Creating Solidarity Across Diverse Communities


Book Description

In this important book, experts from around the globe come together to examine what solidarity in multicultural societies might mean and how it might be built. With a variety of analytical perspectives and findings, the authors present original research conducted in the United States, New Zealand, Spain, France, Chile, Mexico, and India. Educators will recognize relationships between issues discussed in the book and their own places of work, helping them to better understand issues of diversity and take steps toward building solidarity in their own schools and communities. This book demonstrates the commonality of purpose across the globe to connect schools and teachers with the communities they serve, and suggests avenues for bringing diverse understandings together to bridge antagonism and fear. Contributors: Isabelle Aliaga, Gilberto Arriaza, Andrés Calderón, Maria Antonia Casanova, Juan Francisco Contreras, Dolores Delgado Bernalis, Gina E. DeShera, Martine Dreyfus, Judith Flores Carmona, Anne Hynds, Verónica López, Mahendra Kumar Mishra, Carmen Montecinos, José Luis Ramos, José Ignacio Rodríguez, and Alice Wagner. Christine E. Sleeter is professor emerita in the College of Professional Studies at California State University Monterey Bay, and President of the National Association for Multicultural Education. Her recent books include Teaching with Vision (with Catherine Cornbleth). Encarnación Soriano is professor of research methods in education at the University of Almería, Spain. “Whether educators are working with student populations perceived as diverse or homogeneous, Creating Solidarity Across Diverse Communities provides profound insights into strategies for building consensus, efficacy, and reducing prejudice and conflict. This is a well-researched volume on complex theories and diverse practices for building solidarity to effect educational change.” —Merry M. Merryfield, School of Teaching and Learning, The Ohio State University




Racial Ambivalence in Diverse Communities


Book Description

This book makes use of in-depth interviews with the residents most active in shaping the racially diverse urban communities in which they live. As most of them are white and progressive, it provides a unique view into the particular ways that color-blind ideologies work among liberals, particularly those who encounter racial diversity regularly. It reveals not just the pervasiveness of color-blind ideology and coded race talk among these residents, but also the difficulty they encounter when they try to speak or work outside of the rubric of color-blindness. This is especially vivid in their concrete discussions of the neighborhoods' diversity and the choices they and their families make to live in and contribute to these communities. This close examination of how they wrestle with diversity in everyday life reveals the process whereby they unintentionally re-create a white habitus inside of these racially diverse communities, where despite their pro-diversity stance they still act upon and preserve comfort and privileges for whites. The book also provides a close examination of white racial identity, as the context of a diverse community provides both the catalyst and, significantly, the space for an examination of an unarticulated racial consciousness, which has implications for our study of whiteness more generally. The layers of ambivalence and pride surrounding the fact of diversity in these neighborhoods and residents' lives reveal both limitations and hope as the nation itself becomes more diverse. This critical and yet compassionate book extends our understanding of contemporary racial ideology and racial discourse, as well as our understanding of the complexities of whiteness.




Innovative Voices in Education


Book Description

Open this book to find insights, resources, and strategies from seventeen ground-breaking educators and community leaders around the world who share passionate first-person accounts of how to engage students and families of diverse backgrounds. Diverse schools offer enriched academic and social environments, as students and families of different backgrounds and experiences provide a vibrant mosaic of insights, perspectives, and skills. Innovative Voices in Education features stories from around the world, as innovative teachers, educational leaders, and community activists passionately share personal accounts of their successes, challenges, and lessons learned. Book jacket.




Engaging Diverse Communities


Book Description

As U.S. museums evolve from their role as elite institutions to organizations serving multiple stakeholders, they must adopt new communication practices to meet their social missions and organizational goals. Engaging Diverse Communities, the first book-length study of museum public relations for practitioners since 1983, details how institutions can use communication fundamentals to establish and maintain relationships with a wide range of cultural groups and constituencies. Melissa A. Johnson interviews communicators at cultural heritage museums to understand the challenges of representing communities based on racial and ethnic, generational, immigrant, and language identities. Exploring how communications professionals function as cultural intermediaries by negotiating competing and intersecting identities and mastering linguistic and visual code-switching, she presents an analysis of the communication tactics of more than two hundred art, history, African American, American Indian, and other diverse museums. Engaging Diverse Communities illuminates best public relations practices, especially in media relations, digital press relations, website content production, social media, and event planning. This essential text for museum professionals also addresses visual aesthetics, cultural expression, and counter-stereotypes, and offers guidance on how to communicate cultural attractiveness.




Diverse Communities


Book Description

Diverse Communities is a critique of Robert Putnam's social capital thesis, re-examined from the perspective of women and cultural minorities in America over the last century. Barbara Arneil argues that the idyllic communities of the past were less positive than Putnam envisions and that the current 'collapse' in participation is better understood as change rather than decline. Arneil suggests that the changes in American civil society in the last half century are not so much the result of generational change or television as the unleashing of powerful economic, social and cultural forces that, despite leading to division and distrust within American society, also contributed to greater justice for women and cultural minorities. She concludes by proposing that the lessons learned from this fuller history of American civil society provide the normative foundation to enumerate the principles of justice by which diverse communities might be governed in the twenty-first century.




The Diversity Gap


Book Description

A sweeping leadership framework to institute clear and intentional actions throughout your organization so that people of all racial backgrounds are empowered to lead, collaborate, and excel at work. The Diversity Gap is a fearless, groundbreaking guide to help leaders at every level shatter the barriers that are causing diversity efforts to fail. Combining real-world research with honest first-person experiences, racial justice facilitator Bethaney Wilkinson provides leaders a replicable structure to foster a diverse culture of belonging within your organization. With illuminating and challenging insights on every page, you will: Better understand today’s racial climate and its negative impact on your organization and team; Be equipped to shift your organizational culture from one that has good intentions for “diversity” to one that addresses systemic barriers to all employees thriving at work; and Be emboldened to participate in creating an organizational culture where people from various racial backgrounds are growing in their purpose, making their highest contributions, and collaborating effectively towards greater impact at work and in the world. Ultimately, The Diversity Gap is the quantum shift between well-intentioned organizational diversity programs that do little to move the needle and a lasting culture of equity and belonging that can transform your organization and outpace your industry.




Community Mental Health Engagement with Racially Diverse Populations


Book Description

Community Mental Health Engagement with Racially Diverse Populations summarizes research on reducing mental health disparities in underserved populations through community engagement programs. It discusses the efficacy of such programs with specific populations of people of color and cultures, for specific disorders, and via specific communities. It identifies how and why community engagement works with these populations, how best to set up new community programs, the steps and stakeholders to success, and includes case studies showing successes and the challenges involved. - Identifies how and why these programs achieve success through patient engagement - Explores efficacy with specific ethnicities and cultures - Discusses efficacy of programs through schools, churches, non-profits, and more - Includes case studies with their successes and challenges - Provides guidelines on the development and implementation of community programs




Empowering Family-Teacher Partnerships: Building Connections Within Diverse Communities


Book Description

Empowering Family-Teacher Partnerships: Building Connections Within Diverse Communities prepares students to work collaboratively with families and community professionals in support of children's early education and development. Students are invited to develop a personal philosophy of family involvement to guide their work with families and to join a community of learners in relying upon their collective insights and problem-solving skills to address family involvement challenges. The author takes a student-centered approach to delivering substantive information and framing activities, providing: (a) comprehensive coverage of the diversity of family lives represented in classrooms and strategies for working with those families; (b) challenges to family involvement and strategies for addressing them; (c) strategies for communicating effectively with and empowering families, and (d) reflections, activities, tip boxes, and field assignments designed to facilitate students' skills in building positive family-school-community partnerships.




Cultural Psychology


Book Description

Cultural Psychology draws upon major psychological topics, theories, and principles to illustrate the importance of culture in psychological inquiry. Exploring how culture broadly connects to psychological processing across diverse cultural communities and settings, it highlights the applied nature of cultural psychology to everyday life events and situations, presenting culture as a complex layer in which individuals acquire skills, values, and abilities. Two central positions guide this textbook: one, that culture is a mental and physical construct that individuals live, experience, share, perform, and learn; and the second, that culture shapes growth and development. Culture-specific and cross-cultural examples highlight connections between culture and psychological phenomena. The text is multidisciplinary, highlighting different perspectives that also study how culture shapes human phenomena. Topics include an introduction to cultural psychology, the history of cultural psychology, cultural evolution and cultural ecology, methods, language and nonverbal communication, cognition, and perception. Through coverage of social behaviour, the book challenges students to explore the self, identity, and personality; social relationships, social attitudes, and intergroup contact in a global world; and social influence, aggression, violence, and war. Sections addressing growth and development include human development and its processes, transitions, and rituals across the lifespan, and socializing agents, socialization practices, and child activities. Additionally, the book features discussions of emotion and motivation, mental health and psychopathology, and future directions for cultural psychology. Chapters contain teaching and learning tools including case studies, multidisciplinary contributions, thought-provoking questions, class and experiential activities, chapter summaries, and additional print and media resources.




Leading Diverse Communities


Book Description

Based on the National Coalition Building Institute’s popular leadership development program, Leading Diverse Communities gives community, campus, nonprofit, and business leaders the tools they need to embrace diversity and encourage their stakeholders to do the same. The book is filled with practical guidance on how to achieve results and provides a simple, skill-oriented guidebook for busy leaders. Leading Diverse Communities distills the National Coalition Building Institute’s wisdom into thirty-two concise leadership principles. Each principle is illuminated with theory and a related example, activity, and worksheet that can help develop the skills required to put a particular principle into practice.