Space, time and nature: exploring the public reception of biotechnology in New Zealand

Nature is widely acknowledged to be a fluid, contested, material-semiotic construction, historically and spatially grounded. This is certainly the case for New Zealand, where a number of constructions of nature have been mobilized as a means to make judgements over the viability of particular biotechnologies that have entered into public debate. In this paper, we utilize Mikhail Bakhtin's space-time matrix, the chronotope, to explore a series of complementary nature-narratives that have been mobilized as a moral basis for making judgments over the acceptability of a series of exemplars of novel biotechnologies that were presented to participants in eleven national focus groups. We argue that it is the specific space-time manipulations that characterize these sometimes overlapping narrative constructions that are used to justify reactions to novel biotechnologies.     

Adoptive Gay Father Families: Parent–Child Relationships and Children's Psychological Adjustment

Findings are presented on a U.K. study of 41 gay father families, 40 lesbian mother families, and 49 heterosexual parent families with an adopted child aged 3–9 years. Standardized interview and observational and questionnaire measures of parental well‐being, quality of parent–child relationships, child adjustment, and child sex‐typed behavior were administered to parents, children, and teachers. The findings indicated more positive parental well‐being and parenting in gay father families compared to heterosexual parent families. Child externalizing problems were greater among children in heterosexual families. Family process variables, particularly parenting stress, rather than family type were found to be predictive of child externalizing problems. The findings contribute to theoretical understanding of the role of parental gender and parental sexual orientation in child development.     

Exploring the Impact of Television Watching on Vocabulary Skills in Toddlers

With the rising incidence of television consumption in children, the aim of the present study was to investigate the impact of such habits on vocabulary skills in young children. Very little research has targeted a key cognitive skill—vocabulary—during the toddler years, which represent a critical developmental period. We recruited toddlers, aged two to three, from British child care centers. Parents indicated the television watching habits of their children in different genres (educational, cartoons, baby DVDs, adult entertainment) in order to investigate potential differential effects. We also included other key variables linked to vocabulary acquisition: short-term memory (verbal and visuo-spatial) and reading habits (fiction and educational books). The findings indicated that television did not impact vocabulary scores, either positively or negatively. Instead, reading educational books and short-term memory skills predicted vocabulary performance.     

Do as we do and not as we say: teacher educators supporting student teachers to learn on teaching practice

This paper reports data from a larger study into the ways in which Physical Education Teacher Education (PETE) students engaged in professional learning during teaching practice (TP) in Ireland. The study comprised one umbrella case study of Greendale University, schools and PETE students that consisted of five individual cases: tetrads of PETE student teacher, cooperating teacher (CT), University tutor (UT) and School Principal (SP). Each tetrad was defined as a unique community of practice located within the wider structures of school, education and university policies on teacher education. Data were collected over one academic year using qualitative research methods and grounded theory as a systematic data analysis tool.

Findings indicate that in each of the five cases, support for PETE student learning was, to some degree, dysfunctional. In particular, it became evident that there were two conflicting teacher-learning curricula in operation. The official curriculum, expressed in policy and by SPs, UTs and CTs (also referred to as mentors), valued a PETE student who cared for pupils, had a rich pedagogical content knowledge, knew how to plan for and assess pupils’ learning, valued reflection, and was an active member of a community of practice. The unofficial but essentially more powerful enacted curriculum, encouraged PETE students to draw upon their own resources to learn pedagogical content knowledge in an isolated and unsupported manner.

The data highlight the force of the unofficial curriculum and the ways in which PETE students were guided to the core of the dysfunctional community of practice by untrained CTs (mentors) and untrained UTs. PETE students in this study learned to survive in a largely unsupportive professional learning environment and, just as theories of social reproduction intimate, indicated that they would reproduce this practice with PETE students in their care in the future.

The findings suggest that in cases similar to those studied, there is a need for teacher educators in Ireland, (in both universities and schools) to critically interrogate their personal practices and implicit theories of teacher education and to engage in training for their role. There is also evidence to suggest that PETE students in Ireland could benefit from the development of school–university partnerships that act as fundamental units of high quality professional learning. In the cases studied, this may have led to a stronger focus on the intended or official curriculum of TP, led by the revised maxim: ‘Do as we say and as we do’.     

Evaluating the effectiveness of a phonologically based reading intervention for struggling readers with varying language profiles

This study evaluates Reading Intervention—a 10-week supplementary reading programme emphasising the link between phonological awareness and reading—when delivered in a realistic educational setting. Twenty-nine 6-year-olds with reading difficulties participated in Reading Intervention and their progress and attainments were compared with those of a representative control group from the same classes, matched on age and gender. Language profiles were also explored. Children with reading difficulties showed weaknesses in phonological awareness and literacy as well as nonphonological oral language skills and nonverbal reasoning. During the intervention, the intervention group made significantly greater progress than the control group in early word reading, phoneme awareness and phonetic spelling. Over a 6-month follow-up period, the intervention group maintained its gains but during this time made significantly less progress on single word reading, phoneme awareness and phonetic spelling than the control group. These findings provide evidence that reading interventions can be delivered effectively in standard educational settings. We argue that a better understanding of how to manage withdrawal of intervention and how to address poor readers’ additional oral language weaknesses is needed.     

Supporting school teachers’ rapid engagement with online education

Educational technology research and development - In response to Philipsen et al.'s (Educ Technol Res Dev 67:1145–1174, 2019) article titled “Improving teacher professional...