People with psychiatric disabilities frequently experience difficulties in pursuing higher education. For instance, the nature of their disability and its treatment, stigmatization and discrimination can be overwhelming obstacles. These difficulties can eventually lead to early school leaving and consequently to un- or underemployment. Unfortunately, support services for (future) students with psychiatric disabilities are often not available at colleges and universities or at mental health organizations.For the social inclusion and (future) labor opportunities of people with psychiatric disabilities it is of the utmost importance that they have better access to higher education, and are able to complete such study successfully. Supported Education is a means to reach these goals. Supported Education is defined as the provision of individualized, practical support and instruction to assist people with psychiatric disabilities to achieve their educational goals (Anthony, Cohen, Farkas, & Gagne, 2002).The main aim of the ImpulSE project (see Appendix 1 for information about the project's organization) was the development of a toolkit for Supported Education services for (future) students with psychiatric disabilities. The toolkit is based upon needs and resources assessments from the four participating countries, as well as good practices from these.Secondly, a European network of Supported Education (ENSEd) is initiated, starting with a first International Conference on Supported Education. The aim of ENSEd is to raise awareness in the EU about the educational needs of (future) students with psychiatric disabilities and for services that help to remove the barriers for this target group.The toolkit is aimed at students’ counselors, trainers, teachers and tutors, mental health managers and workers, and local authority officials involved in policymaking concerning people with psychiatric disabilities. It enables field workers to improve guidance and counseling to (future) students with psychiatric disabilities, supporting them in their educational careers.In the Netherlands alone, it is estimated that six per cent of the total student population suffers from a psychiatric disability—that is, a total of 40,000 students. On a European scale, the number of students with a psychiatric disability is therefore considerably high. We hope that through the project these students will be better empowered to be successful in their educational careers and that their chances in the labor market and their participation in society at large will be improved.
MULTIFILE
Across the globe, linguistically heterogeneous populations increasingly define school systems at the same time that developing the ability to communicate cross-culturally is becoming essential for internationalized economies. While these trends seem complimentary, they often appear in paradoxical opposition as represented in the content and execution of nationwide education policies. Given the differing geopolitical contexts within which school systems function, wide variation exists with regard to how policymakers address the challenges of providing language education, including how they frame goals and design programs to align with those goals. Here we present a cross-continental examination of this variation, which reveals parallel tensions among aims for integrating immigrant populations, closing historic achievement gaps, fostering intercultural understanding, and developing multilingual competencies. To consider implications of such paradoxes and parallels in policy foundations, we compare language education in the US and in the EU, focusing on the Netherlands as an illustrative case study.
LINK
In the debate about smart cities, an alternative to a dominant top-down, tech-driven solutionist approach has arisen in examples of ‘civic hacking’. Hacking here refers to the playful, exploratory, collaborative and sometimes transgressive modes of operation found in various hacker cultures, this time constructively applied in the context of civics. It suggests a novel logic to organise urban society through social and digital media platforms, moving away from centralised urban planning towards a more inclusive process of city-making, creating new types of public spaces. This book takes this urban imaginary of a hackable city seriously, using hacking as a lens to explore examples of collaborative city-making enabled by digital media technologies. Five different perspectives are discussed. Hacking can be understood as (1) an ethos, a particular articulation of citizenship in the network era; (2) as a set of iterative and collaborative city-making practices, bringing out new roles and relations between citizens, (design) professionals and institutional actors; (3) a set of affordances of institutional structures that allow or discourage their appropriation; (4) a critical lens to bring in notions of democratic governance, power struggles and conflict of interests into the debate on collaborative city-making; and (5) a point of departure for action research. After a discussion of these themes, the various chapters in the book are briefly introduced. Taken together they contribute to a wider debate about practices of technology-enabled collaborative city-making, and the question how city hacking may mature from the tactical level of smart and often playful interventions to a strategic level of enduring impact.
