Promoting staff support in schools: Solution Circles

The Solution Circle (SC) approach is a flexible tool which encourages participants to maintain a positive, creative approach to problem-solving. This project focussed on the introduction of this approach to staff in a primary and a secondary school. The rationale was to implement a problem-solving/discussion tool that would allow staff to utilise expertise present within the school before looking to outside agencies for support. In both schools staff participants reported positively about the process, highlighting its potential use to promote the inclusion of pupils with a wide range of needs.     

On the Rebound: Critical Race Praxis and Grassroots Community Organizing for School Change

This ethnographic research was conducted over a three-year period, and documents the efforts of a committed group of parents and community members who through community-based research sought to address the disproportionate underachievement of African American students within their city??s public school system. Specifically, the parents and community members who make up the group Parents of Children of African Ancestry (POCAA) offer a refreshing theory of action that explicitly addressed issues of racial inequity, and called upon the larger community to respond with the urgency the youth deserved. In effect, POCAA challenges dominant views of African American parents and re-envisions their involvement in school reform as a site of radical resistance.     

Chemical Laws, Idealization and Approximation

This paper examines the notion of laws in chemistry. Vihalemm (Found Chem 5(1):7–22, 2003) argues that the laws of chemistry are fundamentally the same as the laws of physics they are all ceteris paribus laws which are true “in ideal conditions”. In contrast, Scerri (2000) contends that the laws of chemistry are fundamentally different to the laws of physics, because they involve approximations. Christie (Stud Hist Philos Sci 25:613–629, 1994) and Christie and Christie (Of minds and molecules. Oxford University Press, New York, pp. 34–50, 2000) agree that the laws of chemistry are operationally different to the laws of physics, but claim that the distinction between exact and approximate laws is too simplistic to taxonomise them. Approximations in chemistry involve diverse kinds of activity and often what counts as a scientific law in chemistry is dictated by the context of its use in scientific practice. This paper addresses the question of what makes chemical laws distinctive independently of the separate question as to how they are related to the laws of physics. From an analysis of some candidate ceteris paribus laws in chemistry, this paper argues that there are two distinct kinds of ceteris paribus laws in chemistry; idealized and approximate chemical laws. Thus, while Christie (Stud Hist Philos Sci 25:613–629, 1994) and Christie and Christie (Of minds and molecules. Oxford University Press, New York, pp. 34--50, 2000) are correct to point out that the candidate generalisations in chemistry are diverse and heterogeneous, a distinction between idealizations and approximations can nevertheless be used to successfully taxonomise them.     

Gender differences in the strength of association between motivation,competency beliefs and reading skill

Background:?There is concern in the education community regarding gender differences in reading, as girls regularly outperform boys. There is also concern about the consequences of low motivation for children's engagement in reading and learning. An important question is whether boys' motivation is more closely linked to their attainment compared with girls.

Purpose:?The aim of the study was to examine how closely children's reading skill correlates with their intrinsic and extrinsic motivation and competency beliefs. There was a particular focus on gender.

Sample:?There were 492 children (240 boys) aged 7–11 in this study from four primary schools in England, UK.

Design and methods:?Children completed a reading comprehension assessment and a questionnaire examining intrinsic and extrinsic motivation and competency beliefs relating to reading and schoolwork. For analysis, children were split into a younger (age 7–8) and older (age 9–11) age group.

Results:?In both the younger and older groups, the boys' competency beliefs in reading and intrinsic motivation for reading and schoolwork were significantly more closely associated with their level of reading skill, in comparison with the girls.

Conclusions:?The closer reciprocal relationship between boys' intrinsic motivation, competency beliefs and reading skill could be interpreted in at least two ways. Firstly, boys' motivation and beliefs in their ability may be more dependent on their success in reading. Alternatively, boys' motivation and competency beliefs may play a more significant role in the effort they put into reading.     

Children's perceptions of wider reading: to what extent do 7- and 8-year-old children read beyond the scheme books?

A case study was conducted with a class of twenty 7- to 8-year-old children in a primary school in the North West of England, to explore possible links between the use of a school reading scheme and children's involvement in wider reading. A questionnaire was administered to all children in the class, followed by semi-structured interviews with three children. The findings revealed that the vast majority of the children held extremely positive views of their reading scheme books but were also very enthusiastic wider readers, be it either independent reading or reading with a parent or carer. Further findings emerged suggest that environmental factors, such as access to books at home and library usage, also play an important part in children's involvement in wider reading.     

Understanding policy: why health education policy is important and why it does not appear to work

Drawing on research investigating the impact of health imperatives around obesity, diet and exercise on the actions of teachers and pupils in schools, this paper offers a reflexive account of the relationships between the ‘noise’ of obesity discourse in the public domain, policies forged to tackle health issues and the realities of teaching in schools. Our analyses suggest that intersections of bio‐policies, body pedagogies and human agents forge assemblages of meaning that frame and regulate but cannot determine either teachers' or young people's lives. Teachers and pupils experience the capriciousness of policies as they flow through specific school contexts and intersect with ‘local’ institutional cultures, expectations and interests. We suggest that Basil Bernstein's concepts and poststructural social theory prove useful when addressing how the aforementioned processes are emplaced, enacted and embodied.     

Family learning and the socio-spatial practice of ‘supportive’ power

Family learning has been an important mode of education deployed by governments in the United Kingdom over the past 20 years, and is positioned at the nexus of various social policy areas whose focus stretch beyond education. Drawing on qualitative research exploring mothers’ participation in seven different family learning programmes across West London, this paper looks at how this type of education is mobilised; that is, how mothers are ‘encouraged’ to participate and benefit from this type of programme. Framed by a neo-liberal policy climate and Foucauldian writings on governmentality and surveillance, we explore how participating mothers are carefully ‘targeted’ for this type of learning through their children and through school/ nursery spaces, and how programmes themselves then operate as a supportive social space aimed at facilitating social networks, friendship and personal development linked to positions of gender, ethnicity, class and migrant status. It is the socio-spatial workings of ‘supportive’ power and power relations that enable family learning to be mobilised that ensures its popularity as a social policy initiative.     

‘We’re not trying to turn them into middle-class Guardian readers’: constructing the offender in the probation ‘classroom’

Over the past 10 years, cognitive-behavioural programmes have come to be seen as a standard form of rehabilitation for offenders in the United Kingdom. However, the majority of research has tended to evaluate the programmes purely within the evidence-based context of the ‘What Works’ criminal justice agenda. By placing the programmes within their social and political context, this article suggests that they function as neo-liberal regimes of governance that aim to ‘responsibilise’ offenders. Through an analysis of interviews with probation practitioners, the article explores how ‘othering’ discourses relating to offenders intersected with gendered, classed and ‘raced’ social identities. Consequently, young white, working-class masculinities were constructed within this educational environment as impulsive, irresponsible and ‘cognitively deficient’. Thus, the article calls for a discursive shift away from cognitive-behavioural rehabilitation techniques and towards more genuinely inclusive, socially just, and holistic educational programmes for probationers.