Tuesday, January 18, 2011

Native Social Work Journal

Nga mihi mo te tau hou, Greetings, Happy New Year

The School of Native Human Services has completed Volume 7 of the Native Social Work Journal "Promising Practices in Mental Health: Emerging paradigms for Aboriginal social work practices". This version is now available online:

https://zone.biblio.laurentian.ca/dspace/handle/10219/378

There are some amazing articles written in this journal on Mental Health, I am sure you will find them interesting reading. Taima

Monday, January 10, 2011

new book by Russell Bishop, Dominic O'Sullivan and Mere Berryman

Scaling Up Educational Reform – Addressing the Politics of Disparity
by Russell Bishop, Dominic O’Sullivan and Mere Berryman (from Waikato University site: http://www.waikato.ac.nz/news-events/new-books.shtml)


What is school reform? What makes it sustainable? Who needs to be involved? How is scaling up achieved? This book is about the need for educational reforms that have built into them, from the outset, those elements that will see them sustained in the original sites and spread to others.

Using the Te Kotahitanga Project as a model Professor Russell Bishop, Dr Mere Berryman and Dominic O'Sullivan, branch out from the project itself to seek to uncover how an educational reform can become both extendable and sustainable.

Their model can be applied to a variety of levels within education: classroom, school and system wide. It has seven elements that should be present in the reform initiative from the outset. These elements include establishing goals and a vision for reducing disparities; embedding a new pedagogy to depth in order to change the core of educational practice; developing new institutions and organisational structures to support in-class initiatives; developing leadership that is responsive, proactive and distributed; and developing and using appropriate measures of performance as evidence for modifying core classroom and school practices.

This book is an essential read for anyone involved in the process of trying to achieve sustainable school reform that addresses the question of how mainstream schools can effectively address the learning needs of students currently not well served by education.

Monday, January 3, 2011

U.S. will sign U.N. declaration on rights of native people

U.S. will sign U.N. declaration on rights of native people in by Krissah Thompson, Washington Post 16 December 2010

President Obama said Thursday that the United States will sign a United Nations non-binding declaration on the rights of indigenous peoples, a move that advocates called another step in improving Washington's relationship with Native Americans.

Obama announced the decision during the second White House Tribal Conference, where he said he is "working hard to live up to" the name that was given to him by the Crow Nation: "One Who Helps People Throughout the Land."

The United States is the last major country to sign on to the U.N. declaration, which was endorsed by 145 countries in 2007. A handful of countries, including the United States, voted against it because of the parts of the provision that say indigenous peoples "have the right to the lands, territories and resources which they have traditionally owned, occupied, or otherwise used and acquired."

That language does not override national law, and Canada and New Zealand, which also initially opposed the declaration, said in recent months that they would support it.

Obama has told Native American leaders that he wants to improve the "nation-to-nation" relationship between the United States and the tribes and repair broken promises. There are more than 560 Indian tribes in the United States. Many had representatives at the White House conference and applauded Obama's announcement.

Native American leaders said this week that they have mixed assessments of the administration's progress. Many praised the White House focus on Indian country, but others said some problems remain entrenched.