Explore the vast range of titles available.

What is it like to grow up in an orphanage? What do residents themselves have to say about their experiences? Are there ways that orphanages can be designed to meet children's developmental needs and to provide them with necessities they are unable to receive in their home communities? In this book, detailed observations of children's daily life in a Cambodian orphanage are combined with follow-up interviews of the same children after they have grown and left the orphanage. Their thoughtful reflections show that the quality of care children receive is more important for their well-being than the site in which they receive it. Life in a Cambodian Orphanage  situates orphanages within the social and political history of Cambodia, and shows that orphanages need not always be considered bleak sites of deprivation and despair. It suggests best practices for caring for vulnerable children regardless of the setting in which they are living.  

In Cambodia, orphan dance shows were once popular as a way to preserve endangered art forms and to cultivate children's dignity and well-being. But they came to be seen as exploitative instead, and today are nearly nonexistent. This article examines the confluence of changes that caused this reversal of opinion. The reversal is due to both covert factors such as changes in constructions of childhood, and overt factors such as changes in audience composition. The rise and fall of Cambodian orphan dance shows took place largely within foreign communities, with little local input.

Some 12,000 children are living in nearly 300 orphanages in Cambodia today. While stigma is a problem for children in these centers, there is also a surprising amount of envy directed towards the children because of the opportunities and resources they receive. This report presents some of the strategies orphanages use to counter stigma and envy. Among these are site location, use of signage, attractive facilities, exclusive educational opportunities, access to internationalization, physical openness, new kinds of non-placed-based community, traditional architecture, intentional simplicity, and sharing of resources with the surrounding community.

Children’s museums are inspired by universalist approaches to child development, learning, and the “ideal” childhood. Assumptions that inform this approach to museum design include, for example, that children learn best through play, that children should be grouped by age because activities should be developmentally appropriate, and that parents or other adult caretakers should be involved in children’s play. In addition, children should have dedicated spaces for learning that are designated by design elements such as vivid colors, cartoonlike characters, and bounded spaces that maintain clear lines of sight so that children are visible at all times. Implementing these assumptions as design features leads to children’s museums that tend to resemble one another regardless of their geographic or cultural location, raising the following questions that guide this research—if children’s museums are designed to reflect universal beliefs about children, how can they also convey a sense of place or cultural connection? How can children’s museums distinguish themselves when they are designed according to universalist ideas of child development? This article argues that incorporating more local content and design features makes the children’s museum more compatible to a broader range of social values and therefore more inclusive of a broader range of visitors. It also enhances the educational goals of the museum. Based on museum observations made in seven different countries, this article will describe several successful examples of ways that children’s museums have introduced cultural and geographic distinctiveness.

This article describes and analyzes signage in children’s museums, including how their wording, content, salience, and number are informed by culturally specific assumptions about appropriate ways to communicate with children. The findings show that most museum signage consists of directives that can be split into four categories: rule directives, parenting directives, informational directives, and developmental directives. Because the value that museums place on self-directed exploration makes explicit rules about behavioral expectations seem discordant, rule statements are highly indirect or even absent. The other three types of directives are more direct and explicit because they are more consonant with the assumptions and principles underlying children’s museums’ designs and programming. I propose that this state of affairs can be a source of confusion and anxiety for parents who want their children to behave well but may not be familiar with what this means in the museum context. I argue that because the assumptions about appropriate ways to communicate with children are culturally specific and because strategies for making directives more polite are language-specific, the indirect wording of rule statements may result in a lack of clarity about appropriate behavior. This could make visiting children’s museums uncomfortable for demographic groups who already tend to be underrepresented among visitors, particularly racial and linguistic minorities, single parents, families with several children, and families of lower socioeconomic or educational backgrounds. I suggest ways to improve signage in order to clarify expectations without undermining the principle that museums should be fun and inclusive spaces. This research is based on in-person visits to nine children’s museums and the analysis of online materials from five others.

Proceedings of the Eighth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society (1982)

Higher education is at a point of transition. Colleges and universities are considering new ways to attract students through innovative programs that stay true to their educational mission and also prepare students for the current job market. Employers consistently talk about the skills they need in graduates they hire, including critical thinking, strong writing, adaptability, and cultural competency. International studies as a major is perfectly poised to provide students with both the academic grounding they need to better understand the world around them and the skills necessary to make them desirable to employers. Communicating the skills and content that coursework in the major offers, however, is often not a straightforward process. Students have both skills and content knowledge, but two key issues need to be addressed: (1) how can faculty better communicate to students the skills and knowledge we want them to gain from our classes, and (2) how do we enable students to understand and articulate these skills to future employers? This article addresses these questions by examining the contributions of international studies with regard to building skills in the classroom, enhancing cultural competency, promoting language training, developing networking capacity, and preparing students for life after college. La educación superior se encuentra en un punto de transición. Las universidades están considerando nuevas formas de atraer estudiantes a través de programas innovadores que sean fieles a su misión educativa y también preparen a los estudiantes para el mercado laboral actual. Los empleadores hablan sistemáticamente sobre las competencias que necesitan en los graduados que contratan, como pensamiento crítico, escritura sólida, adaptabilidad y capacidad cultural. Los estudios universitarios superiores a nivel internacional están perfectamente preparados para brindar a los estudiantes tanto la base académica que necesitan para entender mejor el mundo que los rodea como las competencias necesarias para hacerlos atrayentes para los empleadores. Comunicar las competencias y los contenidos que los estudios superiores ofrecen, sin embargo, a menudo no es un proceso sencillo. Los estudiantes tienen tanto las competencias como el conocimiento de los contenidos, pero es necesario abordar dos cuestiones: (1) ¿cómo puede el cuerpo docente comunicar mejor a los estudiantes las competencias y el conocimiento que queremos que obtengan en nuestras clases? Y (2) ¿cómo hacemos posible que los estudiantes entiendan y articulen estas competencias ante los futuros empleadores? Este artículo aborda estos interrogantes examinando las contribuciones de estudios internacionales respecto de la construcción de competencias en el aula, la mejora de la capacidad cultural, la promoción de la formación lingüística, el desarrollo de la capacidad de interconexión y la preparación de los estudiantes para la vida después de la universidad.