Understanding parental views of adolescent sexuality and sex education in Ecuador: a qualitative study

Parents' contribution to sex education is increasingly receiving research attention. This growing interest stems from recognition of the influence that parental attitudes may have both on young people's sexual attitudes and behaviour, and on school-based sex education. Studies regarding parental attitudes towards sexuality are, however, still rare. The two main objectives of this study were to explore parental views about sexuality and to understand parental attitudes towards sex education. Four focus group discussions were conducted with parents from high schools in Cuenca, Ecuador. Data were analysed using thematic analysis. The study revealed that parents held a restricted view about sex education, grounded in traditional religious ideas about sexuality, which led parents to understand it as a morally and physically dangerous activity. Although parents expressed a willingness to make good quality sex education available to their children, they reported having insufficient personal resources to fulfil that objective. The results of this study provide important information about the need to develop and adapt sex education to each specific cultural context, thereby confirming the importance of knowing about the cultural traditions and religious beliefs that may form obstacles to effective sex education for young people in Ecuador.     

Strategies for Catalog Management of Electronic Monographs in Series

Electronic monographic series display a complex mix of the characteristics of electronic serials, electronic books, and print monograph series. Because many cannot be managed via the typical tools and services used to manage electronic resources, providing title-level, or analytic cataloging presents challenges above and beyond the usual challenges for e-resources. This article enumerates those challenges, proposes a set of criteria for making analysis decisions for e-monograph series, and suggests other directions libraries might pursue to provide catalog access to this important category of resources.     

Police bodies and police minds: professional learning through bodily practices of sport participation*

The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the literature concerned with bodily perspectives on professional learning by reporting on a study of Swedish police officers’ sport participation as a form of occupational learning. The study seeks to answer how ideals of work practice and sport participation intersect, how professional learning is channelled through sport participation, and how such bodily practices might have excluding effects on professional participation. Using a practice theory framework, the Schatzkian concept of teleoaffective structure guides the analysis. Sixteen interviews were conducted with police officers who practice police sports. The analysis targeted symbolic manifestations of teleoaffectivity, and the findings indicate five overlapping ideals between sport and police practice. In addition, one police specific ideal was constructed. Based on these findings, we discuss how professionals learn by participation in practices not directly related to the work in question, and how such learning includes and excludes from participation.     

Survivors guide to graduate research

Conclusion As you conduct your research, you will undoubtedly suffer from the perennial condition of all graduate students—constant, paralyzing guilt. When you are not working on your research, you are agonizing because you should be. Unfortunately, guilt also keeps you from doing many other things, like cleaning house or simply relaxing. The good news is that guilt usually disappears within a year after you take that final walk across the stage and shake the dean’s hand. The cure is painful, but worth it. We have presented some ideas that worked for us, in hopes that they will work for you. Perhaps these ideas will cause you to consider a factor that you may not have considered before. Perhaps some small suggestion will provide you with a solution to a nagging problem, or simply remind you that some of your frustrations are a natural part of the dissertation or thesis process. For additional information on this topic seeHow to Complete and Survive a Doctoral Dissertaion, by David Stemberg. The chapters on “The Unfolding Dissertation: Diplomatic Relations with your Committee” and “Down in the Dissertation Dumps: How to Get Out” may be especially useful.     

Overcoming ageism: critical reflexivity for gerontology practice

ABSTRACT

Ageism is an age-based form of discrimination that still prevails in our modern society. As other forms of discrimination, older adults may encounter ageist discourses in a variety of contexts, including health care settings. In this paper, we consider critical reflexivity as an approach to challenge ageism within health care contexts. We explore the potential of critical reflexivity to transform the perceptions of older age among students in the health professions who work with older adults. We examine observation, narrative and reflexive writing as fruitful strategies to facilitate dialogue and critically interrogate ageist discourses.     

Pre-school children’s agency in learning for sustainable development

In recent years, there has been a growing interest in pre-school children’s meaning-making and learning in education for sustainability. Young children should be recognized as ‘agents for change’ and active participants in their own day-to-day practices. Such issues are thoroughly discussed in the early childhood education for sustainability field. However, only a few research reports are presented on the subject. In this paper, our purpose is to examine empirically how agency is constituted when pre-school children explore science-related issues in a context of education for sustainability. The empirical material consists of video-recording sequences of four- to five-year-olds. In the analysis, we use a methodological approach based on Dewey’s pragmatist philosophy. We describe what a small group of children are doing and their ‘course of action’ towards ‘fulfilment’. In view of this, agency is explained as something that children achieve together in transactions rather than something they possess. Furthermore, the findings show the significance of the aesthetic relations in the constitution of agency. At the end of the article, we also discuss agency in relation to the ongoing debate on participation in young children’s meaning-making for sustainability.     

Reasoning about Social Conflicts in Different Cultures: Druze and Jewish Children in Israel

This study examined how children of different cultural backgrounds weigh competing considerations in complex social situations. 351 children from Druze and Jewish communities in Israel (mean ages 8-10, 10-9, 12-11, 14-11, and 16-8) were presented with conflicts between 2 concerns: ( a ) Justice-Authority, ( b ) Justice-Interpersonal, ( c ) Personal-Interpersonal, and ( d ) Personal-Authority. For each conflict, subjects selected the course of action to be followed and evaluated the desirability of each behavioral alternative. Both similarities and differences were found in the ways children from each group weigh social concerns and change their priorities with age. Furthermore, judgments in both groups were complex and heterogeneous. These findings demonstrated that the weighing of social concerns in conflict situations is not done solely according to an overriding cultural orientation.     

The effects of a history‐based instructional material on the students' understanding of field lines

Many students in physics courses fail to achieve a desired conceptual change because they assign an incorrect ontology to the to‐be‐learned concept. This situation has been detected in previous research for the case of field lines: many college students assign material properties to the lines and describe them, for example, as tubes that contain or transport charges. The historical evolution of this concept shows that early scientists like Faraday assigned material properties to these lines in some occasions. In the present work a history‐based instructional material was designed to foster the analysis of the ontology of field lines to help students at an Argentinean university achieve conceptual change. The predicates used by the students to describe physical situations were used as evidence of the assigned ontological status. Conceptual change was measured by the change in the proportion of geometrical predicates that students used when referring to the lines in a written questionnaire. This change was significantly higher for the students learning with the history‐based material compared to those that learned in the regular class. Some characteristics of the material and geometrical ideas that students hold about the field lines were determined through an oral interview. © 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Res Sci Teach