Novice teachers' work: constructing ‘different’ children?

Developing a teacher identity is an ongoing and multifaceted process. In part, the process involves finding a voice amid the clamour of other, often contradictory, voices and complex conditions in which teachers find themselves. Drawing from a larger study of teacher professional identities, this paper explores how two beginning early childhood educators talk about what it means to teach. The paper focuses on how these novice teachers position themselves, and are positioned, by their understandings of the ‘child’. This focus on children is particularly relevant to understanding teacher identities for in educational contexts, teachers and children are inextricably linked – they are part of a relational pair. Using critical discourse analysis as a way of examining interview data, I discuss how a discourse of the ‘normal’ child constructs particular identity positions for children and the adults who work with them.     

Prisoners of The Method breaking open the child‐centred pedagogy in day care centres

The twentieth century has known many splendid examples of professional care and education for young children. But in spite of that, research shows that the practice often does not coincide with our ideals. In this paper basic concepts and their historical roots, that form the foundations of professional care and education of young children are analysed: could these concepts possibly impede contact between teachers/caregivers and children? The concepts of ‘natural development’, ‘develop‐mentally appropriate curriculum’ and ‘child centredness’ are criticised. The drawbacks of a separate children's world (child care centres) are explored. Based on Vygotsky's sociocultural approach the author pleads for scaffolding by giving learning through social looking and participation in adult‐activities a place in child care centres. Besides that, teachers have to value peer‐relationships and to acknowledge that young children do not only play but also want to work and learn together.     

Nurturing Careers in Psychology: Combining Work and Family

The academic workplace, with its requirements for achieving tenure within the first 6 years of employment, is designed in ways that discriminate against young faculty with family care responsibilities, most notably mothers. Mason and Goulden (Academe, http://www.aaup.org/publications/Academe/2002/02nd/02ndmas.htm, 2002, Academe, http://www.aaup.org/publications/Academe/2004/04nd/04ndmaso.htm, 2004) found that women faculty who have babies within the first 5 years following the receipt of their doctorate are less likely to earn tenure than women without babies or men in general. Women at research-intensive universities are twice as likely as their male colleagues to report that they had fewer children than they wanted. In addition, only one-third of women who begin their academic career at research-intensive institutions without children will become a mother. These inequities, sometimes called the “baby gap” or “motherhood penalty” make academic institutions difficult places for new faculty with family care responsibilities. Suggestions are provided to assist new faculty in successfully combining their work and family roles (e.g., establish gender equity in parenting and negotiate for family-friendly policies) and to senior faculty and administrators who want to nurture the careers of their younger colleagues (e.g., support the use of family-friendly policies on campus).     

The consequences of being labelled ‘looked‐after’: Exploring the educational experiences of looked‐after children and young people in Wales

The educational experiences and attainment of looked‐after children and young people (LACYP) remains an issue of widespread international concern. Within the UK, children and young people in care achieve poorer educational outcomes compared to individuals not in care. Despite proliferation of research documenting the reasons for educational disadvantage amongst this population, there remains limited empirical consideration of the lived experiences of the educational system, as perceived by LACYP themselves. This paper draws upon qualitative research with 67 care‐experienced children and young people in Wales. The sample was aged 6–27 years, and comprised 27 females and 40 males. Participants had experienced a range of care placements. Findings focus on how educational policies and practices alienate LACYP from dominant discourses of educational achievement through assignment of the ‘supported’ subject position, where children and young people are permitted and even encouraged not to succeed academically due to their complex and disrupted home circumstances. However, such diminished expectations are rejected by LACYP, who want to be pushed and challenged in the realisation of their potential. The paper argues that more differentiated understandings of LACYP's aspirations and capabilities need to be embedded into everyday practices, to ensure that effective educational support systems are developed.     

A Gender Perspective on the Work and Lives of Women Primary School Teachers

The study presented deals with the work and lives of women primary school teachers in relation to gender order in school and society. The study is based on interviews with 20 experienced women teachers. The results are presented as six themes. (i) Consequences of a teachers' sex in their daily work. At a general level, they understand their professional role as gender neutral, but at the same time they express the importance of their sex in their daily work. (ii) Mother and teacher - teacher and mother, experiences of motherhood and of teaching as work and the meaning of a professional attitude. (iii) Balancing the demands of private life and work life where both spheres are characterised by rationality of responsibility and ethics of care, aspects related to gender. (iv) On socio-emotional work, connected to women in the gender order of society. The teachers describe these dimensions as energy sapping and time consuming, but also as most important for work satisfaction and personal motivation. (v) Informal collegial interaction, a source of emotional support as well as development of professional knowledge. (vi) Power, authority and status. Low status views of the teacher and teaching are described in terms of 'women's work'. In an individual perspective, the woman teacher is in a contradictory situation with regard to positional authority. Their emotional work promotes creation of a relational authority. To the teachers themselves gender seems not to be a very important issue, but gender regimes in schools follow the same pattern as in society. Women teachers seem to be in a position where they reproduce, rather than change, traditional gender patterns.     

A maternal identity? The family lives of British women graduates pre‐ and post‐1945

In contrast to the first generations of university‐educated women, this article will suggest that later cohorts no longer transgressed conventional expectations by rejecting marriage and motherhood on the same scale as their predecessors. Post‐1945 society was a period within which theoretically women could ‘have it all’ and arguably graduate women were under even greater pressure to conform. By exploring the life‐histories of a group of women who graduated between 1947 and 1979, this article explores the individual stories behind the quantitative data to consider the attitudes of highly‐educated women to marriage and motherhood and how they have balanced their personal and professional lives.     

Understanding of epilepsy by children and young people with epilepsy

There is a striking dearth of studies focusing sensitively and in depth on the mainstream educational experiences of children with epilepsy, as viewed by those children themselves. The one‐year project (2006–7) reported here addresses that gap. Children’s perceptions about mainstream teachers’ understanding of epilepsy and school‐based needs are particularly interesting and this work breaks new ground in that connection. The authors report findings from two complementary qualitative methods of data collection: (1) an e‐survey of 44 self‐selected children and young people with epilepsy, and (2) interviews (mainly individual) in mainstream schools with 22 children/young people with epilepsy. Overall, the children and young people (aged 7–18) were clear about the nature of their condition, including seizures. For many, there was an implicit reluctance in accepting epilepsy as a “part of them”; self‐reported feelings of secrecy, stigma and shame abounded. This had repercussions for how schools were seen to need to respond with sensitivity and knowledge‐based understanding. Taking a qualitative methodological approach revealed important insights into complex concepts like stigma in the school context. This was illustrated in children and young people’s readiness to talk about their feelings of “difference” in relation to others when given the opportunity to do so sensitively. The findings have important implications for how schools and services work in a genuinely fully inclusive way with children and young people who have epilepsy.     

Incest victims: inadequate help by professionals

Two surveys studied the inadequacies of professional assistance given to incest victims. In the investigation 130 professionals and 50 adult women victimized as children were interviewed. With respect to young, recent victims, the assistance given was hampered by institutional distrust, the inability of individual professionals to stop the ongoing incest, as well as the frequent breaking off of contact by the young girls themselves. The professionals who helped adult, former incest victims were hampered by shortcomings in knowledge and skills as well as their own emotional resistance. On the average, these adult victims consulted 3.5 professionals over many years. The "long march through the consultation rooms" and the various complaints of the women regarding the professionals are described. In conclusion, recommendations for improvement in assisting incest victims are suggested.     

Redefining self and success: becoming teachers and doctors

This study explores how twenty‐eight women graduates of a liberal arts college renegotiate personal and professional identities over a ten year period. Approximately half of these women entered college planning to pursue a career in medicine; the other half indicated some interest in the field of education. Each participant was interviewed six times over the course of ten years. Analysis suggests that prior designations of women's careers as “traditional” (i.e. teaching) and “non‐traditional” (i.e. medicine) no longer apply as women actively reconceptualize their lives, their identities, their definitions of success, and the meaning of their chosen career. Prior studies that examine the balancing of personal and professional lives also simplify a more complicated process experienced by women who explore multiple understandings of themselves within personal and social structures. The women in this study draw on the critical perspectives learned in college as they recognize and respond to competing social and cultural definitions and discourses of success, work, and self.     

College aspirations and expectations among new African-American mothers in late adolescence

It is a generally accepted finding in the sociological literature as well as in public discourse that adolescent mothers are less likely than their non-parenting counterparts to graduate high school and to attend college. For several decades, however, researchers have pointed out that the implied causal process from teen motherhood to academic failure has been largely unsupported by empirical research. In fact, scholars have recently argued that motherhood may actually serve as a positive turning point in the lives of young women. Using a sample of young African-American women, this study assesses the degree to which teen motherhood not only affects college aspirations but also expectations. Further, it tests the ability of these effects to explain the well-known educational attainment gap between teen mothers and their non-childbearing peers. Results indicate that, in general, young mothers’ college aspirations are similar to those of non-mothers, but that their generally high aspirations for academic success appear to be effectively countered by their decreased educational expectations.     

(Under)valuing care work: the case of childcare workers in small‐town Quebec

This paper challenges the assumptions that women ‘care’ as a matter of course, that care work is natural, inevitable, and easy—requiring little skill and as a result should not be highly valued or rewarded. It does so by assessing the impact of Quebec’s (Canada’s) $7/day childcare program on an economically disadvantaged community near the Quebec/Ontario border. This pilot study of mothers and childcare workers marks the first phase of research in the community. This paper looks at some of the care work involved in childcare settings in small‐town Quebec. At the same time, the paper aims to show the importance and impact of Quebec’s childcare initiative on an economically hard‐hit community. It shows that, despite mothers’ recognition of the importance of the program to themselves, their children and their community, there is still evidence of the undervaluing of the care work that childcare providers do.     

Exploring teachers' perceptions of children's imaginative writing at home

This study explores an area of writing that has been largely neglected – children’s imaginative writing at home. In an educational climate dominated by the standards agenda and top‐down directive discourses, this study draws inspiration from children who are creating opportunities for writing themselves and are developing agency through their writing at home. The positive approach to reading advocated in Margaret Clark’s (1976) seminal work on ‘young fluent readers’ has been very influential. Rather than reporting what children are unable to do, Clark explored the early experiences and home setting of competent pre‐school readers, posing the question: what can they teach us? Taking this lead, one of the premises of this study is that we should similarly seek to understand the experiences of young competent writers so that we can learn more about children who choose to write of their own volition outside of school. This paper presents the findings of the preliminary phase of an ongoing doctoral study. Drawing on questionnaire data, it specifically focuses upon Year 5 and 6 teachers’ views of children’s imaginative home writing, exploring problems of identification and teachers’ perceptions of their pupils as imaginative writers at home.     

Academic Women in the UK: Mainstreaming our experiences and networking for action

This article presents the experiences of women academics of management in the UK, who have used informal, collective strategies to move on, to mainstream their experiences and to challenge existing boundaries of management and their organisations. Having identified the repeating patterns of inequalities in management and management education as women academics, researchers and managers, the authors had to turn to action, to progress and to work on some solutions. This article explores the moving on process by presenting the experiences of women academics of management from two perspectives. Firstly, women academics' stories of their careers and their experience of management are outlined as an emancipatory consciousness-raising process. Secondly, the issues of moving on, taking action and challenging existing boundaries are discussed by means of a case study of a group of women academics who have chosen to question the confines of their working lives whilst gaining credibility in a changing context and driving some of the change for themselves. We offer the process we have engaged in as a strategy to support academic women to move on through critical reflection and action.     

Mothering and the work of educational care – an integrative approach

This article, through looking at mothers’ modes of engagement with their children’s education, proposes an integrative analytical approach to the study of the making of mothers, mothering, and motherhood. The article presents and brings into dialogue four different bodies of anthropological and sociological literature: mothering as a form of care work, anthropological work on child-rearing in different cultural settings, sociological studies of the class negotiation of home–school boundaries, and the theoretical and empirical literature on consumption in post-industrial society. Bringing together ideas of care, culture, class, and consumption into one analytical framework is crucial for attending to, in holistic fashion, the complex ways in which mothering, in different social–cultural contexts, is perceived and practiced.     

THE GIFT OF YEARS GROWING OLDER GRACEFULLY By Joan Chittister

The study was designed to investigate marriage, work, and motherhood role perceptions of 93 adult women who were mostly graduate students at a large urban university. A secondary purpose was to examine the interaction of age‐role status variables and role perceptions. Three pictorial protective cues, each with a single role stimulus demand, were used to assess role perceptions. Stories told to cues were scored for presence of conflict, conflict theme, and outcome. Additionally, a single non‐role‐related cue was included. A high level of interrater agreement was obtained for the projective scoring system. Examination of scores for total sample by cue indicated that conflict was perceived most frequently in the marriage role cue, closely followed by the motherhood role cue. The work role was least likely to be perceived as conflictual Outcome scores, however, revealed that conflicts perceived in the motherhood role most frequently led to negative resolutions. Chi‐square analysis indicated that role perceptions were independent of age‐role status variables.     

Pedagogical professionalism and gender in daycare

In the Netherlands, moral panic about boys’ education and behavioural problems has led to public concern about the almost exclusively female environment in which young boys in daycare find themselves. Female daycare workers are attacked for creating a feminized culture in daycare centres. In this article we explore the extent to which these media stereotypes about female workers in daycare coincide with their own ideas and experiences of their work. In 2004 we conducted a (preliminary) study involving more than 80 childcare students in an intermediate vocational training programme in Social Pedagogic Work to qualify them to work in daycare centres in the Netherlands. The results of the study do not support the binary stereotypical representation of women’s professional and personal characteristics as an adequate picture of these trainees’ opinions of their work in early childhood care.     

Teachers as mothers in the elementary classroom: negotiating the needs of self and other

In this paper, I interrogate the implicit and largely unexamined relationship between mothering and elementary teaching as they are informed by dominant notions of caring in the United States. In an environment where students were seen as not receiving adequate care at home, the teachers in this study felt a need to act as mothers in their professional lives. The consequences of such “deficit thinking” for students are well explored in the literature on teaching and learning. What has been less well explored are the consequences of this teacher‐as‐mother notion for teachers themselves. Drawing from the narratives of six women elementary school teachers, I suggest that assuming the role of mother to one's students not only devalues students' identity and experience, but limits teachers' ability to adequately care for themselves.     

The ‘good life’ and the ‘rich portfolio’: young women,schooling and neoliberal subjectification

This paper explores the ways two young women, living in Australia, make sense of themselves, their activities, and futures. The two young women come from two different schooling contexts—a prestigious private school and a government school. We analyse their self‐narratives in relation to neoliberal discourse, and consider how, and with what effects, their school contexts privilege and make available neoliberal discourses, and work to produce different subjectivities and notions of ‘worthwhile’ or ‘good’ lives. Conceptualising schools as sites of subjection, we analyse the discourses that their respective schools make available to the young women, and how they have appropriated them. We suggest that the different exposure and access to neoliberal discourses position the women very differently in terms of future possibilities and work‐life scenarios in the neoliberal economy. In that way, the article seeks to make a contribution towards understanding schools as implicated in social (re)production and in the (re)production of classed subjectivities.     

Engaging With Quality Improvement Initiatives: A Descriptive Study of Learning in the Complex and Dynamic Context of Everyday Life for Family Child Care Providers

ABSTRACT

Research Findings: This article reports on family child care providers’ views about their engagement with professional development programs, including providers who were and were not participating in Quality Rating and Improvement Systems in Los Angeles, California. Most providers participating in the study were taking active steps to improve their work with children, but only a few providers described themselves as satisfied with the programs available. First, we report on why providers chose to engage (or not) in formal professional development activities; specifically, we explore the relationship between career phase and engagement and the levels of participation reported by seasoned providers. Second, we describe the way many providers strategically self-customized their quality improvement (QI) activities by drawing flexibly on available programs or by finding a coach who would work with them on their specific needs. Practice or Policy: Our findings suggest that in order to increase engagement with formal QI systems, designers of professional development supports must better align these supports with the needs and interests of family child care providers in terms of content and modes of delivery. We propose the concept of just-in-time professional development as 1 way to make QI offerings more responsive to some family child care providers’ needs.     

Transition planning and the needs of young people and their carers: the alumni project

Melanie Smart is a research associate at Sunfield School, Worcestershire, and a trainee clinical psychologist. In this article, she reports the results of a small-scale survey which looked at the views of 17 parents whose children with severe and/or complex learning difficulties had made the transition from a residential special school to an adult placement. Pa rents were asked their retrospective views on the transition planning process; their own involvement; and how the adult placement met the needs of their children.
Melanie Smart's findings indicate that the majority of parents were very much involved in the planning process, although they reported struggling to get consistency of approach and basic information. The young people themselves were found to be marginalised in the planning process, with very few being involved in any decision making. Most parents were happy with the eventual placement, but those who had concerns were still pushing for basic services and care. Of those who had suffered placement breakdowns, the major factor was lack of consistency of approach and failure to use prior information about the child.
This survey shows that parents and their learning disabled children experience difficulties in the transition process. There seems to be a distinct lack of person-centred planning, particularly with this user group, by both child and adult services. Parents are vital to this type of planning approach, particularly when the young people themselves cannot voice their needs or advocate their own rights to quality service provision. Melanie Smart argues that parents need access to better quality information and reassurance that their children will receive the services they deserve as young adults. The various agencies, she asserts, need to work together to ensure that the transition process is effective.