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 2023, including the massacre of […] Read Moreabout AMERICA’S MASS SHOOTING EPIDEMIC: SIX WAYS TO END IT
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 the agency’s current orientation towards […] Read Moreabout Public Distrust, Science, and Practitioner Research
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 road, traveling around the Southwest, […] Read Moreabout “BACK IN THE SADDLE AGAIN”
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 tongue, and this good news […] Read Moreabout A Morning After: Ukraine, Putin, and the Attack on Democracy
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 new century. As you will […] Read Moreabout Reflecting on the Taos Education As Relating Conference
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 respond to COVID and school […] Read Moreabout Practitioner Research in a Time of Triple Crisis: When Too Much is Not Enough
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 scientists in Europe some 500 […] Read Moreabout Beginning Again: On Knowledge democracy and Culture Circles in America
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 reading is a pleasure and […] Read Moreabout On Reading the World in 2020-2021
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 for the after-retirement period. We […] Read Moreabout The SPF Blog: Issues in Practitioner Research, Policy Making in Helping Professions and Social Change