Child Directed Interaction Training for young children in kinship care: A pilot study

This pilot study used a randomized controlled trial design to examine the feasibility and explore initial outcomes of a twice weekly, 8-session Child Directed Interaction Training (CDIT) program for children living in kinship care. Participants included 14 grandmothers and great-grandmothers with their 2- to 7-year-old children randomized either to CDIT or a waitlist control condition. Training was delivered at a local, community library with high fidelity to the training protocol. There was no attrition in either condition. After training, kinship caregivers in the CDIT condition demonstrated more positive relationships with their children during behavioral observation. The caregivers in the CDIT condition also reported clinically and statistically significant decreases in parenting stress and caregiver depression, as well as fewer externalizing child behavior problems than waitlist controls. Parent daily report measures indicated significant changes in disciplining that included greater use of limit-setting and less use of critical verbal force. Results appeared stable at 3-month follow-up. Changes in child internalizing behaviors and caregiver use of non-critical verbal force were not seen until 3-month follow-up. Results of this pilot study suggest both the feasibility of conducting full scale randomized clinical trials of CDIT in the community and the promise of this approach for providing effective parent training for kinship caregivers.     

The role of fictive kinship relationships in mediating classroom competition and supporting reciprocal mentoring

Previous research has suggested that competitive classroom environments can play a role in perpetuating race and class inequalities. However, classroom competition can also promote learning, and eliminating it could do students a disservice. This paper draws on research literature and data from a qualitative study by Konstantinos Alexakos, Jayson K. Jones, and Victor H. Rodriguez on fictive kinship in order to explore the conditions under which classroom competition could benefit students from non-dominant groups. Based on their data, I argue that competition can support the learning of students from non-dominant groups, provided that it takes place in the context of strong emotional ties and successful interaction rituals. I also discuss the role of competition in facilitating reciprocal mentoring, as students seek knowledge and skills from each other in order to participate in solidarity-building classroom interactions. In addition, I show how their study challenges a perceived dichotomy between competition and cultural orientations towards communalism.     

Psychological distress in grandmother kinship care providers: the role of resources, social support, and physical health

OBJECTIVE: The purpose of the present study was to investigate predictors of psychological distress in grandmother kinship care providers. More specifically, it was hypothesized that social support, family resources, and physical health would predict psychological distress in grandmothers raising grandchildren. METHOD: One hundred and two grandmothers raising grandchildren in parent-absent homes completed the Brief Symptom Inventory, Short Health Form-36, Family Resource Scale, Family Support Scale, and a questionnaire requesting background and demographic data. RESULTS: Results indicated that psychological distress was predicted by family resources, participants' physical health, and to a lesser extent, social support. CONCLUSION: The findings indicate that family resources, social support, and physical health affected psychological distress in grandmothers raising grandchildren. Grandmothers who reported fewer resources, less social support, and poorer physical health tended to experience higher levels of psychological distress. This study suggests that greater attention be given to interventions aimed to decrease psychological distress and improve the financial resources and physical health of grandmothers raising grandchildren.     

Queer (v.) queer (v.): biology as curriculum, pedagogy, and being albeit queer (v.)

In order to advance the purpose of education as creating a sustainable world yet to be imagined, educationally, queer (v.) queer (v.) expounds curriculum, pedagogy and being, which has roots in sexuality—the public face of the private confluence of sexuality, gender, race and class, are a necessary framework for queer. If queer is a complicated conversation of strangers’ eros, then queer facilitates the creation of space, revolution and transformation. In other words, queer, for science education, is more than increasing and privileging the heteronormative and non-heteronormative science content that extends capitalism’s hegemony, but rather science as the dignity, identity, and loving and caring of and by one’s self and fellow human beings as strangers.     

Teaching about queer families: surveillance,censorship, and the schooling of sexualities

In this paper, we investigate primary school teachers’ reflections on addressing the topic of same-sex families and relationships in their classrooms. Informed by queer theoretical and Foucauldian analytic approaches, we examine teachers’ potential use of texts, such as picture storybooks, which introduce representations of same-sex relationships and desire. By employing a case-study approach, our aim is to provide insights into the pedagogical decisions and the heteronormative conditions under which three teachers in the Australian context attempt to deal with the topic of same-sex families/relationships. Attention is drawn to the regulatory surveillance of the parental gaze and the silencing and marginalization of sexual identity issues in order to illuminate the ways in which the micro politics of teaching about queer families and relationships are inextricably linked to broader macro processes governing the institutionalizing influences of heteronormativity, heterosexism and homonegativity. Implications for teacher education are outlined.     

School toilets: queer,disabled bodies and gendered lessons of embodiment

ABSTRACT

In this paper we argue that school toilets function as one civilising site [Elias, 1978. The Civilising Process. Oxford: Blackwell] in which children learn that disabled and queer bodies are out of place. This paper is the first to offer queer and crip perspectives on school toilets. The small body of existing school toilet literature generally works from a normative position which implicitly perpetuates dominant and oppressive ideals. We draw on data from Around the Toilet, a collaborative research project with queer, trans and disabled people (aroundthetoilet.wordpress.com) to critically interrogate this work. In doing this we consider ‘toilet training’ as a form of ‘civilisation’, that teaches lessons around identity, embodiment and ab/normal ways of being in the world. Furthermore, we show that ‘toilet training’ continues into adulthood, albeit in ways that are less easily identifiable than in the early years. We therefore call for a more critical, inclusive, and transformative approach to school toilet research.     

Child care for children with and without disabilities: The provider,observer, and parent perspectives

This three-phase study, part of a larger study conducted by the Midwest Child Care Research Consortium (MCCRC), investigated the characteristics of child care providers in inclusive and non-inclusive center-based classrooms and family child care homes, the observed quality of care in a subset of these programs, and families’ perceptions of quality and satisfaction with child care services. A telephone survey of 2022 randomly selected Midwestern providers, 36% of whom provided inclusive services, revealed that inclusive providers rated themselves higher on most quality-related indicators. Inclusion status was related to observed quality in family childcare homes (n = 132), with non-inclusive homes higher, while trends in the opposite direction were observed in preschool center-based classrooms (n = 112) but not in infant/toddler center-based classrooms (n = 105). Six percent of the 1325 parents surveyed reported parenting a child with a disability. These parents indicated less income, and more frequent changes in child care settings than other families, and reported the quality of their children's child care as good, particularly if center-based. Improved access to inclusive child care services and enhanced training opportunities related to serving children with disabilities and inclusion, especially for family child care providers, is recommended.     

Child care choices: A longitudinal study of children,families and child care in partnership with policy makers

Child Care Choices is an example of new early childhood research based on a relationship between policy makers and researchers. It is also an example of large-scale longitudinal team-based research into early childhood in Australia. The ongoing study addresses the professional problem for practitioners and policy makers of the increasing use of multiple care settings and changes to care arrangements in the early years and their possible impacts on child development. The project will follow an initial sample of 693 families with a child aged from birth to three years over a three-year period. An ecological framework is used to include the influences on child development of characteristics of the children and their families, their city or country location, as well as their childcare history and current care arrangements. Development is measured in terms of children’s health, motor development, social and emotional development, language and communication as well as emerging literacy and numeracy. The article discusses the unique features of the project in Australian early childhood research, its history, preliminary findings, and the potential of this kind of large-scale, longitudinal team-based research conducted in partnership with policy makers to contribute to policy as well as to theoretical debate.     

Mothering young children: Child care, stress and social life

This study focuses on mothers’ and young children’s everyday social experience by analyzing their social relationships, social support in child care, mother-child interaction, and mothers’ evaluations of all these aspects. Three hundred and eighty-four mothers with a child aged between I and 3 years, living in a city in Central Italy, were interviewed. A Principal Components Analysis was performed on items concerning mothers’ and children’s social experience and mothers’ evaluations. Four PCA generated factors were regressed on the mother’s and Four PCA generated factors were regressed on the mother’s and child’s characteristics. Results show that, even in a context characterized by social conditions supportive to mothering, there is a comparatively widespread desire for social interaction with other mothers and children. A stress related to intensive mothering was found in a minority of the mothers and was predicted by the mothers’ continuous commitment in child care during the whole day. Results are discussed in relation to the hypothesis that social contacts with other mothers may have a mitigating effect on mothers’ stress. One implication is that early educational services that provide the opportunity for social intercourse among parents can be an important resource for them.     

Connecting with Learning: Motivation, Affect and Cognition in Interest Processes

In this paper we draw on our research on interest to explore the questions posed for this special issue. Interest is conceptualized as an affective state that represents students’ subjective experience of learning; the state that arises from either situational triggers or a well-developed individual interest. Drawing on the broad research literature on interest, and using our own findings in relation to the state of interest, we consider how interest represents an integration of affect, motivation and cognition. In particular, how the state of interest brings together motivation in the form of prior goals and interests and focuses them into on-task behavior. We illustrate ways that our research monitoring on-task sequences of affect and behavior, is confronting some of the methodological concerns posed in relation to measurement of affective states. Finally, we examine some of the paths by which triggered states of interest can contribute to productive student engagement with learning.     

Fostering kinship with animals: animal portraiture in humane education

Visual depictions of animals can alter human perceptions of, emotional responses to, and attitudes toward animals. Our study addressed the potential of a slideshow designed to activate emotional responses to animals to foster feelings of kinship with them. The personal meaning map measured changes in perceptions of animals. The participants were 51 students enrolled at a pre-university college in Montreal, Quebec. Major conceptual themes were developed based on students’ responses on the PMM both pre- and post-slideshow. Ninety-two percent changed their perceptions of ‘Animal’ after viewing the slideshow. Pre-slideshow perceptions of ‘Animal’ were described primarily as Pets/Symbols, Biological/Wild Nature, Commodity/Resource, and Dangerous. After the show, the perceptions shifted to Kinship and Sentience/Individuality, with substantial increases in the depth and emotion associated with responses. Thus, viewing animal portraiture improved feelings of kinship with animals and enhanced perceptions of animal individuality in a classroom setting.     

Sensorial experiences and childhood: nineteenth-century care for children with idiocy

Following Foucault’s analysis of expanding psychiatric power, this article addresses the shift from psychiatry into pedagogy in interventions concerning children with mental problems in the nineteenth century. The aims of this article are twofold. First, to answer the question of how the notion of “idiocy” developed in the context of an increasing interest in sensorial experiences in childhood, in relation to both psychopathology and “normalcy”. New research into the early nineteenth-century case of the “wild boy of Aveyron” reveals the importance of care in the first observations of the boy and the connection that was subsequently made with sensorial experiences in childhood and child development. In the wake of the work of Enlightenment alienists such as Pinel and Itard, Edouard Séguin constructed an educational trajectory for children with mental impairments in which, through strict pedagogical guidance, the lack of “will” would be restored by stimulating the senses. The second aim is to examine the case of the first autonomous school for “idiotic” children in The Netherlands. Following the “praxeography” approach, I focus on the interventions by the Reverend Cornelis van Koetsveld, who shaped his “cure by education” through training the senses in children with problems.     

Stone Walks: inhuman animacies and queer archives of feeling

Excavating what Jeffrey Cohen [2015. Stone: An ecology of the inhuman. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press] calls ‘lithic ecomateriality’, in this paper we illustrate how rocks have traditionally been conceptualized through three tropes: rocks as insensate; rocks as personified; and rocks as transformative. We take up the concept of inhuman to challenge human-centric taxonomies of rocks and animacy. If rocks are not lifeless, or only considered as ‘resources’ or ‘threats’, to humans, then thinking with rocks as vital extends our ethical and political response. In the final section of the paper, we consider archives, not as a logical form of organizing knowledge, but as material, vital, and affective. We argue that when stones and archives are examined as something more than stable things – as interfactual, transcorporeal, and transmaterial co-compositions – different ethical relatings to the inhuman world become possible.     

A queer politics of emotion: reimagining sexualities and schooling

This paper draws together [Hochschild's (1979) Emotion Work, Feeling Rules and Social Structure.” American Journal of Sociology 85: 551–575; (1983) The Managed Heart: Commercialisation of Human Feeling. London: University of California Press] concepts of emotional labour and feeling rules with Ahmed's affective economies [(2004a) The Cultural Politics of Emotion. New York: Routledge; (2004b) “Affective Economies.” Social Text 22 (2): 117–139; (2008) “Sociable Happiness.” Emotion, Space and Society 1: 10–13; (2010) The Promise of Happiness. Durham: Duke University Press] and queer phenomenology [(2006a) Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. London: Duke University Press; (2006b) “Orientations: Towards a Queer Phenomenology.” GLQ: A Journal of Gay and Lesbian Studies 12 (4): 543–574] as a way to address wider questions about sexuality and schooling. It highlights the value of the everyday politics of emotion for elucidating and clarifying the specificities, pertinence and complementarities of Hochschild's and Ahmed's work for reimagining the relationship between sexualities and schooling. The combination of their approaches allows for a focus on the individual, bodily management of emotions while demonstrating the connectedness of bodies and spaces. It enables disruption of ‘inclusive’ and ‘progressive’ educational approaches that leave heterosexuality uninterrupted and provides insight into how power works in and across the bodies, discourses, practices, relations and spaces of schools to maintain a collective orientation towards heterosexuality. It also counters linear narratives of progressive change, elucidating how change is a hopeful but messy process of simultaneous constraint, transgression and transformation. Key moments from a three-year study with lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBT-Q) teachers entering into civil partnerships in Ireland serve as exploratory examples of the theoretical ideas put forward in this paper.     

Drawing insight from pictures: the development of concepts of false drawing and false belief in children with deafness,normal hearing,and autism

Theory-of-mind concepts in children with deafness, autism, and normal development (N = 154) were examined in three experiments using a set of standard inferential false-belief tasks and matched sets of tasks involving false drawings. Results of all three experiments replicated previously published findings by showing that primary school children with deafness or autism, aged 6 to 13 years, scored significantly lower than normal-developing 4-year-old preschoolers on standard misleading-container and unseen-change tests of false-belief understanding. Furthermore, deaf and autistic children generally scored higher on drawing-based tests than on corresponding standard tests and, on the most challenging of the false-drawing tests in Experiment 2, they significantly outperformed the normal-developing preschoolers by clearly understanding their own false intentions and another person's false beliefs about an actively misleading drawing. In Experiment 3, preschoolers outperformed older deaf and autistic children on standard tasks, but did less well on a task that required the drawing of a false belief. Methodological factors could not fully explain the findings, but early social and conversational experiences in the family were deemed likely contributors.     

Embeddedness,Affect, and Reading

Children's Literature in Education - A 4-E model of cognition suggests that it is embodied, embedded, enacted, and extended. All these elements are permeated by a fifth...     

Reading gender: a feminist,queer approach to children's literature and children's discursive agency

Children's literature helps young people make sense of gender. However, while books offer children the imaginative ability to create their own worlds, normative gender can manifest in characters and stories. The study described in this article draws upon ‘disruptive’ storytimes with 114 preschool children, interviews with 20 parents and staff, and observations at 20 preschools. Employing a feminist, queer approach, I develop two derivative books that switch a boy-hero for a girl and vice versa. These books are read to children in educational settings. This method interrogates gendered characters and stories’ attachments to such concepts as love, acceptance, bodily agency, and adventure. Results show how children interact with these characters and stories and how they use categorisation and narrative construction to make sense of gender. I focus on the gender discourses at play and moments of childhood discursive agency. Themes include literature, doing and being, positioning, bodies, and feminist tales.     

Trump,trans students and transnational progress

Abstract

The Trump Administration’s attempts to rescind trans students’ domestic legislative protections is part of a new period of backlash against trans rights progress globally. This article examines the USA’s changing role concerning trans students in education policy and rights progress internationally. It outlines developments in transnational policy for trans students. It contextualises US leadership in this policy area, particularly US President Obama and US President Trump’s use of executive powers. It considers theoretical conceptualisations of trans rights ‘progress’ using the work of queer and trans theorists, before analysing data from 60 interviews with key informants participating high-level global networking for trans students’ rights, documenting how stakeholders characterise recent US contributions. Several informants identified a period of ‘progress’ in trans rights during the Obama Administration, but others were more sceptical of such claims and critical of recent policy change by the US Government’s Trump Administration. Alternative models for Northern and Southern engagement in global networking for trans students’ rights are outlined and discussed.     

Aesthetics,Affect, and Educational Politics

This essay explores aesthetics, affect, and educational politics through the thought of Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Rancière. It contextualizes and contrasts the theoretical valences of their ethical and democratic projects through their shared critique of Kant. It then puts Rancière's notion of dissensus to work by exploring it in relation to a social movement and hunger strike organized for educational justice in Chicago's Little Village neighborhood. This serves as a context for understanding how educational provisions are linked to the aesthetic distribution of perception within the neoliberal city. It also serves as a powerful example of how these orders of perception are resisted and subverted at the local level by aesthetic and affective means. Through the Little Village hunger strike the essay argues that while Rancière allows us to recognize the aesthetic dimensions of the political, he falls short in addressing tactical and/or affective considerations. The essay concludes by seeking to extend the critical efficacy of Rancière's dissensus through a rendering of tactical affect within Deleuzian metaphysics.