In August 2006, Australia's conservative prime minister John Howard convened a history summit in Canberra. The purported goal of the summit was the framing of a nationally-acceptable curriculum in Australian history. However, as this article suggests, Howard's hidden intention was to use the summit as a device for introducing a narrowly…

Immigration from Latin America to the United States will be a political issue for many years. Because Latinos are the largest minority group in the U.S., they will continue to be a concern of social work education. Language differences, cultural distinctions, and unique political ramifications require specialized programs within social work…

This report studies the relationship between conflict and education in Cote d'Ivoire, and suggests policy and program approaches for analysts and those engaged with education and peacebuilding in societies affected by conflict. Although the situation in Cote d'Ivoire has evolved since the main recommendations of this report were written in early…

Four classes of ninth-grade students in an international school in East Asia used a set of web-based technology tools to evaluate two competing webpages about the Taiwan Straits. The findings highlight the ways these students developed disciplinary literacy in social studies by drawing upon cultural resources and contextual knowledge as they…

In this classroom narrative article I discuss some of my experiences as a teacher in an Australian government-funded English language development aid project during the United Nations Transitional Administration in East Timor (UNTAET). The program formed part of an emergency response to the devastating violence that accompanied the Indonesian…

The infamous "Sydney Tar Ponds" are well known as one of the largest toxic waste sites of Canada, due to almost 100 years of steelmaking in Sydney, a once beautiful and peaceful city located on the east side of Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia. This article begins with a contextual overview of the Tar Ponds issue including a brief…

The AsiaBarometer of 1,000 respondents shows that Hong Kong people have a great desire for materialistic attainment, and such an emphasis on materialism bodes ill for their quality of life. Negative assessments of the public life sphere, which encompasses the natural environment, the social welfare system, and the democratic system, also detract…

Rooted in graffiti culture and its attitude toward the world, street art is regarded as a postgraffiti movement. Street art encompasses a wide array of media and techniques, such as traditional spray-painted tags, stickers, stencils, posters, photocopies, murals, paper cutouts, mosaics, street installations, performances, and video projections…

Centrality and fragility of university in the long-lasting debates over the functions of higher education and its role in the interplay of wider socioeconomic, political and cultural forces is an ever recurrent issue. It seems that exactly these debates called for constant public attention towards academia and helped retain its core function of…

Although the Vietnam War ended more than thirty years ago, historians remain as divided on what happened as the American people were during the war. Mark Moyar maps the ongoing battle between "orthodox" and "revisionist" Vietnam War historians: the first group, those who depict Vietnam as a bad war that the United States should…

"Service-learning" has been adopted by many colleges and universities as a way of instilling in students an ethic of community service. Its advocates typically distinguish it from simple volunteering, which lacks an academic component, and from internships, in which students acquire practical skills. The author argues that the rationales for…

This study examines the relationship between music preferences and civic activism among 182 participants aged 14-24 years. Our analyses show that participants who regularly listened to certain music genres such as classical, opera, musicals, new age, easy listening, house, world music, heavy metal, punk, and ska were significantly more likely to…

A number of dimensions of the democratic political process are important for understanding civic communities and civic engagement. While many of these aspects have been examined at the federal level, less is known about how these dynamics operate at the local level, especially in rural communities, and that, moreover, involve a specific issue. In…

This paper analyses the policy of reservation for lower castes in India. This policy is similar to that of affirmative action in the United States. The paper provides a brief overview of the caste system and discusses the types of groups that are eligible for reservation, based on data from government reports. The stance of this paper is that…

How can we promote student and civic engagement amongst our students? At Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi, the political science courses in the First Year Learning Communities Program have been using the "New York Times" as a supplemental reader to increase student engagement both inside and outside the classroom. The paper will examine the…