Quality of Inclusion and Related Predictors: Teachers’ Reports of Educational Provisions Offered to Students with Down Syndrome

The aims of this study were to gain insight into the quality of inclusion in mainstream classrooms involving students with Down syndrome and to reveal underlying predictors. A total of 39 8-year-olds with Down syndrome and their teachers participated. Via a survey, the teachers were asked to rate key indicators of inclusion. Their average rating corresponded to a moderate quality of inclusion, suggesting that the students with Down syndrome participated as active and accepted class members who learned with their peers. At the same time, the academic instruction of the students tended to take place outside the mainstream classroom. Regression analysis showed that teacher collaboration and the children’s expressive language abilities explained a reliable portion of the variation in the quality of inclusion. The implications for understanding and facilitating inclusion in practice are discussed.     

Governing the potentials of life itself? Interrogating the promises in affective educational leadership

This article critically explores how educational leadership is becoming increasingly affective in order to cultivate pupil potential and thereby meet the challenge of creating the best schools in the world. It critically analyses policy and handbook approaches to affective educational leadership technologies by showing the difficulty in keeping promises and by introducing the Massumian distinction between possibilities and potentiality. The analysis draws upon the notion of governmentality and the ‘affective turn’, and highlights affective, educational, leadership technologies as they appear in contemporary leadership handbooks in Denmark using four examples: (1) How school becomes the managed core of society. This reshapes educational leadership as onto-power, which means governing through ideas and materialities of perception and neurons. (2) How affectivity becomes synonymous with positive feelings, while more indeterminate parts of affectivity are neglected. (3) How educational leadership becomes a matter of governing the future through simulation and imagination. (4) How affective leadership is energised by a temporally and spatially structured bio-morality. I argue that such discourses tend to maintain the status quo rather than challenge basic premises and thereby, the edifying nature of the technologies paradoxically overshadows the possibilities promised by the technologies.     

The Effectiveness of a Large‐Scale Language and Preliteracy Intervention: The SPELL Randomized Controlled Trial in Denmark

The present article reports results of a real‐world effectiveness trial conducted in Denmark with six thousand four hundred eighty‐three 3‐ to 6‐year‐olds designed to improve children's language and preliteracy skills. Children in 144 child cares were assigned to a control condition or one of three planned variations of a 20‐week storybook‐based intervention: a base intervention and two enhanced versions featuring extended professional development for educators or a home‐based program for parents. Pre‐ to posttest comparisons revealed a significant impact of all three interventions for preliteracy skills (= .21–.27) but not language skills (d = .04–.16), with little differentiation among the three variations. Fidelity, indexed by number of lessons delivered, was a significant predictor of most outcomes. Implications for real‐world research and practice are considered.     

“Bridging Old Relations”: The (De)Construction of Ethnic Identity in the Educational Context of Bosnia and Herzegovina From the Teachers' Point of View

The present study focuses on an educational arrangement in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) known as “two schools under one roof.” The term refers to two different ethnic groups (Bosniaks and Croats) physically sharing the same school building, but maintaining separate administrations, teaching staff, and curricula. The purpose of the study is to explore the manner in which teachers (seven Bosniak and four Croat) from the two ethnic groups perceive and construct their group identities within this context. Findings indicate that the teachers’ sense of belonging to different ethnic groups is strong and that the use of language functions as a vital marker for expressing group identity. In addition, satisfaction with the current situation and perceptions of interactions and discrimination differ substantially between the groups. We argue that this type of educational organization may reignite dormant tensions between the groups and accentuate ethnic differences in terms of (de)constructing ethnic identity.     

Length effects in pseudo-word spelling: stronger in dyslexic than in non-dyslexic students

It is often discussed whether dyslexics show a deviant pattern of reading and spelling development when compared to typically developing students, or whether they follow the same pattern as other students, only at markedly slower rate. The present cross-sectional study investigated phonological encoding skills in dyslexic Danish students. We compared dyslexic and non-dyslexic students from grades 3, 5, 7, and 9 and examined whether effects of item length were stronger in the dyslexic groups. Mixed between-within subjects analyses of variance revealed significant interactions between dyslexia status and item length as the dyslexics at all grade levels were more affected by item length than their non-dyslexic peers. A marked developmental delay was apparent as the dyslexic group from grade 9 performed on approximately the same level as the non-dyslexic group from grade 3. Although the overall difference between these two groups was not significant, a significant interaction between dyslexia status and item length remained because the grade 9 dyslexics were more affected by item length than the younger non-dyslexic students. This difference in error profiles suggests a difference in the developmental patterns of dyslexic vs. non-dyslexic students.     

Bereaved Parents’ Online Grief Communities: De-Tabooing Practices or Relation-Building Grief-Ghettos?

This article presents results from case studies of online grief communities for bereaved parents in Denmark and Sweden, analyzing how development of practices and norms for grieving and mourning online are related to the conditions for participation in the online forums, and to dominant ideas of grief in society as such. Rooted in contemporary research on grief and mourning, we discuss practices of tabooization, de-tabooization, or even re-tabooization in the different online forums and how norms and traditions are performed, challenged, and negotiated in the various formats.