THE USES OF TELEVISION IN TEACHING PSYCHIATRY

The A.U.T.P. Working Party on the Applied Uses of Television was set up after the A UTP/ASME Conference on Undergraduate Education in Psychiatry and Behavioural Science held in Manchester in 1971. A group of Position Papers on the Uses of Television in Teaching Psychiatry has been published by the Working Party (AUTP, 1977), under the chairmanship of Professor David Goldberg. By his kind permission, two of these papers are here reprinted: one concerns the uses of television in undergraduate teaching of psychiatry; the other, ethical aspects of the use of television in psychiatry.     

Recouping and rethinking the effects of summer vacation on reading achievement

Vacations may have detrimental effects on maths and spelling performance, but the findings for reading are less conclusive. The purpose of this study was to analyse the effects of summer vacation on early literacy skills of young children. Participants included rising first and second‐graders, most of whom were at‐risk, struggling readers. No evidence of summer setback was evident for this sample of children; in fact, gains in reading (or, recoupment of any losses) were more common in children performing at lower levels than for those with higher scores at the end of the school year. Our outcomes are different from those reported by other researchers. We explain this with attention to the content of our comparisons, the grade levels investigated and measures used to assess performance, and discuss implications for future research based on our findings.     

Seryozha’s Education

This is discussion of one of Leo Tolstoy’s fictional dramatisations of aggressive but dull-witted pedagogy. In Anna Karenina, two adults badger a lively, deep-souled, active-minded boy, Anna’s son Seryozha, to learn his rote-lessons.     

Researching the habitus of global policy actors in education

This paper reprises the argument for the emergence of a global education policy field and then focuses on the shared habitus of global and national policy actors and technicians. It is argued that this shared habitus is constituted as a reflection of and a contribution to the creation of the global education policy field. Bourdieu’s approach to habitus as both methodological tool and concept is used and the significance of the interview encounter to understanding habitus is argued. The authors also draw on the content of interviews with five elite policy-makers and technicians. It was found that the policy actors and technicians shared a similar middle-class embodied habitus; in terms of schemes of perception, they identified with a high-modernist confidence in both science and technology; they identified with a cosmopolitan outlook and sensibility; and demonstrated scientistic approaches that held real confidence in understanding the social through quantitative social science methods.