Confidentiality With Minors: The Need for Policy to Promote and Protect

Abstract

This article presents research about school counselors' attitudes toward breaching confidentiality that the authors conducted immediately before and after the tragic shootings at Columbine High School in April 1999. Two groups of school counselors were demographically similar but differed significantly in their predictions as to whether they would breach confidentiality and in their attitudes toward certain aspects of school counselor practice such as informed consent. School counselors at all levels of employment reported that they were less likely to breach confidentiality after the highly publicized high school shootings and that they were more responsible to their minor clients than to the parents of those clients. Implications for policy makers are discussed.     

Gun Violence and the Meaning of American Schools

In the United States, targeted school shootings have become a distinct genre of violence. In this essay, Bryan Warnick, Sang Hyun Kim, and Shannon Robinson examine the social meanings that exist in American society that might contribute to this phenomenon, focusing on the question: “Why are schools conceptualized as appropriate places to enact this form of gun violence?” The authors analyze the social meaning of American schooling by using empirical data, everyday observations, films, and poetry, and then connect these points of meaning to stories of individual school shooters. Through this analysis, three aspects of school stand out. First, schools are places of both real and symbolic violence, where force and power often rule the day. Second, schools are places connected to expectations of hope and refuge, friendship and romance, and when these expectations are not met, bitter resentment flows against schools. Third, suburban schools are seen as places of expressive individualism, which, in rare cases, is manifest in terms of “expressive violence.” Together, these points of meaning can make schools, for some youth, seem like appropriate places to express violent intentions. The essay concludes by speculating about how this analysis can be applied to prevent school shootings.     

An alternative to fortified schools: Using crime prevention through environmental design (CPTED) to balance student safety and psychological well-being

In response to tragic school shootings, heightened attention has been devoted to making schools safer through the implementation of security features. However, excessive security measures have a negative impact on school climate, student functioning, and academic achievement. Therefore, there is a critical need to design schools that are safe and secure, yet also welcoming and comfortable. As a promising approach in this regard, crime prevention through environmental design (CPTED) is an architectural philosophy that aims to deter criminal or antisocial behavior through environmental design, and it includes a focus on natural surveillance, access control, and territorial reinforcement. This review discusses pertinent effects of the school environment on student outcomes, extant research on the impact of visible security measures, the relationship between students’ perceptions of safety and academic functioning, and how using CPTED could concomitantly address the physical safety and psychological comfort of students at school.     

When the Exception Is the Rule: School Shootings,Bare Life,and the Sovereign Self

Much discourse on school shootings tends to imply a binary separation between what is considered normal and exceptional, between an expected course of human events and sociohistorical aberrations. In this article Harvey Shapiro suggests the need for new directions in our responses: First, he shows how responses to school shootings tend to expropriate and (paradoxically) dismiss certain kinds of violence in order to articulate a vision of the self as sovereign, exerting power over bodily life, exercising a self‐removal from community conversations, and thus claiming what Giorgio Agamben and others call the “sovereign exception.” Second, he suggests how Agamben's development of Walter Benjamin's concept of “divine violence” can unmask prevailing states of exception and can inform education's efforts to challenge binaries of good and evil, urban and suburban, individual and community, justice and law, normal and exceptional, that confound our deliberations and long‐term responses to mass shootings.     

Aggression toward teachers,interaction with school shooting media,and secondary trauma: Lockdown drills as moderator

The purpose of the present study was first to investigate whether both teacher-reported classroom aggression (ATT) and teachers’ interaction with school shooting media (ISSM) are predictors of teachers’ secondary trauma related to school shootings (STSS) and to second, consider how participation in lockdown drills may moderate these relationships. Two measures were created to understand the levels of aggression teachers report occurs in their classrooms and to understand how teachers interact with media related to school shootings. Both ISSM and ATT were associated with higher levels of STSS. Lockdown drills did not appear to interact with these relationships to either strengthen or weaken them. Considering the importance of teachers’ well-being and how it influences their ability to be effective teachers, continued investigation is warranted.     

Normative Considerations in the Aftermath of Gun Violence in Schools

Gun violence in American and Canadian schools is an ongoing tragedy that goes substantially beyond its roots in the interlocking emotional and behavioral issues of mental health and bullying. In light of the need for effective policy development, Dianne T. Gereluk, J. Kent Donlevy, and Merlin B. Thompson examine gun violence in schools from several relevant perspectives in this article. The authors consider the principle of standard of care as it relates to parents, teachers, and community members in a particular school's context. They posit that normative principles may provide a procedural mechanism appropriate for policymakers and practitioners when contemplating and implementing heightened security measures. Finally, they propose Rawlsian reasonableness as an effective and deliberative democratic process that reduces emotional, reactive responses to school shootings. Through these overlapping concepts, the authors advocate for purposeful discussions regarding gun violence in schools based on the unique pragmatic, educational, social, political, and contextual circumstances of individual schools and their surrounding communities.     

From elite traditions to middle-class cultures: images of secondary education in the anniversary books of a Finnish girls’ school, 1882–2007

This article concentrates on visual sources relating to secondary education, and asks how a collection of photographs can be understood and interpreted as part of the institutional and collective memory of one Finnish girls’ school. The photographs were published in the anniversary books of the school. They construct an entirety, where public memories are interwoven with individual and private reminiscences. The article examines how the traditions of jubilee books and the institutional setting of the school establish the boundaries for the visual narratives of the collection and how the self-image and identity of the school and its gendered nature are visualised in the corpus. The long period (1882–2007) opens up possibilities for studying how the changes in the Finnish education system and the alteration of the girls’ school to a co-educational school are presented in the photographs, and how these photographs create the imagery of gender, class, equality and co-education.     

All of Humanity is Here!

This article describes the personal experiences of a teacher turned counsellor developing a student counselling service in a school setting. It explores how a school seeking to become an emotional literate community enabled the development of a counselling service and a Learning Mentor programme, both of which focused on the needs of individual students. This diverse school community reflected a range of social circumstances from professional affluence to unemployment and deprivation, and it is recognized that emotional need is not confined to those from the latter. Open access to personal support enables every student to really feel that they matter. The significance of relationship is highlighted for its capacity to engender a sense of personal worth and of mattering within the community that is staff and students. Key learning from the development is explored for governors, school leadership teams and classroom teachers, and a culture of open and supportive involvement is seen as a means to enable young people to develop a sense of worth and belonging in the school community and thus in wider adult society.     

Brief Analysis of the Tragic Sense of Society in The Great Gatsby

F. Scott. Fitzgerald is famous recorder and spokesman of Jazz Age. He is known for the sensitive perspective of the society and the domination of tragic sense in his works. The Great Gatsby is Fitzgerald's masterpiece. In the novel,Fitzgerald expresses a disillusive feeling and tragic sense of society. Through analysis of connotation of tragic sense of society and its reflection in The Great Gatsby,a further and comprehensive understanding of tragic sense of society in Fitzgerald's works can be achieved.     

Children's participation in school grounds developments: creating a place for education that promotes children's social inclusion

This paper advances the idea that ‘education for the social inclusion of children’ is similar but different to ‘inclusive education’ as it has come to be understood and used by some authors and UK government documents. ‘Inclusive education’ tends to carry an inward emphasis on the participation of children in the education system (with discussions on school culture, transitions, truancy, exclusion rates, underachievement, and school leaving age). In contrast, education for the promotion of children's social inclusion requires an outward emphasis on children's participation in ‘mainstream’ society while they are still children. The latter emphasis is seen to be lacking in educational policy discourse in Scotland though a recent shift in policy towards education for active citizenship is noted. Examples are provided to show how many policy statements enact a limitation on the scope for education to promote children's social inclusion by emphasizing children's deficits as social actors and focussing on the ‘condition’ of social exclusion. The paper draws on an empirical study of children's participation in changing school grounds in Scotland. The analysis shows how the enclosure of learning in books, classrooms and normative curricula was challenged. Learning from school grounds developments was constructed relationally and spatially, but the scope of what was to be learned was often delineated by adults. The paper closes with a discussion of how education that promotes the social inclusion of children will benefit from seeing both children and adults as current though partial citizens and using socio-spatial opportunities for the generation of uncertain curricula through their shared and/or differentiated participation.     

“It’s My Place”: Student Perspectives on Urban School Effectiveness

This study investigated how graduates of an urban alternative school understood, interpreted, and compared their experiences in previous schools that they considered ineffective with their experiences at an effective alternative school. This study found that students find those schools effective that create or allow spaces where they can be empowered, leading to a sense of place. Students’ ownership or affinity to school spaces that lead them to refer to school as “my place” derived from school practices that were instrumental in promoting a sense of identification, commitment, integration, and alliances among students and faculty at the school. Based on the findings of the study, this article argues that for urban schools to be effective for students at risk, they not only need to focus on caring relationships and diverse learning experiences, they also need to create the space to foster a sense of “my place” for students.     

Issues of responsibility when conducting research in a northern rural school

This article focuses on how interaction meetings between researchers and research participants in a northern Finnish village and its village school develop the researchers’ sense of responsibility as part of their research ethics. The ethics of caring is often seen as the root of the ethics of responsibility, but the authors suggest listening to both the “justice voice” and “caring voice.” Reflecting on the research project and on events in the field, three senses of responsibility are distinguished and described: one, the responsibility for relationships; two, political responsibility; and three, the responsibility to maintain a democratic process when presenting results. We argue that the local and bodily experiences of a researcher in the field give a researcher new emplaced knowledge that transforms his or her sense of responsibility.     

National policy and the development of inclusive school practices: a case study

National education policy in England under New Labour Governments has encompassed both a ‘standards agenda’ and an ‘inclusion agenda’, with schools required to respond to both simultaneously. Some previous studies have seen these agendas as contradictory and have seen schools' efforts to develop inclusive practices as being undermined by these contradictions. This paper questions this account with reference to a primary school participating in a collaborative action research project which aimed to develop inclusive practices in schools. It shows how the school, far from finding these agendas contradictory, drew on both in making sense of its situation. It argues that the development of inclusive practices may draw on national policy as a productive resource, and suggests that inclusion scholars and advocates may need to refocus their work if they are to offer such schools alternatives to the formulations of national policy.     

L'image de l'espace scolaire dans les livres de lecture de l'école primaire,Buenos Aires 1853‐1942

This paper seeks to throw new light on an important source for the History of Education, the Reading school book. Within a larger research project we are carrying out on formation of primary schools in the city of Buenos Aires, the Reading book has surfaced as a key documentary source. Our point is that the Argentine Nation State needed an architectonic dimension in configuring its primary school, a dimension that used readings and images that were distinct from material resources that traditionally signified national importance. In brief, Argentina had to turn the primary school into a place easily recognizable for what happens inside ‐ teaching and learning ‐ and for what that teaching and learning stood for. the Nation‐State in its capital city. Reading books took on an important role in this nation buildingprocess, through both iconographie and textual materials that conveyed various ways of imagining school space, especially a poetic sense of space which signified multiple modes of representation and assertion. The most interesting aspect in the paper is its use of the spatial viewpoint, along side of the material aspect of school buildings. The words and images printed in Reading books, their variance and dominance, go beyond the material and evoke the sense and meaning of space in a broader sociohistorical framework.

     

‘You are a Flaw in the Pattern’: Difference, Autonomy and Bullying in YA Fiction

Though portrayals of bullying in children??s books stretch back to Victorian public school stories, this article sees a new subgenre about bullying in young adult novels emerging in the post-Columbine years. Selected works by Jerry Spinelli, Walter Dean Myers, Jaime Adoff, Carol Plum-Ucci and Rita Williams-Garcia are examined, although the article begins by looking at a precursor of this subgenre, Robert Cormier??s classic The Chocolate War. In this subgenre, it is argued that bullying is not presented as dysfunctional adolescent behavior, but as a tool for addressing issues of difference and discrimination on the grounds of race, class, sexual orientation or personality; issues that filter into adolescent culture. High schools are thus portrayed as totalitarian microcosms where bullying functions as a means of social control, curbing deviance from masculine, heterosexual, middle-class and white norms. The narrative techniques and themes of these books??around homophobia, jock culture, rampage shootings and girl-on?Cgirl violence??will be examined.     

对《原野》悲剧内涵的重新探索

《原野》深刻的悲剧内涵在于人类精神最深刻的矛盾和最对立的状态——人类与生俱来的原始野性与社会理性文明之间的冲突，人类强大的、鲜活的原始野性在社会中受到精神异化的压迫后反抗、挣扎，最后成为玉石俱焚的悲剧动力源。     

Social constructs regarding the physical and sexual energy of whites,indigenous South Americans and blacks in Spanish and Colombian primary school reading books between 1900 and 1960*

This article analyses the manner in which the physical and sexual energy of the white, native South American and black populations was represented in reading books for elementary school children in Spain and Colombia between 1900 and 1960. Ninety reading books from representative authors were examined. It was found that the ideal of extraordinary physical vigour attributed to the white male was decisive in justifying Spanish imperialism, the superiority of the male in the patriarchal family and the intervention of authorities in administering people’s bodies. In the case of Spanish texts, the might attributed to the white race was shown as having a motive of pride, whereas in the Colombian case, the mixture with Native Americans and blacks tended to be used as an explanation for the ‘weakness’ of Colombians. Evidence is also found of the way in which education was implicitly conceived as a process of cultural ‘whitening’.     

Noise and Stress in Primary and Secondary School Children: Noise Reduction and Increased Concentration Ability Through a Short but Regular Exercise and Relaxation Program

To assist in decisions about appropriateness of data aggregation, this paper describes and demonstrates analytic techniques developed and used in organizational psychology along with contemporary multilevel analysis. Using these analytic techniques, the relations of educational outcomes (student self-reported academic performance, sense of belonging, and educational aspirations) to the school environment (possible indicators of school quality) were examined. Survey data were obtained from students (N = 11,573 or 82% of the eligible students completed the surveys) who attended 31 middle school students. Results showed that at least some indicators might be represented as school-level phenomena, although the amount of variance explained by school membership was quite small. Results implied that the appropriate level of analysis is concept- and variable-dependent. For example, students' sense of belonging may likely develop by how respect and instruction are revealed to students, such as in classrooms. Future studies of educational effectiveness might consider other groupings of students and emerging theoretical frameworks of organizational effectiveness to determine what constitutes educational quality/effectiveness and their measures at specific organizational levels.     

Boundary Crossing during Pre-service Teacher Training: empowering or hampering professional growth?

Yuli Rahmawati’s paper presents an auto-ethnographic inquiry into her lived experiences as a science teacher in different countries. Through her reflections and analysis of events, Yuli captures and builds a model of her identity and explores the influence of inter- and intra-cultural perspectives in shaping how she recognizes herself and brings meaning to her professional life. Yuli’s insights and explanations of teaching within different cultural contexts highlight the importance of personally relevant and meaningful knowledge, where expectations and accepted norms, that might fit well within one community, may be seen quite differently in another. While for Yuli, this led to professional growth as she inquired and made sense of her new context, my concern is that the social and cultural change could, in some instances, lead to disengagement rather than professional growth. My concern is that the conflict that arises from boundary crossing may be experienced even stronger by inexperienced professionals, such as pre-service teachers. The learning trajectory of pre-service teachers is steep; they need to gain stronger knowledge of curriculum and pedagogy and an awareness of how their students learn. They also need to build confidence in their professional self and what they can do to support and trigger student learning. For this to happen, in the tight time frames available on teacher education courses, pre-service teachers need to understand and engage with the new community that they are placed in very quickly, to make sense of both their role and that of others within the community. This paper suggests that pre-service providers should carefully consider the learning opportunities offered by school contexts, that may vary dramatically from the social and cultural contexts experienced by their teachers as part of their own education, to prevent disengagement or misunderstanding hampering professional growth.