Charting the waves of prevention: two steps forward,one step back

BACKGROUND: Over the past 30 years, the political response to child maltreatment and its prevention in the US has experienced periods of frantic activity, often followed by long periods of benign neglect. In reflecting on this history, Dick Krugman has referred to this uneven level of attention as a series of "waves" in which apparent progress is often minimized by an inability to sustain political commitment to a given reform or course of action. To an extent, this pattern reflects deep differences among child welfare advocates, researchers, and practitioners on how best to proceed. While most everyone agrees that "it shouldn't hurt to be a child," how to prevent this hurt and at what cost is less clear. METHOD: To address this dilemma, prevention advocates, researchers, and practitioners have struggled with a variety of conceptual frameworks and programmatic reforms. This article summarizes the relative gains and limitation of three such efforts and outlines the lessons these efforts offer those formulating future prevention policies and programs. RESULTS: Specifically, the authors suggest that future prevention efforts will need to take care in avoiding some of the most common mistakes experienced by earlier efforts. CONCLUSIONS: These mistakes or pitfalls include oversimplifying the problem of child abuse; overstating preventions' potential and appropriate target populations; failing to establish a significant partnership with child protective services; compromising depth or quality in an effort to maximize breadth or coverage; and failing to fully engage the public.     

Illustrating the Impact of Performance Measurement Systems on Organizational Performance: The Blue‐Green Game

Business students are thoroughly schooled about the importance of measurement systems that, by their very nature, are designed to accurately measure the past performance of organizations, departments, and individuals. This article describes a team‐based, active‐learning exercise that clearly illustrates an additional important and often underemphasized aspect of performance measurement systems—their influence on individuals’ future behaviors and organizations’ future performance.     

发展中的菲律宾华文教育

菲律宾华文教育历经了华侨教育时期和华人教育时期,有其鼎盛和繁荣的纪录。随着菲律宾对华人的菲化,华文教育工作者落后于形势的变化,华文教育遭遇低谷。但华族是个永不言败的民族,他们从低谷中奋进,推动着华文教育的发展,使华文教育充满希望。     

The Changing Context of Teaching and Implications for Teacher Education

Current efforts to improve teacher quality are misguided by a misunderstanding of the education we need in the future. The efforts are rooted in an education paradigm that worked in the Industrial Age but is becoming obsolete due to revolutionary changes brought about by technology. To prepare our children for their future, we need to redirect our efforts toward shifting the education paradigm, which requires a different kind of teaching force equipped with a different set of abilities from the traditional set of content knowledge and pedagogical skills. This article outlines the reasons for the need of a paradigm shift and outlines a paradigm of teaching. It further suggests some elements of new qualities teachers will need for effective teaching in the new paradigm.     

过去与未来——评析奥古斯特·威尔森的《钢琴课》

奥古斯特·威尔森的《钢琴课》揭示了在美国现实生活中美国黑人面对本种族群落的文化传统时所处的两难处境。威尔森通过对钢琴的去与留这一矛盾的解决 ,阐明了美国黑人要想立足于美国社会开创未来就要把握好过去和未来的关系     

Parents’ past experiences as a mediational tool for understanding their child’s current mathematical learning

This article explores the ways in which parents use their own past experiences as a mediational tool for understanding their child’s current school learning. Following a sociocultural approach parents’ past experiences were examined drawing on the notions of (1) heterochronicity, which looks at the partially overlapping histories of the individual and society and (2) prolepsis whereby the imagined future mediates and constrains the world of the present. The analysis draws on 22 interviews with parents whose children were from three primary multiethnic schools in a town in the Southeast of England. The findings brought to light the means by which parents can either intentionally or unintentionally use the past to inform their current representations and practices. Thus at times they use their past experiences to mediate internalisation (reproduction of the experience), at other times they use them to promote externalisation (change brought about by the experience). It is within this process that parents projected a future ideal for their child, which was either congruent or discordant with their own past.     

从“2＋1”顶岗实习看学生的职业素养教育

职业素养是一个人在职业过程中表现出来的综合品质,将直接影响一个人在未来的职业生涯中职业技能的充分发挥和事业的发展。＂2＋1＂顶岗实习的学生在企业实践中暴露出来的一些职业素养缺失的问题,需要学校和企业携手合作,共同帮助学生养成良好的职业习惯,为社会培养更多有用的人才。文章分析了＂2＋1＂顶岗实习的学生职业素养问题,同时提出了解决的方法。     

Market-Driven Education Reform and the Racial Politics of Advocacy

What is the landscape of the racial politics of public education in the age of Obama? To what factors can we attribute the seeming educational policy consensus from Washington, DC, to the states and from philanthropies and policy entrepreneurs in urban school districts? How should we understand opposition to the policy menu? This article examines commonsense understandings in education reform, which are supported by assertions that market-based schooling options are superior for children of color, and argues that a primary reason for the popularity of such reforms is an underexamined advocacy coalition, formed nominally around school choice, while also encompassing several other entrepreneurial educational reforms. The article describes the structure of this network, arguing that its dominance has precluded an understanding of counter advocacy against school choice and related reforms. It then describes several past and current movements that challenge commonsense understandings of the reforms’ currency, as a way of pushing back against the reforms’ expansion. The article also discusses the activities of grassroots community groups in response to market-based reforms and argues that these efforts can help to expand public deliberation on complex matters of educational policy. The article concludes with recommendations for further examination of these efforts to highlight the concerns, strategies, and solutions to educational inequality being articulated within communities of color and with their allies.     

Raising the stakes: the challenges for teacher assessment

These are changing times in Australia for teachers and their students, with the introduction of a national curriculum and standards driven reform. While countries in Europe such as England, and in Asia such as Singapore, are changing policy to use assessment in the support of and improvement of learning it appears that we in Australia are moving towards creating policy that will raise the assessment stakes for the putative purposes of transparency, accountability and fairness. What can be learnt from countries that have had years of high stakes testing? How can Australia avoid the mistakes of past curriculum and assessment reform efforts? And how can Australian teachers build their capacity to maximise their use of the learning power of assessment? These are the questions that are addressed in this article, with reference to innovative research from global networks that have maintained the assessment focus on learning rather than accountability practices.     

Nostalgia,the Future,and the Past as Pedagogical Technologies

This article provides a genealogical perspective on narratives about the past and the future as governmental discourses in teacher education, public health, and criminal justice in Sweden. Contemporary governmental strategies bring nostalgic memories of the past and visions and fears about the future back to life in the present. The past (history) is a technology of the present to re-memorialize who “we” are and have been. The future is a spatial concept, a technology to shape and nurture the “future oriented” subject bent on the pursuit of lifelong learning. The notions of history and future in the construction of the lifelong learner function to link and harmonize the interest of the individual with that of society. As technologies of government these are not new. Similar technologies were operating in the discourses about the future, society, and the citizen in the first part of the 20th century. What is new is the particular capabilities and capacities of the individual as an agent of the future and the collective principles in which life is lived.     

Documenting and Assessing the Role of Community Colleges in Developing Human Capital

The 21st century community college is an institution that espouses the values of open-access and high quality education. The literature is filled with research that documents the extent to which these institutions contribute to society and to human capital development. The purpose of this article is three-fold: First, to apply a human capital framework to the community college context; second, to describe efforts by several states to document and assess their community colleges' contributions to human capital development; and third, to raise research and policy issues related to improving assessment of that role. The article concludes by addressing future research and policy implications.     

Changes in the Singapore University Student Demand since the Currency Crash

The purpose of this article is to detail what has happened to demand for overseas university education by Singaporeans since the economic crisis of 1997. Briefly stated, the demand for education has risen dramatically over the past year in Singapore, but fear of future economic conditions has caused prospective students to switch their target preferences. As most prospective students feel that they cannot afford to enrol in higher education course programmes in Europe and in North America, they are switching their allegiances to higher education systems and programmes in Australia and New Zealand. The real winners in the new market‐place are the international education institutions that have set up operations in Singapore. Schools that have a history of transnational offerings in Singapore have experienced large increases in enrolments, up to 300 per cent in some areas over the past year. These increases have been achieved without the sacrifice of any teaching quality.     

Connecting the Dots Between Past and Future: Constraints in Episodic Future Thinking in Early Childhood

Preschoolers have limited capacity to use past experiences to prepare for the future. Two experiments sought to further understand these limitations. Experiment 1 (N = 42) showed that 3- to 4-year olds’ difficulty performing anticipated future actions was constrained by their memory for relevant past actions, especially those including temporal information. Experiment 2 (N = 94) sought to determine whether preschoolers fail to see that past experiences can inform future-oriented actions. When the connection between the past and future was experimentally heightened, future thinking accuracy improved, but only if preschoolers remembered past experiences. The results indicate that past recall is a prerequisite for future thinking but failure to bridge past and future further accounts for observed limitations in future thinking in early childhood.     

An innovative program for multihandicapped deaf students using the FSSI.

Teachers in public schools now have more students with more severe disabilities than they did in the past. Unfortunately, efforts to provide them with a quality education have been hampered by a lack of focused instructional planning. This article describes an innovative program developed for deaf multihandicapped students that has created an integrated focus for instruction. The organizing framework for the program incorporates the Functional Skills Screening Inventory, a domain referenced assessment of living and working skills. This structured approach enables teachers to identify current functional levels, develop meaningful short- and long-term objectives, and monitor student progress throughout their educational programs. It also facilitates long-range planning and evaluation of the instructional program on an ongoing basis.     

‘You Norwegians think we female Muslims are not free’: enactment of gendered positional identities during transition stages

This article describes two young Norwegian ethnic-minority girls in their efforts to involve social networks and to position themselves as learners in the transition between lower and upper secondary school. The article explores how they experience future possibilities represented by education and how they use resources in negotiating their everyday lives. We use the concept of social gendered positional identities to study how educational choices are individually and collectively formed and enacted in these girls’ everyday figured worlds. The study builds on ethnographic data collected by following two classmates across multiple settings over two years. We develop biographical cases to demonstrate how cultural factors relevant to learning emerged in particular contexts. The article concludes that gendered positions and choices made in educational transitions are connected and that meta-reflections on personal identity can help students to make decisions about the future.     

Until somebody hears me: parent voice and advocacy in special educational decision making

When a family finds out their child has a disability, they enter the world of special education which has its own terminology, rules, settings and personnel. In addition to grappling with the meaning of their child's special needs, families are also thrown into the role of principle advocate for their child. The research study reported here presents the findings from focus groups conducted in the United States of America with 27 diverse families on their efforts to obtain the best educational outcomes for their children. In this article, Robyn Hess, Amy Molina and Elizabeth Kozleski bring their collective past experiences, as a school psychologist, bilingual counsellor and special education teacher respectively, to bear on this topic and frame the issue from a systemic perspective. They argue that engaging in conversation with families around their needs, as well as assisting them in their efforts to advocate for their child, is the first step in creating more equal partnerships between parents of children with special needs and educational professionals.     

What once was old is new again

Through seminars and continuing educational opportunities, recently certified Lamaze childbirth educators beginning their teaching careers have learned of the changes in birth practices over the past 50 years. However, they may not have heard the personal stories about the locations and conditions in which Lamaze educators first taught. In this column, five childbirth educators share their memories of the birthing climate, teaching strategies, class populations, and other aspects of Lamaze childbirth education 50 years ago and how the "old ways" compare with today's classes. Their stories not only provide an important, historical perspective to build on the past and improve future educational opportunities for expectant women and their families but also illustrate Lamaze's ongoing efforts to promote natural, safe, and healthy birth practices.     

满世界都开放着中华活字——从教学角度谈中国现代文学与世华文学的互补性

论文从教学角度,谈同济大学中文系中国现当代文学课程,近几年来不但尝试打通大陆与台、港、澳,也尝试着打通中国与世界,尤其尝试着用比较的方法,沟通整个华文文学从题材、风格到价值的联系,以试图复活中国现当代文学和世界华文文学的历史与现实,并从一切可能性上找到形式与精神的互补,以寻找和创造前所未有的大华文文学时代。     

Between the Hammer and the Anvil: lifestyles of Russian students in the years of permanent crisis

This article attempts to look at Russian students in the broader social, economic and political context as it has developed over the past 13 years. While society needs higher education to consolidate its identity that was deeply wounded by the shock of the political and economic collapse of the early 1990s, it still lacks the means to maintain it. As a result of a complex interplay of various actors and their short‐term interests, Russian youth is being literally stored as students in higher education institutions, barely able to survive physically, with little hope for improvement in a foreseeable future.     

Math Anxiety: Past Research,Promising Interventions,and a New Interpretation Framework

Mathematics anxiety is a pervasive issue in education that requires attention from both educators and researchers to help students reach their full academic potential. This review provides an overview of past research that has investigated the association between math anxiety and math achievement, factors that can cause math anxiety, characteristics of students that can increase their susceptibility to math anxiety, and efforts that educators can take to remedy math anxiety. We also derive a new Interpretation Account of math anxiety, which we use to argue the importance of understanding appraisal processes in the development and treatment of math anxiety. In conclusion, gaps in the literature are reviewed in addition to suggestions for future research that can help improve the field's understanding of this important issue.