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Recently, Managed Alcohol Programs (MAPs have emerged as an alcohol harm reduction model for those living with severe alcohol use disorder (AUD) and experiencing homelessness. There is still a lack of clarity about the role of these programs in relation to Housing First (HF) discourse. The authors examine the role of MAPs within a policy environment that has become dominated by a focus on HF approaches to addressing homelessness. This examination includes a focus on Canadian policy contexts where MAPs originated and are still predominately located. The purpose of this paper is to trace the development of MAPs as a novel response to homelessness among people experiencing severe AUD and to describe the place of MAPs within a HF context.

This conceptual paper outlines the development of discourses related to persons experiencing severe AUD and homelessness, with a focus on HF and MAPs as responses to these challenges. The authors compare the key characteristics of MAPs with “core principles” and values as outlined in various definitions of HF.

MAPs incorporate many of the core values or principles of HF as outlined in some definitions, although not all. MAPs (and other housing/treatment models) provide critical housing and support services for populations who might not fit well with or who might not prefer HF models.

The “silver bullet” discourse surrounding HF (and harm reduction) can obscure the importance of programs (such as MAPs) that do not fully align with all HF principles and program models. This is despite the fact that MAPs (and other models) provide critical housing and support services for populations who might fall between the cracks of HF models. There is the potential for MAPs to help fill a gap in the application of harm reduction in HF programs. The authors also suggest a need to move beyond HF discourse, to embrace complexity and move toward examining what mixture of different housing and harm reduction supports are needed to provide a complete or comprehensive array of services and supports for people who use substances and are experiencing homelessness.

The shift from paper portfolios to e-portfolios has arrived in educational institutions worldwide. This study investigates e-portfolio systems as a means of improving performance-centered assessment, enriching students’ learning experiences and documenting the students’ progress and achievements. The current study reveals the experience of implementing a course-level framework for e-portfolios and an approach taken in initiating student electronic portfolios in the Department of Educational Technology (DET) at Ajman University of Science and Technology, UAE. Data was obtained in several ways, including Likert scale responses and interviews with the participants; students’ journals and final reports; notes from the Practicum site supervisor and the DET lab technician; and analysis of the electronic portfolio product. The work and responses of the Practicum students were compared for three consecutive Practicum classes. Analysis of the results showed that developing formative and summative portfolios fluctuated extensively between the three Practicum classes of DET graduates, as did the outcomes. In spite of this fact, the findings suggested that the use of e-portfolios could serve as an influential learning and assessment tool when driven by a clear understanding of the desired outcome and the specific skills to be assessed, and when sufficiently mentored, peer-reviewed, and based on sensible principles.

We've been living in a homogenous world, you know a world centered on and seen through the language perceptions of men. The consequences of this for everything that we take for granted, for all our assumptions are very deep. Feminism, in the sense I use it, is a radical complexity thought in the process of transforming itself. It is a kind of breaking open of not only the oversimplification but of the lies and the silence in which so much of human experience has been cloaked. Too much has been left out, too much has been unmentioned, too much has been made taboo. Too many connections have been disguised or denied. (Interview with Adrienne Rich, Christopher Street, Jan. 1977, pp. 9–16.)

Sustainability performance in higher education is often evaluated at a generalized large scale. It remains unknown to what extent campus efforts address regional sustainability needs. This study begins to address this gap by evaluating trends in performance through the lens of regional environmental characteristics.

Four sustainability metrics across 300 North American institutions are analyzed between 2005 and 2014. The study applies two established regional frameworks to group and assess the institutions: Commission on Environmental Cooperation Ecoregions and WaterStat (water scarcity status). Standard t-tests were used to assess significant differences between the groupings of institutions as compared to the North American study population as a whole.

Results indicate that all institutions perform statistically uniformly for most variables when grouped at the broadest (Level I) ecoregional scale. One exception is the Marine West Coast Forest ecoregion where institutions outperformed the North American average for several variables. Only when institutions are grouped at a smaller scale of (Level III) ecoregions do the majority of significant performance patterns emerge.

This paper demonstrates an ecoregions-based analytical approach to evaluating sustainability performance that contrasts with common evaluation methods in the implementation field. This research also identifies a gap in the literature explicitly linking ecological sub-regions with their associated environmental challenges and identifies next research steps in developing defensible regional targets for applied sustainability efforts.

The practical implications of this research include the following: substantive changes to methodologies for rating sustainability leadership and performance, a framework that incentivizes institutions to frame sustainability efforts in terms of collaborative or collective impact, a framework within which institutions can meaningfully prioritize efforts, and a potential shift toward regional impact metrics rather than those focused solely on campus-based or generalized targets.

The authors believe this to be the first effort to analyze North American higher education sustainability performance using regional frameworks.

The authors proposed that participation in large-scale, structured events designed to match students to employers' internship opportunities could support students' employability by focussing students' career goals, strengthening students' career self-efficacy and growing students' social capital.

Interviews were carried out with 49 students both before and after the students took part in the event to assess whether students career goals, self-efficacy or social capital changed after taking part in the events. In the second interview, the authors also asked students what outcomes students gained from the event and how the event process had contributed to these outcomes.

Students' descriptions of their outcomes from the event aligned with social capital theory and self-efficacy theory. The students valued the information, connections, skills and experience they developed through taking part in the interviews and connecting with employers and students. The longitudinal analyses revealed that most students career goals did not change, but students' career self-efficacy improved and students could identify more actions for achieving their career goals after taking part in the event. Importantly, these actions were often explicitly connected with information or connections that students gained from the event.

The interviews illustrate that students can build social capital from short, one-on-one engagement with employers that then enable them to identify ways of furthering students' career goals. The authors' findings suggest that structured, event-based engagement with employers can provide an efficient and equitable means of enhancing students' social capital and career self-efficacy.

The purpose of this paper is to introduce the special issue on race and place.

The approach used by the authors is to combine an overview of sociological debates on place within a framework that makes the case for a relational approach to race, space and place.

The overview provides an account of place in sociology, of the relationality of race and place, and the making of race and place in sociological work.

The Introduction sets the papers in context, providing a short account of each of them; it also aims to present an argument for attention to race and place in sociology in a setting characterized by racism and reaction.

This paper aims to examine which organisational learning conditions and individual characteristics predict the learning outcomes nurses achieve through informal learning activities. There is specific relevance for the nursing profession because of the rapidly changing healthcare systems.

In total, 203 nurses completed a survey assessing their perception of the available learning conditions, the learning outcomes they acquired by executing their job and their self-efficacy, proactive personality and learning motivation. After checking the structure and reliability of the instruments by means of confirmatory factor analysis and the calculation of the internal consistency of the scales, a multivariate multiple regression analyses was performed because the different learning outcomes (dependent variables) were correlated with each other.

Results show that learning outcomes as a whole are significantly predicted by opportunities for cooperation and feedback. Regarding generic and job-specific learning outcomes, analyses showed the same predictors for both levels of learning outcomes: opportunities for feedback and self-efficacy. Higher proactivity and opportunities for cooperation are related to higher organisational level learning outcomes.

The main limitation of this study is that its findings rely on cross-sectional survey data; hence, further research is needed to confirm these initial exploratory results.

The current study is one of the few studies that empirically relates organisational learning conditions to learning outcomes acquired by employees while considering the personal characteristics of the employee. It offers insight into which learning conditions are able to foster the acquirement of different learning outcomes.

Retirement is a phenomenon unique to modern industrial societies. It is only within the last century, through technological and scientific advances, that industrial nations have been able to produce significant surpluses of food and goods, while simultaneously diminishing the effects of disease and raising the overall standard of living. These advances, combined with the demographic shift which accompanies a declining birth rate (a proportional increase in number of old people to total population), the development of large national bureaucracies, and sudden shifts in the industrial market, have left significant numbers of older workers with obsolete skills and have led to the evolution of a major “retired” segment of the population.