Integration in Victoria: Teachers’ Attitudes After Six Years of A No‐Choice Policy

THE STUDY investigated differences in attitude toward the integration of children with disabilities as measured by responses on the Attitudes Toward Mainstreaming Scale between a 1984 sample of teachers, teachers‐in‐training and non‐teachers in the State of Victoria, Australia, with corresponding groups in 1990. In 1984 a new policy which emphasised the rights of all children to an education in regular schools and the consequent expectation that teachers had no choice about whether they would accept children with disabilities into their classes had been introduced. It was found that in 1990 the teacher groups expressed more positive responses than had their counterparts in 1984. The teacher groups in 1984 had been less positive than the non‐teachers but in 1990 this difference had disappeared. The factor structure of the responses in 1990 emphasised the changes further indicating that children with intellectual disabilities and/or those with disturbed behaviour were those about whom teachers held the most concerns. The availability of ancillary staff was seen as a major factor in the more positive attitudes toward the policy.     

Academic standards and regulatory frameworks: necessary compromises?

Assessment regulations in higher education, which are important for assuring threshold academic standards, reflect institutional cultures and histories, and are shaped by pragmatic concerns about quality indicators such as retention and progression rates, as well as principles of equity. This paper articulates some of the tensions that confront higher education institutions in the development and revision of regulatory frameworks, and describes a survey of assessment regulations from a sample of UK higher education institutions for the first year of undergraduate study. The survey identifies key variations in regulatory policy and practice that challenge assumptions about comparability of academic standards between higher education institutions. These findings imply that student success and progression may not be a simple reflection of academic attainment, and raise questions about notions of equity. It is intended that this research will contribute to informed discussion in the sector about academic standards and the regulatory frameworks underpinning first-year assessment policy and practice, and thus potentially lead to more transparent and consistent practice.     

Creative block play

Blocks should be part of the daily free choice activity in early childhood settings for children between the ages of two and six. Large enough segments of time need to be allotted for blockbuilding activities, so that children can build various structures and also have enough time to use blocks for social and dramatic play. Eugene F. Provenzo, Jr. is Associate Professor of Education at the University of Miami. Arlene Brett is Associate Professor of Elementary Education at the University of Miami. This article is excerpted from The Complete Block Book, ©1983 Syracuse University Press, 1600 Jamesville Avenue, Syracuse, New York 13210. Photographs © 1983 by Michael Carlebach. The book is available from the publisher in paperback edition for $12.95 (plus $1.25 for postage and handling).     

Bridging the implementation gap: a teacher‐as‐learner approach to teaching and learning policy

A major dilemma facing higher educational institutions around the world is how to achieve quality outcomes for students in an increasingly internationalised and competitive environment. To effect change in teaching and learning, we advocate a teacher‐as‐learner approach to the implementation of teaching and learning policy. Our approach has been influenced by approaches to change management as well as contemporary educational theories, such as constructive alignment and deep and surface approaches to learning. In this paper we use these approaches to evaluate the success of a policy initiative designed to encourage subject coordinators to use a faculty‐endorsed template to embed graduate attributes into their subject outlines. The difficulties experienced by teachers at the disciplinary level in using the subject outline template illustrate how a seemingly positive and well‐intentioned initiative can have a potentially minimal effect on teaching and learning practice and, as a consequence, student learning. We suggest that the Course Experience Questionnaire provides a useful model for evaluating not only teaching but also the management of teaching. As teachers responsible for the implementation of teaching and learning policies, we hope our views will provide a more integrated approach to teaching and learning changes in the higher educational context.     

Women's perceptions of the nature and adequacy of their present support relationships

Concern is commonly expressed about the adequacy of women's social support. Typically, women are described as suffering from a support gap or a relational deficit whereby they give more support to others than they receive in return. Men are frequently faulted for not being able and/or willing to provide nurturing and emotional support to the women in their lives.This study was undertaken to examine women's perceptions of the nature and adequacy of their present support relationships. It was intended to learn on whom women typically rely for various kinds of support, how adequate they perceive this support to be, and what changes they would like to see.Results of the study indicated that the majority of women perceive themselves to receive adequate support from others. It was also evident that women feel that they receive about equal support from others in general and from their spouse/intimate, as they give in return. It was found that women, particularlymarried women, relied extensively on men for their social support, most often naming their male intimate as the most supportive person in their lives. Women tended to most frequently characterize the kinds of support they received from men as Shows Caring and Personal Interest, and Gives Encouragement, Praise and Confidence. While women, particularlymarried women, relied more on men than on women for most kinds of support examined, they also expressed more dissatisfaction with the quality of the support received from their male support persons than from their female support persons. Major dissatisfactions described (regarding male support) were lack of understanding and acceptance, and inadequate expression of appreciation for their role in the home.The results suggest that men play a far more prominent role in providing valued social support for the women in their lives than they are generally given credit for doing.     

Decolonising the curriculum: using graduate qualities to embed Indigenous knowledges at the academic cultural interface

The context of this paper is a strategy at a large Australian university that involves embedding a new graduate quality ‘cultural competence’ and lifting the profile of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultures, experiences and histories. It has been argued that the inclusion of Indigenous knowledges is essential for the decolonisation of our higher education institutions. Decolonisation involves removing the barriers that have silenced non-Western voices in our ‘multi-cultural’ higher education system and combatting the epistemic injustices of a system dominated by Western thought. In this paper, we suggest that our university’s suite of graduate qualities can provide a locus for work at the cultural interface between Indigenous and non-Indigenous knowledges. While these qualities may be firmly embedded within Western ways of knowing, being and doing, they can nonetheless be used to interrogate and revisit Western disciplinary knowledge construction and pedagogy so as to help bring about institutional change.     

Improving cancer caregivers’ emotion regulation and supportive message characteristics: Results of a randomized controlled expressive writing intervention*

This study tested whether a 17-day randomized controlled expressive writing (EW) intervention improved cancer caregivers’ emotion regulation ability and if improved emotion regulation predicted increases in verbal person-centered message characteristics present in caregivers’ recalled support conversations with cancer survivors. Participants (N?=?64) were spousal caregivers of hematopoietic stem cell transplant cancer survivors assigned to one of three writing conditions: traumatic disclosure (TD), benefit finding (BF), or a time-management control. Caregivers completed writings three times at one-week intervals, along with pre- and posttest reports of emotion regulation and written accounts of supportive conversations with spousal survivors. Both EW conditions (TD and BF) predicted reduced emotion regulation difficulty compared to the control condition. Cognitive, pronoun, and positive affect word usage within EWs did not predict emotion regulation improvement. However, use of negative emotion words predicted significant increases in emotion regulation difficulty across conditions. Verbal person-centeredness (VPC) message characteristics significantly increased from pre- to posttest for those assigned to the BF and control conditions. Despite change in VPC, emotion regulation did not mediate the relationship between condition assignment and message characteristic outcomes.     

Imagining the Audience: language,creativity and communication in youth media production

This article provides an analytical case study of the production of two films made by young people as part of the VideoCulture project, and of the ways in which they were interpreted. The case study raises key issues to do with the question of audience, which has been a major theme in debates around the place of production in media education. The article suggests that awareness of audience may enable young people to ‘decentre’, and hence to develop a more reflective analysis of their own work. However, it also points to the social differences in the media ‘languages’ that young people use, and the contrasting models of creativity which they imply. Discussion of these issues suggests that media education should avoid the more individualistic approach to creative production which is made possible by digital technology