Sexual Bullying in Secondary Schools

Neil Duncan suggests that because of the theoretical perspectives of many of the main researchers involved in investigating bullying, important aspects of this phenomenon have been neglected. Based on findings from research into sexual bullying, it is suggested that the sexual identities formed during adolescence play an important part in producing the kinds of behaviour which are involved in bullying in general. The research findings reported here were the result of structured interviews (themselves developed from earlier work) undertaken with single‐sex groups of boys and girls. The data that these interviews generated have important implications for both researchers and those working with young people in secondary schools.     

Representing self‐in‐society: education for citizenship and the social‐subjects curriculum in Scotland

The documented social‐subjects curricula for Scottish 5–16 year olds are analysed for representations of ‘self‐in‐society’. Such representations are important in Scotland because it is expected that the new Education‐for‐Citizenship framework will in part be delivered through the social subjects. However, citizenship education is also relevant throughout the UK and beyond and our analysis of the social subjects has wider relevance.

An ideal‐type analysis was used on documents including national guidelines, examination syllabuses, examination papers, and assessor instructions. Our analysis suggests that in these documents: the self is seen as an abstract; people are understood by category; society is the sum of discrete institutions; self‐in‐society is fully defined; and this representation of society is not contested. This representation becomes increasingly exclusive with age/ability and may be linked to assumed modes of curricular division, teaching and assessment. We discuss how this overall picture might affect students’ sense of ‘agency’ in the light of citizenship education. We conclude that the social‐subjects’ curricular representation of self‐in‐society may not fully support the Scottish Education‐for‐Citizenship framework.     

Adolescents at risk for violence

Interpersonal violence among youth is a growing problem in many communities and schools across the nation. The causes of violence are multiple and complex. This paper examines the extent and nature of interpersonal violence among youth as well as the individual and societal factors which contribute to youth violence. Adolescents are disproportionately represented as both victims and perpetrators of fatal and nonfatal assaultive violence. Homicide rates among young men in the United States are vastly greater than those of other Western industrialized nations. Persons age 12–24 years face the highest risk of nonfatal violent victimization of any segment of our society. Arrest rates for homicide, rape, robbery, and aggravated assault peak among adolescents and young adults. Further, arrest rates for murder and other violent crimes have increased substantially among this age group since the mid-1980s. Effective prevention programs will require combinations of interventions aimed at multiple factors and delivered through many channels.     

Making memories available: a framework for preserving rural heritage through community knowledge management (cKM)

While most of the research in Knowledge Management (KM) has focused on business communities, there is a breadth of potential applications of KM theory and practice to wider society. This paper explores the potential of KM for rural communities, specifically for those that want to preserve their social history and collective memories (what we call heritage) to enrich the lives of others. In KM terms, this is a task of accumulating and recording knowledge (using KM techniques such as story-telling and communities of practice) to enable its retention for future use (by interested people perhaps through KM systems). We report a case study of Cardrona, a valley of approximately 120 people in New Zealand's South Island. Realising that time would erode knowledge of their community a small, motivated group of residents initiated a KM programme to create a legacy for a wider community including younger generations, tourists and scholars. This paper applies KM principles to rural communities that want to harness their collective knowledge for wider societal gain, and develops a community-based framework to inform such initiatives. As a result, we call for a wider conceptualisation of KM to include motives for managing knowledge beyond business performance to accommodate community (cKM).     

Learning Science Concepts by Teaching Peers in a Cooperative Environment: A Longitudinal Study of Preservice Teachers

Misconceptions of science principles are frequent among university students. This is particularly problematic in teacher education, as these misconceptions can be passed on by teachers to pupils at school. In this study, 40 preservice teachers studied 8 common misconceptions by 3 different approaches: learning by teaching (LbT) and learning from peers (LfP; both organized in cooperative groups and using self-developed activities) and conventional lecturing. Participants’ understanding was evaluated prior to, 1 month after, and 2 years after instruction, together with their views on the effectiveness of these methods for achieving learning. The 3 approaches improved scores on all posttests, but LbT achieved the best results. This coincided with perceptions of the participants who gave diverse reasons for the success of LbT. For lecturing, the longitudinal perspective showed that gains in student learning at 1 month had partially declined by 2 years, even though there was still a medium effect size compared to the pretest. However, for LbT and LfP gains remained statistically stable throughout. A combination of these methods might not only contribute efficiently to conceptual change for a good number of misconceptions but also connect teacher education to an almost real school classroom, giving opportunities to translate student learning into teaching practice.