Lesley Wood
Biographic Data
| ID | 3596594 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Lesley Wood |
| GIVEN NAMES | Lesley |
| FAMILY NAME | Wood |
| SIGNATURE | WOOD L |
| AFFILIATIONS | North-West University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-9139-1507 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 59 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 113 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 59 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2004 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
Reducing HIV Stigma by Transforming Children's Stereotypical Perceptions Through Arts-Based Methods
High levels of HIV-related stigma in South Africa continue to hinder effective management of the pandemic. Although the Department of Basic Education incorporates HIV and stigma education into the life skills curriculum, classroom teaching remains largely theoretical and does not enable children to grasp the deeper social complexities and intersectional factors that drive and sustain stigma. An arts-based, experiential pedagogy offers a transform…
Developing resilience in Neet youth through participatory action learning and action research
Planting seeds of resilience in South Africa's Ecce through local hubs and collaboration
The Department of Basic Education (DBE) took over responsibility for the early childhood care and education (ECCE) function in 2022 with the aim of expanding access and improving quality through regulation and professionalisation. However, the transformation of ECCE to align with government objectives requires grassroots engagement between invested stakeholders. One emerging idea is the establishment of localised ECCE hubs, yet the absence of a g…
Professionalising Ecce in South Africa is not child’s play! Determining skills gaps and implications for future sector development
In line with international trends in early childhood care and education (ECCE) recognising the importance of early learning, the Department of Basic Education in South Africa has pledged to professionalise the sector, increase access and improve quality. From a systemic point of view, professionalisation of the sector will require collaboration on multiple levels between various stakeholders working in different systems to bring about simultaneou…
The power (and caveats) of body mapping as a visual methodology with vulnerable youth
Purpose This study aims to explore the NEET (Not in Education, Employment and Training) experiences of young people living in impoverished settings. Design/methodology/approach Methodologically, this study was informed by a qualitative analysis of visual and textual data related to a body mapping exercise with eleven young people who were participants in a four-day start-up workshop in a larger action research project. Findings The findings revea…
‘But how will you ensure the objectivity of the researcher?’ Guidelines to address possible misconceptions about the ethical imperatives of community-based research
Many reviewers of applications for ethical approval of research at universities struggle to understand what is considered ethical conduct in community-based research (CBR). Their difficulty in understanding CBR and the ethics embedded within it is, in part, due to the exclusion of CBR from researchers’ mandatory research ethics training. After all, CBR challenges both pedagogically and epistemologically the dominant paradigm/s whose worldviews, v…
Transformation in early childhood education
When I was approached to write an editorial for the EECERA journal, I readily accepted since I see such tasks as part of the community service that academics should perform to sustain the dissemina
Cataloging Protest
What is the best source for tracking protest activity? Newspaper sources remain dominant, but other options are tempting. This article compares three differently sourced catalogs of protest events in Toronto from July 15 to September 15, 2020. The widely discussed Movement for Black Lives and housing justice cycles of protest are visible in all three catalogs, but apart from this, the field of protest they reveal is very different. While the cove…
Lessons Learnt From Facilitating Action Learning With Youth Facing Multiple Adversities
Action learning has proven to be an effective change process in the field of organisational development, where it originated. However, can it work equally well with young people who face intersectional adversities that negatively affect their holistic well-being, sense of purpose, and self-worth? This paper presents the case of a participatory action learning and action research project that we considered a failure because, after eight months of …
Youth leading youth
This article demonstrates how community-based action research can be conducted in democratic and democratizing ways to enable young people to take action to improve their own circumstances. By means of a case study, I show how Participatory Action Learning and Action Research (PALAR) can enable sustainable learning and development. Findings reveal that the youth participants benefitted from their participation in the PALAR research project in ter…
Youth Participatory Action Research as a Catalyst for Health Promotion in a Rural South African School
Rural schools in South Africa face many social and environmental challenges which impact negatively on learner wellbeing and performance. Given the severity and history of these problems, the situation is unlikely to change in the near future. Yet, schools are supposed to be enabling environments, providing holistic support to learners from communities plagued by severe economic, health and social challenges. A different strategy is clearly neede…
Raising Awareness of Agency to Address Climate Change
The United Nations Children's Fund 2008 report, Our Climate, Our Children, Our Responsibility, warned that children will suffer most from the effects of climate change. Environmental education is one way to prepare children to cope and enable them to educate their families and friends about the need to act now to minimise the danger climate change poses. This article reports on findings from a participatory action research project aimed at integr…
Learning To Facilitate Community-Based Research
The diversity of South Africa's population calls for authentic and contextually relevant participation in research that is community based. For novice researchers and researchers transitioning to participative methods, it can be challenging to facilitate a community-based research (CBR) project if they lack the necessary facilitation skills or experience. These skills are crucial to enable collaborative and participative learning. In this paper, …
The affordances of PAR for a school-community partnership to enhance learner support in socio-economically challenged communities
Although complex reasons exist for the poor state of education in socio-economically challenged communities in South Africa, improving parental support to learners is one approach to buffer contextual adversities. Yet, historically, collaboration between school and parent has been problematic. We hypothesized that a participatory action research approach might be useful to develop positive relations between teachers and parents. We report on the …
(Dis)Assembling global-justice identities
Social Movements, 1768–2008
This expanded second edition of Tilly's widely acclaimed 2004 book brings this analytical history of social movements fully up to date. Tilly and Wood cover such recent topics as immigrants' rights, new media technologies, anti-Olympic organizing in China, new mobilizations against the Iraq War, and the role of bloggers and Facebook in social movement activities. Coverage of these and other recent events serve to expand further the book's seminal…
Policing counter‐protest
In the Trump era, when clashes between right wing protesters and left counter protesters escalate, police disproportionately repress left wing activists. Explanations that rest solely on the conservative politics and culture of the police, or the ideological targeting of the left neglect the ways political systems, identities and organizations shape interactions between police and protesters. This study draws on the research on social movements, …
Nothing about us without us! A Palar approach to improving inclusion in a Zimbabwean College of Education
Higher education institutions should ensure they create conducive spaces for students with disabilities to engage fully in both academic and social spheres. Yet, too often the educational opportunities of these students are limited by social and structural barriers to inclusion. As Principal of a teacher education college in Zimbabwe, I saw it as my responsibility to improve inclusion in my institution. I proceeded from a critical disability theo…
The Seattle Model”
I almost attended the WTO protests in Seattle. A few days before N30, I had been part of a Reclaim the Streets protest against the World Trade Organization (WTO) in New York’s Times Square. We had
My living theory of a professional framework for art education
This article explains my living educational theory in the form of a professional framework that I call PART, which conceptually unites the roles of the artist, researcher and teacher (ART) to foster critical, participatory (P), and socially engaged action. I discuss how I improved my practice over four action research cycles to be more in line with my professed values of creativity, connectedness and care, followed by six learning platforms condu…
Social Movements Enter the Twenty-First Century
This chapter looks at the effect of dynamics of global connections and communication technologies on social movements, suggesting that instead of a straightforward internationalization of social movements, we may be seeing something more complicated.
Participatory Action Learning and Action Research
Participatory Action Learning and Action Research offers a concise yet comprehensive explanation of the theory, practice and process of this emerging paradigm, methodology and theory of learning. PALAR is a transformative, collaborative and democratic process for resolving complex problems within the context of sustainable professional, organisational and community development. The book draws on real-life examples from socially and economically c…
Youth as Participatory Action Researchers
Schools should be enabling spaces that nurture the holistic development of learners. However, in under-resourced communities in South Africa this is not always the case because learners, already vulnerable due to the effects of poverty, are exposed to added stressors within the school gates. We explored how engaging vulnerable learners in a rural high school in a youth participatory action research (YPAR) process could enable them to take action …
A critical participatory pedagogical approach to enabling life orientation students to develop social literacy through HIV education
HIV education is an important component of the life orientation curriculum, since an intersectional understanding of HIV provides an entry point to appreciate the interrelatedness of various social injustices. Yet, our interaction with predominantly white and privileged pre-service life orientation students led us to believe that they did not perceive HIV education as something that was relevant to their personal or professional lives. Their rigi…
Metabolic syndrome among adolescents in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, is attributable to the high prevalence of low HDL levels
This study indicates the importance of carrying out further investigations about the constituents of HDL and their atherogenic effects. Additionally, these results strongly recommend setting a consensus for HDL measurement, since small variations in methodologies may lead to substantial deviations in results
Breaking the Wave
Using interviews with thirty-two direct action activists and field notes from the period, this article argues that repression limited the diffusion of the tactics used in the 1999 protests against the World Trade Organization (WTO) in Seattle to activists in New York City and Toronto. The tactics under review are affinity groups, blockading, jail solidarity, black bloc, and giant puppets. I argue that repression highlighted the ways that poor act…
Eventful events
How do transnational summit protests affect local activists and the internal dynamics of organizations and movements in a host city? This paper uses Sewell’s concept of ‘eventful temporality’ to explore the impacts of the G20 summit protests in Pittsburgh (2009) and Toronto (2010) Interviews, and field notes are analyzed to show how the mobilizations enhanced the skills of local activists, increased connections between their movements, changed lo…
Breaking the Bank & Taking to the Streets
This paper analyses a set of 467 local protests that took place against neoliberalism on 5 global days of action between 1998 and 2001 and ?nds that the targets of protest di?er on each continent. The majority target either the global institutions of neoliberalism, such as the IMF, World Bank, World Trade Organization or the Group of 8, or neglect to identify a single institutional target. However, the most popular local target in Africa and Asia…
Using Drawings and Collages as Data Generation Methods With Children
Appropriate data generation methods are key to a successful research project to attain rich and relevant data. When doing research with children, the methods selected should be age appropriate and enable them to contribute their ideas in the research process. However, data generation with children is not 'child's play'-it is a challenging task that requires careful design on the part of the researcher. We conducted a study in South Africa with ch…
Policing counter‐protest
In the Trump era, when clashes between right wing protesters and left counter protesters escalate, police disproportionately repress left wing activists. Explanations that rest solely on the conservative politics and culture of the police, or the ideological targeting of the left neglect the ways political systems, identities and organizations shape interactions between police and protesters. This study draws on the research on social movements, …
The Ethical Implications of Community-Based Research
Researchers need to provide evidence that they have met ethical requirements before entering the field-rightly so, since the power and privilege embedded in academic researchers is considerable. However, given the calls for universities to decolonize and democratize research, we need to question whether the ethical norms developed to cater for objective, researcher-driven enquiries are appropriate and sufficient to ensure ethical conduct for qual…
Living at the Edges of Capitalism
Idle No More, Facebook and Diffusion
The indigenous-led movement Idle No More leapt into public view during the winter of 2012–2013, bringing round-dance flash-mobs and blockades to communities across Canada and internationally, becoming a symbol of twenty-first century indigenous resistance. This profile examines the first two months of the movement by analysing the structure of social networks being mobilized, by breaking down the Facebook architecture and interface into its vario…
What kind of respect is this
In this article I attempt to answer the question, ‘How can I influence teachers to be able to contribute to changing social/cultural norms and practices that hamper effective HIV & AIDS education and prevention?’ There is a growing realization that HIV & AIDS education and prevention initiatives need to move away from trying to change the sexual behaviour of individuals towards addressing societal and cultural factors which promote rapid transmis…
Examining a conceptual model of parental nurturance, parenting practices and physical activity among 5-6 year olds
Horizontalist Youth Camps and the Bolivarian Revolution
Between 2001 and 2005, the Intercontinental Youth Camp at the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, Brazil became associated with a decentralized, horizontalist form of organizing. When the polycentric forum took place in 2006, this horizontalist identity and strategy did not diffuse successfully to the new site in Caracas, Venezuela. This article argues that for diffusion to be successful, the local hosts must be able to deliberate on the locally …
The power (and caveats) of body mapping as a visual methodology with vulnerable youth
Purpose This study aims to explore the NEET (Not in Education, Employment and Training) experiences of young people living in impoverished settings. Design/methodology/approach Methodologically, this study was informed by a qualitative analysis of visual and textual data related to a body mapping exercise with eleven young people who were participants in a four-day start-up workshop in a larger action research project. Findings The findings revea…
The affordances of PAR for a school-community partnership to enhance learner support in socio-economically challenged communities
Although complex reasons exist for the poor state of education in socio-economically challenged communities in South Africa, improving parental support to learners is one approach to buffer contextual adversities. Yet, historically, collaboration between school and parent has been problematic. We hypothesized that a participatory action research approach might be useful to develop positive relations between teachers and parents. We report on the …
Cataloging Protest
What is the best source for tracking protest activity? Newspaper sources remain dominant, but other options are tempting. This article compares three differently sourced catalogs of protest events in Toronto from July 15 to September 15, 2020. The widely discussed Movement for Black Lives and housing justice cycles of protest are visible in all three catalogs, but apart from this, the field of protest they reveal is very different. While the cove…
Learning To Facilitate Community-Based Research
The diversity of South Africa's population calls for authentic and contextually relevant participation in research that is community based. For novice researchers and researchers transitioning to participative methods, it can be challenging to facilitate a community-based research (CBR) project if they lack the necessary facilitation skills or experience. These skills are crucial to enable collaborative and participative learning. In this paper, …
Nothing about us without us! A Palar approach to improving inclusion in a Zimbabwean College of Education
Higher education institutions should ensure they create conducive spaces for students with disabilities to engage fully in both academic and social spheres. Yet, too often the educational opportunities of these students are limited by social and structural barriers to inclusion. As Principal of a teacher education college in Zimbabwe, I saw it as my responsibility to improve inclusion in my institution. I proceeded from a critical disability theo…
My living theory of a professional framework for art education
This article explains my living educational theory in the form of a professional framework that I call PART, which conceptually unites the roles of the artist, researcher and teacher (ART) to foster critical, participatory (P), and socially engaged action. I discuss how I improved my practice over four action research cycles to be more in line with my professed values of creativity, connectedness and care, followed by six learning platforms condu…
Youth as Participatory Action Researchers
Schools should be enabling spaces that nurture the holistic development of learners. However, in under-resourced communities in South Africa this is not always the case because learners, already vulnerable due to the effects of poverty, are exposed to added stressors within the school gates. We explored how engaging vulnerable learners in a rural high school in a youth participatory action research (YPAR) process could enable them to take action …
Collaborated understandings of context-specific psychosocial challenges facing South African school learners
South African teachers are not sufficiently equipped to address psychosocial challenges that they encounter in under-resourced contexts among learners at school, and which impact negatively on learning and teaching. In this article, we report on the first cycle of a community-based participatory action research project undertaken with teacher participants to facilitate a collaborative understanding of the contextual psychosocial challenges that l…
Reaching Beyond the Net
Using a survey of 359 participants in the 2010 protests against the G20 in Toronto, this paper examines the effects and effectiveness of the different communication media in informing diverse participants about the protest. It finds that the communication networks that surrounded the G20 summit protest in Toronto in 2010 were dense and interconnected. Drawing on Tilly's ‘political circuits’, the survey shows that activists at the core of these ne…
Every teacher is a researcher
Since gender is an undisputed driver of HIV infection, teachers concerned with HIV prevention education should ideally encourage critical awareness of and culturally sensitive practices around gender inequalities. Many interventions and programmes have been developed for teachers to enable them to do this, however most have met with limited success. This article proceeds from the viewpoint that for HIV-prevention interventions to be sustainable a…
The perceptions and responses of South African school principals regarding HIV and Aids in their schools
Despite numerous HIV and AIDS training programmes for educators, little appears to have been achieved in terms of creating a wider understanding of the social and cultural complexities of the disease and its impact on the quality of teaching and learning. There appears to be a lack of developmental programmes that help principals provide the type of leadership which ensures that teachers and children who live in a context affected by the disease …
Breaking the Bank & Taking to the Streets
This paper analyses a set of 467 local protests that took place against neoliberalism on 5 global days of action between 1998 and 2001 and ?nds that the targets of protest di?er on each continent. The majority target either the global institutions of neoliberalism, such as the IMF, World Bank, World Trade Organization or the Group of 8, or neglect to identify a single institutional target. However, the most popular local target in Africa and Asia…
Organizing against the occupation--US and Canadian anti-war activists speak out
Editors' Note: In the Interventions section of this journal we include interviews and commentary from intellectuals, activists, and academics on recent and ongoing social movements. Our goal is to contribute to a public dialogue between these at times disconnected groups. We are grateful to Lesley Wood for organizing these e-mail contributions from activists in the US and Canadian movements against the war and occupation in Iraq. While the views …
Breaking the Wave
Using interviews with thirty-two direct action activists and field notes from the period, this article argues that repression limited the diffusion of the tactics used in the 1999 protests against the World Trade Organization (WTO) in Seattle to activists in New York City and Toronto. The tactics under review are affinity groups, blockading, jail solidarity, black bloc, and giant puppets. I argue that repression highlighted the ways that poor act…
HIV- and Aids-related (mis)perceptions and (non)responses of school principals in the Eastern Cape, South Africa
Despite various HIV and AIDS training programmes offered for educators by the South African Department of Education, little has been achieved at the level of management in terms of creating a wider understanding of the social and cultural complexities of the condition and its impact on the quality of teaching and learning. Specifically, there is a lack of developmental programmes to help school principals provide leadership that can ensure that t…
The perceptions and responses of South African school principals regarding HIV and Aids in their schools
Despite numerous HIV and AIDS training programmes for educators, little appears to have been achieved in terms of creating a wider understanding of the social and cultural complexities of the disease and its impact on the quality of teaching and learning. There appears to be a lack of developmental programmes that help principals provide the type of leadership which ensures that teachers and children who live in a context affected by the disease …
Not only a teacher, but an ambassador
This article describes how South African educators were facilitated to adopt the role of HIV/AIDS 'ambassadors' within their circles of influence by participating in a two-year course for an Advanced Certificate in Education for HIV/AIDS in Teaching (ACE-HAT) qualification. It reports on the data generated by a qualitative study of the teachers' experiences with and subsequent to the programme. The programme works from the assumption that the HIV…
Jeffrey Juris, Networking Futures
What kind of respect is this
In this article I attempt to answer the question, ‘How can I influence teachers to be able to contribute to changing social/cultural norms and practices that hamper effective HIV & AIDS education and prevention?’ There is a growing realization that HIV & AIDS education and prevention initiatives need to move away from trying to change the sexual behaviour of individuals towards addressing societal and cultural factors which promote rapid transmis…
Horizontalist Youth Camps and the Bolivarian Revolution
Between 2001 and 2005, the Intercontinental Youth Camp at the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, Brazil became associated with a decentralized, horizontalist form of organizing. When the polycentric forum took place in 2006, this horizontalist identity and strategy did not diffuse successfully to the new site in Caracas, Venezuela. This article argues that for diffusion to be successful, the local hosts must be able to deliberate on the locally …
Short communicationKey differences between school lunches and packed lunches in primary schools in England in 2009
Objective To compare the key differences between school lunches and packed lunches as consumed in a nationally representative sample of primary schools, 6–8 months after the nutrient-based standards for school lunch became mandatory. Design Data on 6580 pupils’ school lunches and 3422 pupils’ packed lunches were collected between February and April 2009 from pupils attending primary schools in England. Fieldwork was conducted over five consecutiv…
The impact of the food-based and nutrient-based standards on lunchtime food and drink provision and consumption in primary schools in England
Objective To assess lunchtime provision of food and drink in English primary schools and to assess both choices and consumption of food and drink by pupils having school lunches. These findings were compared with similar data collected in 2005. Design Cross-sectional data collected between February and April 2009. In each school, food and drink provision, including portion weights and number of portions of each item served at lunchtime, were reco…
Read me to resilience’
The study explored whether and how culturally sensitive stories can encourage resilience in young children orphaned by AIDS. The purpose of the investigation was allied to the paradigm of positive psychology, which focuses on the promotion of potential strengths to buffer children against adversity, as well as on social ecological understandings of resilience, which emphasise that social ecologies have a duty to facilitate children's positive adj…
Supporting Lesotho teachers to develop resilience in the face of the HIV and Aids pandemic
Craig Calhoun, The Roots of Radicalism
Every teacher is a researcher
Since gender is an undisputed driver of HIV infection, teachers concerned with HIV prevention education should ideally encourage critical awareness of and culturally sensitive practices around gender inequalities. Many interventions and programmes have been developed for teachers to enable them to do this, however most have met with limited success. This article proceeds from the viewpoint that for HIV-prevention interventions to be sustainable a…
School lunches v. packed lunches
Objectives To compare food choices and nutrient intakes of pupils taking a school lunch or a packed lunch in eighty secondary schools in England, following the introduction of the food-based and nutrient-based standards for school food. Design Cross-sectional data collected between October 2010 and April 2011. Pupils’ lunchtime food choices were recorded over five consecutive days. Setting Secondary schools, England. Subjects A random selection o…
The impact of the food-based and nutrient-based standards on lunchtime food and drink provision and consumption in secondary schools in England
Objectives To assess lunchtime provision of food and drink in English secondary schools and the choices and consumption of food and drink by pupils having school lunches, and to compare provision in 2011 with that in 2004. Design Cross-sectional data collected between October 2010 and April 2011. In each school, food and drink provision, including portion weights and number of portions of each item served at lunchtime, were recorded over five con…
Lunchtime food and nutrient intakes of secondary-school pupils; a comparison of school lunches and packed lunches following the introduction of mandatory food-based standards for school lunch
Objective To compare the key differences between school lunches and packed lunches as eaten in eleven secondary schools in England, 21 months after the food-based standards for school lunch became mandatory, but before the introduction of nutrient-based standards. Design Data on 358 school lunches and 139 packed lunches were collected in May and June 2008 from pupils attending secondary schools in Sheffield, Manchester, Leicester City and Essex. …
Reaching Beyond the Net
Using a survey of 359 participants in the 2010 protests against the G20 in Toronto, this paper examines the effects and effectiveness of the different communication media in informing diverse participants about the protest. It finds that the communication networks that surrounded the G20 summit protest in Toronto in 2010 were dense and interconnected. Drawing on Tilly's ‘political circuits’, the survey shows that activists at the core of these ne…
You learn from going through the process
In South Africa, the under-resourced and socially challenging contexts in which the majority of schools function, calls for leadership that has the vision to look beyond seemingly insurmountable problems. South African school leaders must develop the capacity to envisage and create schools that function well, in spite of the daunting environmental challenges. To facilitate the development of leaders capable of doing this, we engaged ten schools, …
Designing an effective sexuality education curriculum for schools
Sexuality education forms part of the national school curricula of most sub-Saharan African countries, yet risk-related sexual behaviour among young people continues to fuel the HIV pandemic in this part of the world. One of the arguments put forward to explain why sexuality education seems to have had little impact on sexual risk-taking is that existing curricula have neglected to take into account the complexity of the social, cultural and gend…
Treating ‘Aids blindness’
HIV and AIDS affect all South Africans, irrespective of gender, race, age and economic status. Teachers should therefore be able to meaningfully integrate HIV content into the school curriculum. However, pre-service teacher education programmes still do not pay adequate attention to HIV education, particularly in institutions where students are being prepared to work in environments that are perceived to be unaffected by the consequences of the p…
School travel mode, parenting practices and physical activity among UK Year 5 and 6 children
For girls, encouraging active travel to school is likely to be important for overall PA. Further formative research may be warranted to understand how both parental logistic support and active travel decisions are operationalized in families as a means of understanding how to promote increased PA among pre-adolescent children
Associations between objectively assessed child and parental physical activity
29% of boys and 47% of girls aged five to six years did not meet PA guidelines indicating that these children would benefit from new approaches that focus on increasing physical activity. There were weak associations between the MVPA of 5-6 year old children and their parents, demonstrating that the time that children are active with their parents is not a major source of physical activity. Clinicians and public health professionals should encour…
Increasing children’s physical activity through a teaching-assistant led extracurricular intervention
ISRCTN58502739
Sociology (44 works) · Political science (36 works) · Psychology (27 works) · Pedagogy (22 works) · Law (17 works) · Medicine (17 works) · Participatory action research (14 works) · Politics (14 works) · Citizen journalism (13 works) · Law (13 works)