In 2015, a university from Hong Kong led an international service-learning course to Kigali, Rwanda. The focus of the course was to install solar panels in individual households in a community, on the outskirts of Kigali, without access to electricity. The following year, the Hong Kong university partnered with a university in the United States and returned to Rwanda to expand the solar panel project in the same community. The central question of the qualitative impact assessment was, How, if at all, has the installation of solar panels impacted individual households and the community as a whole in the past year? Data methods included semi-structured interviews and observations during visits to the 16 households who had received solar panels in previous iterations of the service-learning project. Findings demonstrating five reoccurring themes emerged: project implementation, economic savings, improvement of study environment for childhood, women's empowerment, and improved quality of life. A strategic government development plan, a sustained relationship between a university and a local organization, and the type of service project are highlighted as important factors. The importance of local participation in the design and implementation of the solar home systems (SHS) project is emphasized, and an unexpected impact on gender dynamics related to project design is explored. Worldwide, universities are applying service-learning pedagogy across disciplines to enhance cognitive development, problem-solving skills, learning transfer, and global immersion experiences (Anitsal, Anitsal, Barger, &
With growing recognition of sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV) occurring in schools, the governments of Burkina Faso and Benin, partnered with non-governmental organisations (NGOs), have attempted to implement systems of response within the school environment. This empirical study applied the socioecological framework to highlight the intersecting relationship of multiple contexts within society including the interpersonal, family, community, school, and national identities. The findings revealed inadequacies and possibilities for holistic action and accountability in both countries. Data were analysed from qualitative interviews with Beninese and Burkinabe government ministries, international and local NGOs, and community organisations. Barriers exposed complex difficulties in holding perpetrators accountable and sustainably moving towards collective action as a result of entrenched gender dynamics and social norms. However, there are pockets of action to protect victims and hold perpetrators responsible through considering communitarian ideals in addition to official policies. This study offers insight into two nations struggling to develop contextual responses of possibility.
This meta-analysis seeks to critically examine the qualitative research being published in influential journals in the field of international and comparative education in order to determine whether qualitative research has remained true to the constructivist paradigm and its theoretical and philosophical underpinnings. Decades after the heated paradigmatic debates within the field of education in the 1980’s, we seek to examine whether predictions that the constructivist paradigm would be pushed out by the call for post-positivist, quantifiable, data-driven research have come to fruition. Based on a review of all qualitative research published in the past three volumes of five influential journals in the field, we conclude that while qualitative articles are represented in approximately equal numbers as quantitative articles, there are key elements of the constructivist paradigm that are largely absent from these qualitative articles. In particular, our conclusion attempts to address the concern that qualitative researchers are failing to address the issue of researcher positionality in their qualitative work.
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