Greetings from the Editor 25 (4)

While it is clear that reading is critical to children's success throughout schooling and reading instruction research has dramatically increased over the past 2 decades, few early childhood providers have the necessary knowledge, skills and/or confidence to effectively implement evidence-based, emergent literacy strategies in their settings. This article explores the impact of the Early Learning Opportunities (ELO) initiative that provided funding to train early childhood providers to utilize the HeadsUp! Reading (HUR) curriculum in their settings. Noteworthy in this initiative was the inclusion of a coaching component designed to increase participants' ability to generalize HUR instructional practices into their classroom. Also important here was the opportunity to evaluate teaching outcomes. Results from this study indicate that all participants benefited from their involvement in the professional development activities, and that those who received coaching had an advantage with respect to growth in knowledge, skills, and confidence in implementing the new strategies into their classrooms. Implications for professional development activities suggest that coaching efforts to support implementation of newly acquired skills in the classroom may improve teacher performance.     

Family trauma and its association with emotional and behavioral problems and social adjustment in adolescent Cambodian refugees

OBJECTIVE: The main aim of this study was to investigate the effect of war-related trauma on the subsequent social adjustment and functioning of young Cambodian refugees. METHOD: This longitudinal study of 67 young Cambodian refugees in Montreal interviewed in the first year of high school and then 2 years later examines a family's exposure to war related premigration trauma and its association with an adolescent's emotional and behavioral problems and social adjustment. Emotional and behavioral problems were assessed using the Youth Self-Report and an inventory of risk behavior. Social adjustment was assessed in terms of academic achievement, peer relations, and feeling of competence. RESULTS: The trauma a family suffered before leaving their homeland and prior to the teenager's birth seems to play a protective role at various times in adolescence with regard to externalized symptoms, risk behavior, and school failure in boys, and foster positive social adjustment in girls. CONCLUSIONS: These reactions may be understood as overcompensation by the children of the survivors of a massacre, to whom the implicit duty to succeed has been passed on. They suggest that a broader range of posttraumatic responses to war situations should be investigated and that trauma's dual nature as both burden and source of strength should be examined more closely.     

Study abroad as governmentality: the construction of hypermobile subjectivities in higher education

ABSTRACT

Drawing on the concept of hypermobility, the paper examines a case of study-abroad mobility from a governmentality perspective. Based on a critical analysis of policy texts and interviews with Irish students who have taken part in the Erasmus exchange programme, it argues that under the conditions of neoliberal globalisation, the normalisation of study abroad aims to produce self-governing practices that align with dominant discourses promoting voluntarist attitudes to labour mobility. These dispositions, described as hypermobility, are an additional dimension of the flexible, entrepreneurial subject imagined in neoliberal societies. The paper examines the discourses and practices at state and institutional levels and how they circulate and impact on students’ subjectivities – analysing affective detachment from home and cosmopolitan sociability as self-disciplining practices that align with the production of neoliberal hypermobile subjectivities.     

Family Influences on Adaptive Development in Young Children with Down Syndrome

In this study we investigated the extent to which the family environment predicted differences in trajectories of adaptive development in young children with Down syndrome. The sample was comprised of 54 children with Down syndrome and their families who were studied from infancy through the age of 5 years as part of a longitudinal study of children with disabilities. Hierarchical linear modeling (HLM) was used to estimate the parameters of hierarchical growth models in domains of adaptive development. Results indicated that growth in communication, daily living skills, and socialization domains were predicted by measures of the family environment (i.e., family cohesion and mother-child interaction) above and beyond that predicted by maternal education. Further, Bayley MDI measures during infancy did not predict changes in adaptive development in any of the domains. The results are discussed in terms of implications for service provision and for expanding theoretical frameworks to include the development of children with disabilities.     

A Cross-Analysis of the Mathematics Teacher’s Activity. An Example in a French 10th-Grade Class

The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the debate about how to tackle the issue of ‘the teacher in the teaching/learning process’, and to propose a methodology for analysing the teacher’s activity in the classroom, based on concepts used in the fields of the didactics of mathematics as well as in cognitive ergonomics. This methodology studies the mathematical activity the teacher organises for students during classroom sessions and the way he manages¹ the relationship between students and mathematical tasks in two approaches: a didactical one [Robert, A., Recherches en Didactique des Mathématiques 21(1/2), 2001, 7–56] and a psychological one [Rogalski, J., Recherches en Didactique des Mathématiques 23(3), 2003, 343–388]. Articulating the two perspectives permits a twofold analysis of the classroom session dynamics: the “cognitive route” students are engaged in—through teacher’s decisions—and the mediation of the teacher for controlling students’ involvement in the process of acquiring the mathematical concepts being taught. The authors present an example of this cross-analysis of mathematics teachers’ activity, based on the observation of a lesson composed of exercises given to 10th grade students in a French ‘ordinary’ classroom. Each author made an analysis from her viewpoint, the results are confronted and two types of inferences are made: one on potential students’ learning and another on the freedom of action the teacher may have to modify his activity. The paper also places this study in the context of previous contributions made by others in the same field.     

Tasks Designed to Highlight Task-Activity Relationships

Our work is in keeping with the general framework of didactical research in France, where we both studied, and now teach. This paper describes a model training session designed for in-service mathematics teachers, whose purpose is to guide them in their understanding of the relationship between students’ tasks and activities in secondary school (from 11 to 18 years). We first explain the didactical tools that we consider necessary in order to address tasks analysis, and then, as an example of a training session, we provide a list of tasks on similar triangles illustrating the two kinds of analysis in which we engage participants. As a conclusion to this paper, we comment on our choices, and their potential influence on teachers’ practices.     

The issue of the arrangement of new environments for science education through collaborative actions between schools,museums and science centres in the Brazilian context of teacher training

We present, in this article, an investigation about the potential of the relationship between formal and non-formal educational environments. Therefore it is not an empirical research, but an essay on the topic. This paper demonstrates the concept that science education and science outreach can be privileged by actions that are developed by closer relations between formal and non-formal places. Currently, non-formal environments such as museums and science and technology centres are considered potential educational resources within the reach of schools. Educators from museums have conducted studies which demonstrate a predominant model of the utilization of these institutions by teachers, which consists of illustrative visits during the exhibitions, but does not feature a collaborative relationship or partnership between schools and these institutions. In Brazil, the main examples of approaches to collaboration between these places and schools have been taking place through the initiatives of teachers or through projects developed by the educational sector, aiming to broaden the dialogue between their institutions and the school community. Another approach mechanism relates to research and extension projects developed by university researchers, sponsored by state and federal funding agencies. In this case, the universities and university museums appear as new social actors that stand in the way of the schools and the cultural environments, complicating the relationship and, at the same time, bringing new questions to the field of educational research. We believe that the discourse in this paper should bring about further discussions in the initial teacher training courses to contribute to the understanding of practices related to the extension of the field of activity of the school.