Search Results

An exploration is made of how the environmental justice movement in the United States has taken on some of the communicative and participatory demands and practices of critical pluralism. The movement has been critical of the communicative methods of the mainstream – the top-down organizational structure and its one-way nature of communication, and the lack of attention to issues of public participation in policy-making – and issues of communication have been a central focus in the development and demands of environmental justice. Accepting the diversity and the situated experiences of individuals and cultures has fostered the use of, and demand for, a variety of innovative communicative processes. Internally, the movement has attempted to employ more open discursive processes, paying particular attention to communication within and across diverse groups. Externally, the movement has made demands with regard to issues of communication and more discursive and participatory policy-making on government agencies, particularly the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

This chapter concludes the book by summarizing its theory and research findings and emphasizing the centrality of communicative processes in the effects of schooling on maternal behavior related to health and education. Presenting the case for a causal influence of schooling on maternal health behavior mediated by retained literacy skills, the chapter examines alternative explanations of the results and finds them inadequate. It considers the theoretical implications of the findings – including the internalization of the teacher-pupil relationship consistent with the theories of L. S. Vygotsky and G. H. Mead – and their policy implications for the protection of children and improvement of schools in less developed countries. It recommends that population studies incorporate the perspectives and research of educational research in the analysis of demographic and health data.

This chapter explores the notion of a ‘community of practice’ in relation to children's music-making in informal settings. It illustrates recent research in children's communication of musical practice that investigates the communicative processes that hold between persons and practices in these communities, and the nature of musical engagement in these settings.