Missouri foster parents : advocating for the educational needs of children from hard places

The educational attainment rates of foster youth are abysmal, and positive changes in policy and funding have not improved the rates to an adequate level. Research shows a positive relationship exists between the educational attainment of older youth in foster care and the presence of supportive adults in their lives (Clemens, Helm, Myers, Thomas & Tis, 2017; Dworsky & Perez, 2010; Neal, 2017). This study will explore foster parents as supportive adults, specifically, educational advocates. Educational advocacy comes from the field of special education and refers to behaviors of supportive adults who intervene and mediate for a child or someone who cannot advocate for self. This study will expand educational advocacy research (Duquette, Fullarton, Orders, & Robertson-Grewal, 2011; Duquette, Orders, Fullarton, & Robertson-Grewal, 2011; Duquette, Stodel, Fullarton, & Hagglund, 2011; Mulick & Butter, 2002; Olivos, Jimenez-Castellanos, & Ochoa, 2011; Wilson Cooper, 2007) to foster parents. Framing the study will be the four dimensions of advocacy proposed by Duquette, Stodel, Fullarton, and Hagglund (2011). The framework will inform the interview protocol: items will follow the four dimensions (awareness, seeking information, presenting the case, and monitoring) to explore how foster parents tacitly advocate for the educational needs of their foster children. This qualitative study will seek to answer the research questions How do foster parents serve as educational advocates for foster children? and What challenges do foster parents face as they serve as educational advocates? The study will use a qualitative research design with a phenomenological approach. Data collection will include in-depth interviews of eight to ten foster parents. By extending educational advocacy research to foster parents, this study will highlight the need for foster youth to have educational advocates and the ways in which that need is, or is not, being met. This study will provide a research foundation for additional research, with the hope of helping to ensure an educational advocate, foster parent or otherwise, is engaged in advocacy behaviors for every foster child in Missouri.

Centering “Grace”: Challenging Anti-Blackness in Schooling Through Motherwork

Anti-Blackness is global and present in every facet of society, including education. In this article, we examine the challenges Black girls encounter in schools throughout the United States. Guided by select research centered on Black women in their roles as mothers, activists and school leaders, we assert that sociologist Patricia Hill Collins’ concept of Motherwork should be an essential component in reframing the praxis of school leadership and in helping school leaders to rethink policies, practices, and ideologies that are anti-Black and antithetical to Blackness and Black girlhood. While most research aimed to improve the schooling experiences of Black children focuses on teacher and school leader (mis)perceptions and systemic racial biases, few studies build on the care and efficacy personified by Black women school leaders. We argue that the educational advocacy of Black women on behalf of Black children is vital to culturally responsive school leadership that combats anti-Blackness and honors Black girlhood. We conclude with implications for school leaders and those concerned with the educational experiences of Black children, namely Black girls.

#CardioOncology: Twitter chat as a mechanism for increasing awareness of heart health for cancer patients

Consideration of heart health for cancer survivors is increasingly important, as improved cancer survivorship has resulted in a growing number of survivors affected by cardiovascular disease. However, there is limited knowledge of cardio-oncology among both patients and a variety of health professionals. Thus, efforts are needed to increase awareness about cardio-oncology. Social media represents one potential opportunity to disseminate information about cardio-oncology to a large audience. We highlight one example of a social media educational/advocacy campaign conducted on Twitter (a “Twitter Chat”) that garnered nearly 1.2 million impressions (views by Twitter users) in just 24 h. We provide both quantitative and qualitative data to support the efficacy of using Twitter for such educational/advocacy campaigns, and describe key features that contributed to its success. Twitter Chats inexpensively utilize innovative technology to provide education and foster community. Long-term studies are needed to understand whether Twitter Chats can change knowledge and behavior related to cardio-oncology.

Exploring the Educational Advocacy of Graduate Students in Philippine Higher Education Institution

Every school needs an advocate leader who can influence others to address issues, concerns, and problems that affect education, its quality, access, and the welfare of the stakeholders, especially that of the learners. This leader needs to subscribe to the redefined roles and nature of leadership. Advocacy leadership challenges educational leaders to take a progressive stance on pressing educational issues and problems. The next in line leaders need to awaken in themselves a specific advocacy and tune-in to this new trend. With this, a qualitative inquiry explored the educational advocacies of twenty graduate students involved in focus group discussions and interviews. Using the thematic network as an analytical framework, the inquiry identified 46 keywords, 51 basic themes, and 6 organizing themes. Thus, a new thematic network of educational advocacies was generated. Learners’ welfare was the most dominant educational advocacy of graduate students, while leadership and governance, professional development, culture and religion, safety and environmental protection, and community development were considered as developing and noteworthy advocacies. These educational advocacies were deemed interconnected and interdependent to each other. Also, the study comes up with relevant propositions, while it makes recommendations for further research and utilization of the new framework. The results have implications for revisiting the educational administration curriculum by mapping out the subjects that contribute to the development of educational advocacy.

Health workers as Hate Crimes Targets during COVID-19 outbreak in the Americas

Many health workers in the Americas, especially women, have been victims of discrimination and different types of grievances during the COVID-19 pandemic. These brief reflections aim to make the problem visible, offer theoretical explanations and some recommendations. The pandemic constitutes a massive crisis that triggers fears and reassuring of diffuse anxieties, which often includes someone to blame. Healthcare workers have become circumstantial scapegoating targets. The inflicted attacks can be understood as reactive hate crimes since they are originated from an allegedly healthy person to an allegedly contaminated person. People seems to incur in a sanitary profiling process based on the health worker´s uniform. However, these expressions of hatred are fueled by pre-pandemic circumstances such as the precariousness of health systems and deficient medical equipment, misogyny, or the pervasiveness of authoritarian tendencies. Understanding this situation as a human rights issue, it is suggested to consider measures in order to discourage these attacks, such as: guaranteeing the appropriate conditions of hospitals and the personal protective equipment of workers; development of recognition campaigns of the healthcare staff and the work they carry out (in particular female nurses); and implementing transitory regulations that sanction any hate crime type attack to health workers or the scientific community. Furthermore, educational advocacy efforts should reiterate basic hygiene measures for the people, but also focus on refuting false and pseudoscientific beliefs that contribute to the fear-induced construction of the health worker as a threat of contagion.

Democratic Citizenship of Teacher Movement in Indonesia Post-Soeharto: Between Democratic Citizenship and Civic Engagement

After May 1998, Indonesia began the transition from centralization to the era of autonomy. During 32 years, Soeharto’s New Order regime (1966-1998) demonstrated authoritarian regime in many sectors, like politics, economics, social, especially in education. The political freedom of the Reform era has opened up an opportunity for the revival of social movements in Indonesia. Reform has enabled more open political structure, including a friendlier political atmosphere for the teacher movement. The purpose of this research is to explain how teacher movement in Indonesia made transformation from authoritarian which close movement to liberal with open movement. In New Order regime with authoritarian performance, Persatuan Guru Republik Indonesia (Teacher Union in Indonesia) is as the single actor. The paper discussed three main aspects: (1) the explanation of the emerging of teacher movements in the process of democratic citizenship (2) the dynamics of teacher movement in developing teacher capacity in era of decentralization of Indonesia (3) the relations of teacher movement between the civil societies in era of decentralization. The teacher movement influences Indonesia’s democratization process. Teacher movement has contributed substantially in increasing participation and democracy in Indonesia, building the legal and institutional infrastructure for democracy, and providing voice and educational advocacy in supporting the reform.

Conclusion

Participants in the discourse on AMBS are best situated to assess their own and others’ experiential claims within a specific place and as part of a particular process of educational advocacy. The former is comprised of barber shops, laundromats, libraries, and other accessible, decentralized, community-based arenas that have a history of incubating anti-racist and other politics of resistance. The latter emphasizes the importance of public schools while challenging the quality of such schools available to black children. Such advocacy is ultimately successful when it abides by the two-fold norm that good public schools foster black self-determination in the face of intersecting oppression and also prepare black children of all genders to continually evaluate what life in a democratic polity looks like.

In a Classroom of Their Own

Many supporters of all-black male schools (ABMS) argue that they reduce black boys’ exposure to racist, “overly” feminized teachers. In casting black boys as victims of intersecting racial and gendered oppression, these supporters -- many of whom are black males -- demand an end to racism in the classroom and do so on the sexist assumption that women teachers are emasculating. This rationale for ABMS raises two questions that feminist theory has lost sight of. Why do oppressed groups articulate their experience in ways that challenge and reproduce inequality? Is it possible to build emancipatory political coalitions among groups who make such claims? This book answers these questions by articulating a new politics of experience. It begins by demonstrating that intersectionality is a politically fluid rather than an always feminist analytical framework. It also reveals a dialectical reality in which groups’ experiential claims rest on harmful assumptions and foster emancipatory demands. This book concludes that black male supporters of single-gender schools for black boys can build worthwhile coalitions around this complex reality when they interrogate their own as well as their critics’ assumptions and demands. Doing so enables these supporters to engage in educational advocacy that recognizes the value of public schools while criticizing the quality of such schools available to black boys and black girls.