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Impact of a School-Based Youth Participatory Research Project: An Organizer’s Experience
Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR) is an underutilized tool for addressing culture and climate challenges in school communities. YPAR is unique for its ability to develop practical knowledge and skills among young people, with a focus on improving a system or community that serves them. While there is no one-size fits all approach to [...]
Working to Strengthen Citizen-Centered Democracy in a Time of Faltering Hope
In our latest publication, SPF presented an essay on the creation of a new antisemitism curriculum entitled Antisemitism from a framework of collective Liberation (Antisemitism from a Framework of Collective Liberation - Social Publishers Foundation). The curriculum was created by members of PARCEO - an education, resource, and research center based in New York City [...]
America’s Mass Shooting Epidemic: Six Ways To End It
The Gun Violence Archive, a nonprofit research group that tracks gun violence using police reports, news coverage, and other public sources, defines a mass shooting as one in which at least four people are killed or injured. As of March 27th, the archive had counted 130 mass shootings in the United States so far in [...]
Public Distrust, Science, and Practitioner Research
I recently read a Time magazine interview[i] with Dr. Rochelle Walensky, Director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, regarding her efforts to change the CDC and fix its “dramatic mistakes” during COVID 19. In the interview Walensky shared that a recent in-depth review of CDC revealed, among other things, the challenges of [...]
“BACK IN THE SADDLE AGAIN”
I took a break from the Blog for a number of months to focus further on my health and to complete preparations for the 10th Anniversary Conference for the Action Research Network of the Americas (ARNA), which I co-founded and in which I remain active. My wife and I also spent 6 weeks on the [...]
A Morning After: Ukraine, Putin, and the Attack on Democracy
INTRODUCTORY NOTE: I have been in a period of personal and professional reorganization following a major health scare. From June through September I was in treatment for throat cancer following 2 months of diagnosis and testing. The chemo and radiation therapy I underwent destroyed what had been a malignant tumor at the base of my [...]
Reflecting on the Taos Education As Relating Conference
My thanks to colleague, friend, and SPF Advisory Board member, Rolla Lewis, for submitting the Guest Blog below. Rolla was a long-time California counselor educator. We worked together on a number of projects in support of school counseling and school counselors in the state back in the 80s, 90s, and into the start of the [...]
Practitioner Research in a Time of Triple Crisis: When Too Much is Not Enough
We are living in terribly perilous times. And the stress of it all showers down on us daily. In its August 25 weekly online Education Briefing, The New York Times proclaimed “A bumpy fall semester.”[i] The article focuses on the impact of current COVID anxieties and the political divides associated with determining how best to [...]
Beginning Again: On Knowledge democracy and Culture Circles in America
Knowledge democracy is a phrase that refers to long-standing conflicts over what constitutes knowledge and whose knowledge counts. The phrase has been advanced as a kind of platform for resistance to the domination of what long-time scholar-activists Budd Hall and Rajesh Tandon (2017) describe as a small band of knowledge systems created by white male [...]
On Reading the World in 2020-2021
Book clubs can be a worthwhile and enjoyable activity. It is generally estimated that more than 5 million people in the US now participate in Book Clubs, with club popularity increasing over the past several decades.[i] With a history that in some form goes back several centuries, a core premise of book clubs is that [...]
The SPF Blog: Issues in Practitioner Research, Policy Making in Helping Professions and Social Change
Around six years ago my wife and I were beginning to have some serious conversations about our upcoming retirements from higher education including our evolving views of what we had accomplished as teachers and as scholars in education, where we had fallen short in our original goals and aspirations, and what we wanted to do [...]
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