the projection of aspirational places imposes a new “way of seeing” places and landscape based on a highly visual story with which to make a particular place desirable, not only for tourism promotion purposes but also with the intention of capturing talent, infrastructures and investment, among other objectives.

The purpose of this paper is to identify, describe and evaluate the different ways in which formal collective change agency is structured in specialist units inside 25 diverse organisations. As such it is oriented towards a range of practitioners operating in HR, project management or with responsibility for delivering change in public and private sectors.

Using a qualitative design, exploratory interview and case study research was conducted in organisations across the UK public and private sectors to explore how different change agency units operate within organisational structures.

Four dominant types of internal change agency unit are identified, varying in terms of their change impact scope and degree of structural embeddedness in the organisation. These units are described as transformers, enforcers, specialists and independents and share key concerns with securing client credibility and added value, effective relationship management and the use of consulting tools. Their roles and the tensions they experience are outlined along with hybrid forms and dynamic shifts from one type to another.

The study could be extended outside of the UK and conducted longitudinally to help identify outcomes more precisely in relation to context.

Each of the four types of change agency unit identified is shown to be suited to certain conditions and to present particular challenges for collective change agency and for specialist management occupations engaged in such work. The analysis could usefully inform organisation design decisions around internal change agency.

The authors extend debates around the nature of internal change agency which has typically focussed on comparisons with external change agents at the level of the individual. Developing the work of Caldwell (2003), the authors reveal how emergent, team-based or collective approaches to change agency can be formalised, rather than informal, and that structural considerations of change need to be considered along with traditional concerns with change management.

Information science research has begun to broaden its traditional focus on information seeking to cover other modes of acquiring information. The purpose of this paper is to move forward on this trajectory and to present a framework for explicating how in addition to being sought, existing information are made useful and taken into use.

A conceptual enquiry draws on an empirical vignette based on an observation study of an archaeological teaching excavation. The conceptual perspective builds on Andersen’s genre approach and Huvila’s notion of situational appropriation.

This paper suggests that information becomes appropriable, and appropriated (i.e. taken into use), when informational and social genres intertwine with each other. This happens in a continuous process of (re)appropriation of information where existing information scaffolds new information and the on-going process of appropriation.

The approach is proposed as a potentially powerful conceptualisation for explicating information interactions when existing information is taken into use rather than sought that have received little attention in traditional models and theories of human information behaviour.