Priority Education Zones in Mauritius

This article discusses the Priority Education Zones project (ZEP) in Mauritius. The original and innovative dimensions of the project are described, together with the difficulties encountered during the setting-up of the ZEP schools. The article covers five main issues: the status of the ZEP project; the minimal conditions for success; the implications concerning the teachers; the obstacles faced; and the strategy devised to implement the ZEP project, while overcoming the obstacles.

Leadership Practice in Service of Homeless Students: An Examination of Community Perceptions

This qualitative study examines the collaboration and leadership practice that influences the education of homeless students in a large Mid-Atlantic city. The perspectives of administrators and staff members from three homeless shelters are analyzed with insights from Spillane’s (Distributed leadership, 2006) distributed leadership theory. Findings from the study indicate that differences in shelter and school structures and cultures present significant obstacles to productive communication that would facilitate homeless children’s schooling. Several structural and programmatic recommendations are made towards developing more effective leadership practice among schools and shelters.

Project InterActions: A Multigenerational Robotic Learning Environment

This paper presents Project InterActions, a series of 5-week workshops in which very young learners (4- to 7-year-old children) and their parents come together to build and program a personally meaningful robotic project in the context of a multigenerational robotics-based community of practice. The goal of these family workshops is to teach both parents and children about the mechanical and programming aspects involved in robotics, as well as to initiate them in a learning trajectory with and about technology. Results from this project address different ways in which parents and children learn together and provide insights into how to develop educational interventions that would educate parents, as well as children, in new domains of knowledge and skills such as robotics and new technologies.

Homeless and Disabled: Rights, Responsibilities, and Recommendations for Serving Young Children with Special Needs

Homelessness is a growing social problem in the United States. Especially vulnerable to this phenomenon are young children because homelessness is viewed as a breeding ground for disabilities. Despite federal legislation ensuring educational opportunities, the educational needs of children who are homeless are frequently unfulfilled. This article reviews the educational rights of children who are homeless, including those with disabilities, and offers recommendations and suggestions as to how early childhood programs can help meet the needs of homeless young children with disabilities and their families.

Kindergarten Children Discussing the Fairness of Probabilistic Games: The Creation of a Primary Discursive Community

In this paper we analyse the language used by kindergarten children and their teacher while they discuss the fairness of two games that involved the concept of chance. Their discussions show that the children are able to overcome their primary intuitions concerning the fairness of a game and to comprehend the important role of materials. The children mostly used counting strategies in order to justify their opinion; this reveals the establishment of a primary discursive community based on the premise that each opinion should be justified in order to be accepted by the other children and the teacher.

Nightmares,Idylls, Mystery,and Hope: <Emphasis Type="Italic">Walk Two Moons</Emphasis> and the Artifice of Realism in Children’s Fiction

Sharon Creech’s Walk Two Moons is a defining example of contemporary realistic fiction for children. This article argues that Walk Two Moons models storytelling as a tool which children need to understand their own relationship to reality and to literature. Rather than employing a grim verisimilitude, as some critics have charged, Creech has created a novel of realistic character development which also challenges any simplistic understanding of children’s realistic fiction through its complex and self-referential narrative structure and use of literary language. The result is a narrative which, in the face of painful and tragic circumstances, empowers readers toward a hopeful and optimistic view of life’s mysteries.

Interdependence, Garbage Dumping, and Feral Dogs: Exploring Three Lifeworld Resources of Young Children in a Rural School

In this article, we concentrate upon the lifeworld resources that comprise the funds of knowledge for children living in a rural community in the southeastern United States. Through interview conversations with a group of third grade children, we identified three lifeworld resources—interdependence, garbage dumping, and feral dogs—that rural teachers might draw on to generate curriculum that is connected to the community in which they teach. Through such connections rural teachers may increase the likelihood that they will remain teaching in rural schools.

Parents’ Perceptions of Child Care for Children with Disabilities

Sixteen Minnesota families with children with disabilities participated in a 2-year interview study of their care experiences. Findings show that families developed a network of care providers, struggled to pay additional costs for care, were not informed of community services and programs, and believed that their children received adequate child care. This study highlights the need to provide information to families and providers and to link services in both rural and urban communities.

The Journey from Telling to Being: Narrative Ways of Understanding Applied to South African Children’s Hero Stories

Children are raised hearing stories of local and mythic heroes in every society (Campbell, 1968). Parents and teachers have used tales surrounding the lives of heroes to teach children about courage, honor, and integrity for thousands of years. Yet, in spite of this rich history, there is astonishingly little research about the impact of hero stories on the lives of children. In this study, data were obtained from children in a South African primary school exploring the uses of hero stories in the social construction of the self as hero. Implications for counseling children are discussed.

Clergy’s Views of the Relationship between Science and Religious Faith and the Implications for Science Education

Since many teachers and students recognize other kinds of knowledge (faith) based on other ways of knowing, consideration of these realities is appropriate for the science education community. Understanding the multitude of ways that clergy view relationships between science and faith (i.e. alternative ways of knowing) would assist in understanding various ways that people address complex issues arising from ideas about science and faith. We administered a questionnaire composed of multiple-choice and short answer items to 63 United Methodist ministers. Findings included (1) that formal, organized faith contexts (e.g. church services) serve as informal science education opportunities, (2) participants demonstrated considerable diversity regarding the types of relationships developed between science and faith, and (3) participants recognized a need exists for better understandings of science and its relationship to faith for them, their colleagues, and their congregations.

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Sustaining a non-dominant activity in school: Only a utopia?

This article examines why an initially successful innovative pedagogical practice was not sustained. The innovative practice was a computer-mediated activity known as Fifth Dimension (5D) within a collaborative project between a university and a local elementary school. The analysis identifies conflicts and transitional actions which prevented participants from continuing the 5D and yet reveal that the 5D had an impact on the participants’ dominant activities. The analysis provides grounds for rethinking the sustainability of innovations in school as a process of interplay between dominant and non-dominant activities which includes conflicts and almost unnoticeable transitional actions.

Growth and diversity in doctoral education: assessing the Australian experience

The major growth of doctoral education in recent decades has attracted attention from policy makers and researchers. In this article we explore the growth of doctoral education in Australia, its impact on diversity in respect of the doctoral population, shifts in disciplinary strengths, institutional concentration and award programs. We conclude that there has been both change and continuity in the provision of doctoral education with extensive variation at the level of practice in what is a reasonably stable system featuring continuing hierarchical institutional diversification. The limitations of available data and issues for further research, policy and practice are discussed.

The Dispositions and Skills of a Ph.D. in Education: Perspectives of Faculty and Graduate Students in One College of Education

Twenty-two faculty and graduate students were interviewed in one college of education in order to understand what the college and its constituents view as the skills, habits of mind, and dispositions needed to obtain a Ph.D. in Education. Analysis of the data was conducted using professional socialization as a theoretical framework, allowing for an understanding of the different perspectives of this topic as viewed through a developmental lens. Implications for theory and practice are included.

Intuitive nonexamples: the case of triangles

In this paper we examine the possibility of differentiating between two types of nonexamples. The first type, intuitive nonexamples, consists of nonexamples which are intuitively accepted as such. That is, children immediately identify them as nonexamples. The second type, non-intuitive nonexamples, consists of nonexamples that bear a significant similarity to valid examples of the concept, and consequently are more often mistakenly identified as examples. We describe and discuss these notions and present a study regarding kindergarten children’s grasp of nonexamples of triangles.

“Beneath their cheerful bunny faces,his slippers had steel toe caps”: Traction Cities,Postmodernisms, and Coming of Age in Philip Reeve’s <Emphasis Type="Italic">Mortal Engines</Emphasis> and <Emphasis Type="Italic">Predator’s Gold</Emphasis>

This article discusses Philip Reeve's young adult science fiction novels as literary collages. It explores the ways in which the author uses postmodernisms to introduce big ideas and construct a compelling futuristic world that combines fast-paced adventure with the bildungsroman.

Co-sleeping and the Importation of Picture Books About Bedtime

In mainstream Western cultures where bedtime means isolation and separation from adults, picture books about bedtime are cultural artifacts created especially for this transitional process of separation. In a culture such as Taiwan where children often sleep with their parents, siblings, or other caregivers until elementary school, the need for picture books about bedtime is an imported concept. The large number of translated Western bedtime books found in Taiwan becomes a rich area in which to explore the impact of imported ideas of childhood on Taiwanese picture book creation. This article takes a close look at the books created by Taiwanese authors with a bedtime theme and notes their culturally hybrid qualities.

Implications of Japan’s Center-based Night Care: A 1-year Follow-up

With increasing numbers of women joining the evening/nighttime workforce, there is a need for quality childcare during these hours. This project, conducted in Japan, sought to compare the effects of expanded childcare on the development and adaptation of 866 young children after one year. Parents completed a survey on the childrearing environment at home, their feelings of self-efficacy, and the presence of support for childcare. Childcare professionals evaluated the development of children. The results of the multiple regression analysis indicate that factors in the home environment, not type of centerbased care, explained developmental risks one year later.