Shyness and Trajectories of Functional Network Connectivity Over Early Adolescence

High shyness during early adolescence is associated with impaired peer relationships and risk for psychiatric disorders. Little is known, however, about the relation between shyness and trajectories of brain development over early adolescence. The current study longitudinally examined trajectories of resting‐state functional connectivity (rs‐fc) within four brain networks in 147 adolescents. Subjects underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging at three different time points, at average ages 10.5 (range = 7.8–13.0), 11.7 (range = 9.3–14.1), and 12.9 years (range = 10.1–15.2). Multilevel linear modeling indicated that high shyness was associated with a less steep negative slope of default mode network (DMN) rs‐fc over early adolescence relative to low shyness. Less steep decreases in DMN rs‐fc may relate to increased self‐focus in adolescents with high shyness.     

Making Sense of Disaster Through Rhetorical Homologies: Extending Walter Benjamin’s Unique/Copy Binary to Post-Katrina Tours

Over a decade after Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans, publics continue to come to terms with the tragedy. Isabelle Cossart, owner of “Tours by Isabelle” and survivor of the hurricane, began offering disaster tours of the affected areas after taking note of people’s desire to see the damage and contemplate its effects. Public accounts of Cossart’s business suggest that people make sense of disasters symbolically via tourism. Cossart’s post-Katrina disaster tours belong to a wider form concerning disastrous events springing from anxiety over how to respond, followed by agency-driven strategies for coping. This discursive dichotomy of disaster/agency is grounded in a homologous discourse of uniqueness versus copy in Walter Benjamin’s essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Through publicly available information on “Tours by Isabelle,” this article compares subcategories of disaster, Cossart’s tours, and works of art, and explores how people make sense of disaster symbolically.     

Teachers as Change‐Agents for Young People with Special Needs: an approach to teacher training in Portugal

The practice of integrated education for pupils with special needs has been attempted nationally in Portugal. This has prompted the development of area support teams across the country. Whilst this is a positive move, it has created a pressure for specialist training of teachers. This demand is yet to be fulfilled; an example of an inservice course is outlined in this report.     

Central child abuse registers: The British experience

Multi-disciplinary co-operation, including use of central registers, is now regarded as essential to the management of child abuse, both in the UK and USA. There are significant differences in register operation in the UK and USA, however. This paper describes two research studies of registers in the UK, discusses various issues of register operation and contrasts the UK and USA experience as reflected in research and literature.     

African Journals Online: improving awareness and access

Indigenous journal publication is vital to the well-being of the African research enterprise in ways that the high-profile initiatives of Western publishers have, so far, failed to address. This paper describes the scope and development of African Journals Online, a free service which provides online access to the tables of contents and abstracts of scholarly journals published in Africa, backed by a document delivery service and managed by the International Network for the Availability of Scientific Publications.     

Research on teacher and librarian collaboration: An examination of underlying structures of models

This article reports on quantitative data collected in a mixed methods study of teacher and librarian collaboration. This practice is discussed extensively in the literature on school librarianship as an instructional strategy that positively affects student academic achievement. However, while there is much anecdotal evidence regarding successful teacher and librarian collaboration, there is little hard research that defines specific practices that lead to successful collaborations. This study provides empirical data on teacher and librarian collaboration which helps us understand the nature of collaboration and the extent to which theory and practice are integrated. Two surveys based on proposed theoretical models of teacher and librarian collaboration were used for this study. The first survey was based on Loertscger's Taxonomy. The second survey was based on a new proposed model of teacher and librarian collaboration (TLC Model) which builds on the taxonomy and expands our understanding of teacher and librarian collaboration. Participants in the study included teachers, librarians and principals from kindergarten through middle school. An exploratory factor analysis (EFA) was carried out on both surveys to identify underlying structures of teacher and librarian collaboration. Three factors emerged from the data identifying a range of underlying structures: integrated instruction, library and librarian as resource, and traditional role for teacher and librarian. Further research on the TLC Model with a larger number of participants and survey items is needed to examine the stability of the factor structures and to further refine the new measure.