Shoes on the streets and byways of New York

The author describes his experiences helping to teach a writing workshop for the patrons of a Manhattan soup kitchen. The participants are, he learns, less migratory in some ways than he and the other teachers, yet they all share ideals about the Big Apple as well as experiences on the streets of New York City. The author quotes with permission from the participants' writings and presents the classroom routines by recreating one of the typical meetings from the early years of the workshop.     

Supporting children’s transition to school age care

While a great deal of research has focused on children’s experiences as they start school, less attention has been directed to their experiences—and those of their families and educators—as they start school age care. This paper draws from a recent research project investigating practices that promote positive transitions to school and school age care. Data were generated through questionnaires, document analysis, visits to sites and conversations with a wide range of participants. In this paper, data related to school age care are reported. The results emphasise the importance of communication in the development of strong positive relationships among all those involved in transition. The practices identified as effective reflect the principles of My Time, Our Place: Framework for School Age Care in Australia, and are aligned with the Transition to School: Position Statement, which focuses on the opportunities, expectations, aspirations and entitlements for all during educational transitions. Drawing on these practices, possibilities for enhanced professional practice are explored.     

Issues in boys' education: a question of teacher threshold knowledges?

This paper exploresthe effects of specific teacher threshold knowledges about boys and gender on the implementation of a so‐called ‘boy friendly’ curriculum at one junior secondary high school in Australia. Through semi‐structured interviews with selected staff at the school, it examines the normalizing assumptionsand ‘truth claims’ about boys, as gendered subjects, which drive the pedagogical impetus for such a curriculum initiative. This research raises crucial questions about the need for the formulation of both school and governmental policy grounded in sound research‐based knowledge about the social construction of gender and its impact on the lives of both boys and girls and their experiences of schooling. This is crucial, we argue, in light of the recent parliamentary report on boys' education in Australia which rejects gender theorizing and given the failure of key staff in the research school to interrogate thebinary ways in which masculinity and femininity are socially constructed and institutionalized in schools through a particular ‘gender regime’. While some good things are happening in the research school, the failure to acknowledge the social construction of gender means that ultimately the school's programs cannot be successful.     

God's Word, Religious Rules, and Their Relation to Christian and Jewish Children's Concepts of Morality

2 studies were conducted of children's concepts of moral and nonmoral religious rules. In Study 1, 64 Amish-Mennonite children (ages 10, 12, 14, 16) were asked to evaluate 4 moral and 7 nonmoral religious rules as to rule alterability, generalizability, and whether the status of the acts was contingent on the word of God. As a second aspect of Study 1, 64 Dutch Reform Calvinist children were asked to determine whether God's commands could make a harmful act morally right. Study 2 replicated the basic design of Study 1 with 64 Conservative and 32 Orthodox Jewish children. Findings were that subjects differentiated between moral and nonmoral religious issues. Moral rules and some nonmoral rules were seen as nonalterable by religious authorities. The status of moral (but not nonmoral) acts was generalized to members outside the religion and was not viewed as contingent on the existence of statements from God. Judgments regarding moral issues were justified in terms of justice and human welfare considerations; nonmoral issues were evaluated in terms of their normative status. Some denominational and age effects were found. Findings supported the proposition that social knowledge is constructed within conceptual systems that represent fundamental categories of social experience.     

Antigone Aloud Allowed

This is an exploration of what can happen when a rich, complex, challenging text is read aloud in class, of how students make meanings and connections with their own lives (and of how mysterious these processes often are).     

Children's Judgments about Psychological Harm in Social Context

72 children, ages 6 to 11 years, were presented with a series of stories involving psychological harm (name-calling) in a game context. Situations were presented in which intentions, consequences, and game context were varied, along with order of story presentation. Comparisons between acts of physical and psychological harm were also conducted. Although responses in some conditions were influenced by order of presentation, age differences were found in children's evaluations of agents' actions and recipients' reactions for psychological harm in game contexts. Younger children were more likely to ignore intentions and consequences or the recipient's perspective and to focus on contextual features (e.g., game rules). Older children were more likely to base their evaluations on intentions, or both intentions and consequences, and to take into account the recipient's perspective. Game context interacted differentially with psychological and physical harm at all ages. Evaluations of acts of physical harm were more likely than acts of psychological harm to be transformed by game context.     

I fall to musing

This is a narrative of the author reading—with his students in a remedial English class at a community college in Brooklyn, New York—a story by Leo Tolstoy about a shoemaker's awakening through reading. As it recounts the students' reactions and the instructor's remarks, it quotes the story ‘Where Love Is, There God Is Also’ piece by piece. For the instructor, Tolstoy's story is problematic, for the story is patently religious (and his students are widely divergent in their beliefs, he is an atheist and the college is emphatically and legally secular), and yet its deeper significance, he hopes, is that it dramatises the deep thinking and feeling that only reading seems able to provide.     

Multivariate Behavioral Genetic Analysis of Parenting in Early Childhood

Objective. Caregivers play an important role in child development; in addition to instilling their norms and values in their children through socialization, caregivers modify their parenting practices in response to children’s characteristics. Previous studies have documented child genetic effects on parenting behaviors, but multivariate behavioral genetic examinations of parenting are scarce. Design. The current study examined the multivariate structure of child genetic and environmental influences on parenting in a sample of 236 individual twins aged 0–5 years, providing a total of 542 observations. Results. “Shared environments” (between-family environmental differences that are shared by twins reared in the same home, including parental characteristics, family socioeconomic status, and neighborhood characteristics) account for the majority of variation in parenting practices, whereas child genetic effects are more modest and occur more on specific parenting practices. Conclusion. Caregivers generally engage in similar parenting across children reared together and, at the same time, adjust their broad parenting approach and particularly their specific practices in response to genetically driven child characteristics. Future research may benefit from using a multidimensional framework to examine the different components and age-related transformations in these parent-driven and child-driven processes.     

Systematic Mentoring for New Faculty Teachers and Graduate Teaching Assistants

This study reports on the development and assessment of two mentoring programs, one for new faculty and one for new graduate teaching assistants. The first program was an externally funded, elaborate program; and it suggested the centrality of factors such as sustained, involving relationships for best outcomes with protégés. The second project, with newcomers to graduate study, demonstrated that a simpler program focusing on involvement within the pair and group meetings produces promising results. From both these projects, we developed a replicable model of systematic mentoring; and we obtained a clear picture of the styles and skills of exemplary mentors.Peg Boyle: Graduated from the State University of New York at Stony Brooknow resides in Boone, North Carolina