Carl A. Maida

Learning in the Anthropocene: Reimagining Education in the Twenty-First Century reimagines the education of future generations in our complex society. Carl A. Maida argues we are living in an era of transition that has been repeatedly called an age of acceleration, and in this time of crisis, diverse constituencies will need to coalesce and create place-based arenas for critical inquiry and reflection around biodiversity, energy, and sustainability concerns. Education is therefore critical to the public sphere, which is polarized by contentious debates over class, ethnicity, culture, and more recently the fate of the planet. He posits that two provinces—the school and society—can join together to afford students greater freedom to produce future knowledge as humanity faces profound challenges to its existence by advancing experiential instructional approaches.

Common Worlds: Paths Toward Sustainable Urbanism explores expert and lay approaches to sustainable urbanism, focusing on the politics and civic aesthetics of space and place; project-based learning and it consequences for the life chances of youth; and the prospect of intergenerational civic engagement. Extended case studies of sustainable urbanism describe areas undergoing demographic and socioeconomic change over the two decades since the end of the Cold War. The case studies, based upon participatory action research, are framed through the lens of transformational anthropology, which focuses on the structural factors and power relationships that contribute to social and economic disparities within a population. This approach is based upon principles of personal and group transformation, and it holds researchers responsible for collaborating with communities and groups in co-constructing research, thereby enhancing the constituents’ ability to carry out subsequent transformational change studies rooted in and shaped by the local community. Each case also focuses on a movement in support of aesthetic improvement, including preservation, conservation, and restoration efforts on behalf of parkland, open space, agricultural land, and marine wetlands in the face of external threats to their sustainability.

Common Worlds: Paths Toward Sustainable Urbanism explores expert and lay approaches to sustainable urbanism, focusing on the politics and civic aesthetics of space and place; project-based learning and it consequences for the life chances of youth; and the prospect of intergenerational civic engagement. Extended case studies of sustainable urbanism describe areas undergoing demographic and socioeconomic change over the two decades since the end of the Cold War. The case studies, based upon participatory action research, are framed through the lens of transformational anthropology, which focuses on the structural factors and power relationships that contribute to social and economic disparities within a population. This approach is based upon principles of personal and group transformation, and it holds researchers responsible for collaborating with communities and groups in co-constructing research, thereby enhancing the constituents’ ability to carry out subsequent transformational change studies rooted in and shaped by the local community. Each case also focuses on a movement in support of aesthetic improvement, including preservation, conservation, and restoration efforts on behalf of parkland, open space, agricultural land, and marine wetlands in the face of external threats to their sustainability.

When disaster strikes, survivors suddenly find themselves in a world that has become confusing and unfamiliar. Such traumatic events impose severe psychological strain on every member of a community, but children are a particularly vulnerable group requiring special attention. Children and Disasters addresses the needs of this specific population by examining the impact of major disasters on the mental health and emotional functioning of children. The programs described in this book are designed to provide early intervention to children and families undergoing stress reactions to a catastrophic event. The authors offer interventions aimed at enhancing the skills of mental health professionals, educators, and peer counselors in responding to the intensified demands of disasters. These intervention approaches provide information regarding the event itself, reinforce the legitimacy of the anxieties and fears that children and their families are experiencing, and encourage the expression of feelings in group and individual settings (for the younger child, through drawing and play). Furthermore, they build on the coping capacity of individuals and theirs families and provide concrete coping skills and techniques to alleviate stress reactions. The intervention model can be applied to programs for individual children and their families, multi-family groups, and groups for children in mental health, educational, and community settings. The practical "hands-on" approach to program design makes this book an attractive resource for mental health professionals, social workers, rehabilitation specialists, professional and volunteer counselors, and suicide intervention workers. It will also be useful for school personnel, including teachers, school counselors, and administrators, as well as federal and state emergency planners and coordinators.

When densely populated urban areas face severe crises—natural disasters, epidemics, sudden unemployment, massive immigration—they often find that established mechanisms cannot respond adequately to the problems. Carl Maida argues that solutions to these problems tend to be developed within the affected communities themselves. In Pathways through Crisis, he draws on his two decades of work in ethnography and with crisis centers in the Los Angeles area to study the kinds of informal organizations that arise at the grass-roots level in order to deal with severe crises. This ground-breaking examination of responses to urban disaster suggests how both informal and formal organizations can be developed to serve people under extreme duress.

When disaster strikes, survivors suddenly find themselves in a world that has become confusing and unfamiliar. Such traumatic events impose severe psychological strain on every member of a community, but children are a particularly vulnerable group requiring special attention. Children and Disasters addresses the needs of this specific population by examining the impact of major disasters on the mental health and emotional functioning of children. The programs described in this book are designed to provide early intervention to children and families undergoing stress reactions to a catastrophic event. The authors offer interventions aimed at enhancing the skills of mental health professionals, educators, and peer counselors in responding to the intensified demands of disasters. These intervention approaches provide information regarding the event itself, reinforce the legitimacy of the anxieties and fears that children and their families are experiencing, and encourage the expression of feelings in group and individual settings (for the younger child, through drawing and play). Furthermore, they build on the coping capacity of individuals and theirs families and provide concrete coping skills and techniques to alleviate stress reactions. The intervention model can be applied to programs for individual children and their families, multi-family groups, and groups for children in mental health, educational, and community settings. The practical hands-on approach to program design makes this book an attractive resource for mental health professionals, social workers, rehabilitation specialists, professional and volunteer counselors, and suicide intervention workers. It will also be useful for school personnel, including teachers, school counselors, and administrators, as well as federal and state emergency planners and coordinators.