Lifelong learning among older professionals: How competence strategies and perceptions of professional learning affect pastors’ participation

One of the challenges of keeping older employees up to date and ensuring their continued involvement in the workplace is to provide them with relevant learning opportunities. This article aims to understand the usefulness of the concept of LLL for a group of older employees (50+). This is done using interviews and a document study on the Church of Norway (CofN) to understand how the concept of LLL is interpreted and acted upon by employers and older pastors. We assume that changes occurring outside the Church provoke the need for new knowledge and new ways of working. We ask how these older professionals perceive their learning opportunities and try to ascertain how the concept of LLL is helping them to tackle the ongoing changes. The article adds to the research on the interplay between competence strategies of employers and attitudes of older employees in a well‐established profession. Results of our study show that new strategies open up for greater participation. However, older pastors’ greatest motivation for learning seems to be their ordination vows, which include a commitment to continued learning through personal studies. This influences the kind of activities in which they participate, their expectations concerning the recognition of their learning and their views on the Church as a learning organisation. We conclude that older pastors do benefit from LLL initiatives in the workplace, but they also benefit from belonging to a profession with a conscious commitment to learning.     

INTERGENERATIONAL ACTIVITY ANALYSIS WITH THREE GROUPS OF OLDER ADULTS: FRAIL,COMMUNITY‐LIVING,AND ALZHEIMER'S

This study documents the effects of utilizing different types of activities (i.e., cognitive, rote, active, passive) in fostering positive intergenerational exchanges between preschool‐aged children and three groups of older adults—frail, community‐living, and elders diagnosed as in the early to mid‐stage of Alzheimer's disease. Results suggested that, overall, simple and largely unstructured activities with one or two steps and very few rules can be most successfully utilized with all three groups of elders when interacting with young children. Community‐living older persons and children were found to enjoy the widest range of activities, while intergenerational contact involving frail elders and those with Alzheimer's disease needed to be approached with care in order to maintain the dignity of the elders, the positive perceptions of the children toward the older generation, and the comfort of staff members.     

Technology, math, and the early learner: Models for learning

As today’s preschoolers become the school-age children of tomorrow, early learning educators are faced with a unique and exciting challenge of integrating technology into mathematics instruction. This article examines theory, standards, guidelines, and rationale that supports technology in the preschool environment. Examining practices at 12 diverse preschool sites, four designs emerge as the “typical” models that enable early learners to engage and experience technology within a developmentally appropriate learning environment. The designs outlined are viewed through the lens of preschool mathematics instruction and provide early learning educators as well as parents with models for replication.     

South African Deaf education and the Deaf community

In a special section of the american Annals of the Deaf, Deaf education and the Deaf community in South Africa are discussed. The special section is organized into 7 segments: a historical overview to establish context, the educational context, educators and learners, postgraduate education and employment, perspectives of Deaf children and their parents, sport and the arts, and spiritual lives and mental health. Throughout the entire section, however, the central focus is on the overall foundation (or lack thereof) of education for Deaf learners in South Africa.     

Prenatal Antecedents of Newborn Neurological Maturation

Fetal neurobehavioral development was modeled longitudinally using data collected at weekly intervals from 24 to 38 weeks gestation in a sample of 112 healthy pregnancies. Predictive associations between 3 measures of fetal neurobehavioral functioning and their developmental trajectories to neurological maturation in the first weeks after birth were examined. Prenatal measures included fetal heart rate (FHR) variability, fetal movement, and coupling between fetal motor activity and heart rate patterning; neonatal outcomes include a standard neurologic examination ( n  =   97) and brainstem auditory evoked potential (BAEP; n  =   47). Optimality in newborn motor activity and reflexes was predicted by fetal motor activity, FHR variability, and somatic–cardiac coupling predicted BAEP parameters. Maternal pregnancy-specific psychological stress was associated with accelerated neurologic maturation.     

4. ELECTRONIC MEDIA

Dorothy Ganfield Fowler's Unmailable: Congress and the Post Office (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1977- $14.50)

Current Developments in CATV and Pay Television (Practising Law Institute, 810 Seventh Ave., New York, N.Y. 10019—$20.00, paper, with discounts if adopted in quantity for class use).

Broadcasting and the Government: A Status Report prepared by the Relations and Legal Departments of the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB, 1771 N St., NW, Washington, D.C. 20036—free on request)

Allen Hyman and M. Bruce Johnson, eds., Advertising and Free Speech (Lexington, Mass: Lexington Books [D.C. Heath] , 1977—$12.50