Challenging Behaviour in the Classroom

Challenging behaviour among children with severe learning difficulties has drawn relatively little attention from educationists. Dr John McEvoy, Andrew McDonnell and Bob Dearden, who have been running workshops in behaviour management in Birmingham, seek to explore this issue further and offer their views on policy and training.     

Putting themselves together

The author describes a semester teaching basic composition to a class of New York City women college students on public assistance. His narrative dramatizes how the students write in powerful and impressive ways on a variety of themes and have original and interesting responses to the short stories they read and to a guest author they meet.     

心路历程--世世代代

Dear Friends, Every one of us was young at some time inthe past.Even our planet was young once-billionsof years ago.Some of you are still young.The rest of uslook back to our youth with mixed feelings.We generallyhad better health and more energy than we have atpresent.But,we did not have the life experiences that wehave gathered over the years.     

Assessing the Occurrence of Learning in Children with Profound Intellectual Disability: A Conditioning Approach

Although children with the most profound forms of intellectual disability are clearly capable of learning, they are frequently unable to acquire skills and knowledge through the familiar social learning processes of modelling and verbal instruction. Instead, they rely on more basic learning processes, such as habituation, classical conditioning, and operant conditioning. This paper defines these basic processes and indicates their importance in allowing behaviour to adapt flexibly to changing environmental circumstances. Research on basic learning processes in which children and young adults with profound intellectual disability have acted as participants is then evaluated. The literature indicates that work of this kind is of clear relevance to those involved in facilitating the development and education of children with intellectual disability. This is because research and theory in the area of learning suggests effective ways of assessing non‐verbal children's cognitive capabilities and preferences and indicates ways of changing behaviour to produce educational outcomes and remediation of problem behaviours. Work of this kind thus provides the basis for intervention programs that can enhance the quality of life for this most disadvantaged group of children.     

Defects 101

An English professor at a community college in New York City argues, by analogy with contentions made by the neurologist Oliver Sacks about some of his patients, that the testing his university system uses to evaluate his students' writing is only good at exposing deficiencies, not strengths; he claims that students write under constraints that no professor or professional writer would accept. He concludes that it is less important for his students to satisfy mandated rubrics than to satisfy his own rigorous responses as a professional and devoted reader of literature.     

Mobile Chinese students navigating between fields: (Trans)forming habitus in transnational articulation programmes?

Abstract

Transnational articulation programmes are one way China is attempting to advance its higher education (HE) system. We report a study of twelve Chinese students’ experiences in two China-Australia 2?+?2 articulation programmes. In our analysis of semi-structured interviews, we use Bourdieu’s concepts of field and habitus to understand the impact on the habitus of the students. We report the experiences of the Chinese students in the HE sub-field in Australia. Students were like fish in water with the logics of practice of Chinese HE. In the new sub-field of HE in Australia, their habitus was out of place. This field/habitus mismatch created a field-habitus dissonance that can be productive of change to the habitus. Some in the study strategised to overcome this field-habitus mismatch and to adjust to the logics of the new field. We designate this emergent habitus as an in-between, diasporic cosmopolitan habitus, while others were able to ‘compartmentalise’ the demands of the new field, indicating durability of habitus.