Publication Type: Presentation Proposal
Abstract: Use of technology in the classroom is often encouraged, but can it be used to teach environmental responsibility? Use Lego Mindstorm Robots to create "Eco-Man", who tests for three environmental conditions. Students must help their robot pass these environmental tests.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: In a number of jurisdictions and almost regardless of the welfare regime to which they belong, policy communities are increasingly focussing on investing in the early years and children more generally. Even in those places that have long had generous family programmes and explicit family policies, there is new attention to children. In these policy circles, this shift is considered an optimal anchor for the redesign of their welfare regimes, a broader event occurring everywhere in the European Union and North America. Many of the principles of redesign are similar, with attention going to human capital, "investments" for the future, life-long learning, activation and so on. These signs of convergence prompt us to speak of shift from the Fordism that characterised the post-1945 years and shaped welfare regimes to a LEGO model.
How might we account for this convergence in policy thinking and visions? Are there theories or approaches that are helpful for understanding the similarities in ideas and recommendations that a growing number of policy actors advocate to address the various problems and pressures that beset the contemporary state, and that we term the LEGO model? These are the key questions we explore in this paper. Our goal is to strike a better balance between the study of social policy differences and similarities. We work with a key distinction between convergence in policy visions and divergence in implementation. This distinction is important because our major proposition is that most advanced democracies are currently in the process of renegotiating the terms of the post-war social contract. Therefore, they are in a phase of basic redesign that goes beyond retrenchment and is no longer one of permanent austerity. It is a moment for re-thinking the blueprints for the very architecture of welfare, that is the respective responsibilities of families, markets, and communities as well as states. Our second proposition is that, as they undertake this redesign, many are converging around a policy vision that we describe by using the image of LEGO, the building blocks invented in Denmark in the 1930s. We use the name in two ways. One is as a metaphor, to describe convergence around some basic building blocks of a future social contract and model. The other is as an ideal-type to capture the key features of the child-centred and future-oriented strategy currently advocated as a blueprint for welfare state redesign by an increasing number of people in policy circles. The paper is organised as follows. Part I briefly outlines, in ideal-typical form, the key elements of the LEGO model. By assembling a range of sources, from national to supra-national and international, we aim both to describe the key components of the model and to show how policy communities deploy it in their policy discourse. Part II reviews existing approaches to understanding the welfare state and welfare regimes, in order to assess their utility in understanding such convergence. There are three broad approaches: (i) power resources theories; (ii) new institutionalist approaches emphasising path dependency and regime continuity; and (iii) ideas-based accounts stressing the role of social learning. Building on the insights of all three approaches, Part III documents recent reform initiatives to highlight how features of the LEGO model have been incorporated in response to two challenges: child poverty in liberal regimes and sustainability in continental regimes.