Building True Community explores how to build a sense of community as an antidote to divisiveness and distrust. Based on more than thirty years of working with the community building model developed by M. Scott Peck, M.D., bestselling author of The Road Less Traveled and co-founder of the Foundation for Community Encouragement, this book provides a detailed description of the community building experience, how to facilitate the experience, and how to integrate its principles and practices into daily life. Learn how to: • deepen and restore relationships, resolve conflicts, and experience the freedom to be your authentic, best self; • dissolve fixed mental perceptions that reinforce the “optical delusion” of our separateness; • confront what keeps divisions in place that separate people and lead to conflict. Other topics include the underlying principles and conditions that make a sense of community possible, how to create conditions for communities to take root and flourish, how the stages of community play out in daily life, and how to integrate community building practices into daily life. The book also looks back at the origins of community and considers the community building experience as a fusion of spiritual practice with a scientific foundation.

The question needs to ponder over as we have entered in the new millennium. On what way we are going? What is the nature of social transformation? What socio-economic forces and value systems are emerging in the country? Keeping in view the expected consequences of socio-economic development as an instrument of change in the structure and culture, the present book mainly deals with Social Structure and Social Interaction. This book provides valuable insights into social structure and change in a complex society. Well researched and lucidly written, this volume will be widely welcomed by all those involved in the study of sociology, social anthropology and social change. This book is of great help and utility to all those who are interested in knowing the changing social structure.

Social postmodernism and systematic theology can be considered the new pair in some of the most creative discussions on the future of theological method on a global scale. Both in the academy and in the public square, as well as in the manifold local and pastoral moments of ministry and community social activism, the social, the postmodern, and the theological intermingle in engaging and border-crossing ways. The Community of the Weak presents a new kind of jazzy fundamental theology with a postmodern touch, using jazz as a metaphor, writing ethnographically messy texts out of the personal windows of lived experiences, combining fragments of autobiography with theological reconstruction. A comparative perspective on North American and European developments in contemporary systematic theology serves as a hermeneutical horizon to juxtapose two continents in their very different contexts. The author proposes a systematic and fundamental theology that is more jazzy, global, and narrative, deeply embedded in pastoral ministry to tell its postmodern story.

This detailed ethnographic study of fifth- and sixth-grade classrooms offers new insights into Japanese culture, as many aspects of daily social life are embedded in the educational system. Additionally, this book provides new perspectives on educational reform in the U.S., since many current issues and programs focus on notions of community, collaboration, and systemic reform, all of which are central to understanding Japanese teaching-learning processes in schools.

The author examines why educators must move beyond the quest for higher test scores and embrace their own life experiences within a standard curriculum.

Can our students learn something positive for themselves in spite of traumatic and toxic situations? Can they thrive in their cognitive, emotional, and social capacities to transform their painful and challenging current COVID-19 environment? What do teachers need to do for this? These questions guided this book to suggest a new perspective of education, called the Pedagogy of Thriveology, which challenges students to overcome the current toxic social environments based on the biblical perspective. In fact, Jesus presents many effective teaching cases in Scripture. In this book, I identify specific cases of audiences who experienced trauma (that are related to physical, emotional, relational, spiritual, cultural, ethical identity issues) along with appropriate learning strategies and instructional processes that are used by Jesus so that the specific audience in each case would be equipped with resilience needed to overcome their trauma.

This is the thoroughly revised and updated second edition of the best-selling book Exploring Leadership. The book is designed to help college students understand that they are capable of being effective leaders and to guide them in developing their leadership potential. Exploring Leadership incorporates new insights and material developed in the course of the authors’ work in the field. The second edition contains expanded and new chapters and also includes the relational leadership model, uses a more global context and examples that relate to a wide variety of disciplines, contains a new section which emphasizes ways to work to accomplish change, and concludes with concrete strategies for activism.

How educators can respond to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s Calls to Action Educators have a special role in furthering truth and reconciliation in education, but many struggle to understand exactly what that means and how to accomplish it. There is no step-by-step guide to getting it right. Educators can only meaningfully accomplish truth and reconciliation in education by seeking out truth and reconciliation through education: an ongoing process of amplifying Indigenous voices and experiences, allowing oneself to be changed by them, and being guided by this learning both personally and professionally. Springing from an Indigenous education master’s certificate program at the University of Calgary and written from an adult education perspective on transformative learning, this book invites educators, broadly defined, into a conversation about truth and reconciliation through education. Section I contains useful chapters on program design and concepts, while section II presents a collection of inspirational and thought provoking personal reflections from Indigenous and non-Indigenous educators who have taken deliberate, active roles in responding to the TRC’s Calls to Action. This is a resource written by educators for educators wishing to embark on their own journeys of truth and reconciliation. Join the reconciliatory education community in courageously teaching, learning, and acting, just as the educators in this collected volume do.

Describes different forms of professional development for cooperative learning and shows how the use of cooperative learning in professional development is leading to new insights into teaching and professional growth in schools.

28 contributors each offer a chapter giving their experiences and techniques for resolving conflict in communities across the globe.