Making and Breaking Careers: Reviewing Law Enforcement Hiring Requirements and Disqualifiers

With an increasing number of students entering criminal justice programs across the country, the majority of students are looking to pursue a career in law enforcement. While many students graduate college equipped for the law enforcement job market, some are unprepared for the scrutiny and depth the law enforcement hiring process requires. Using LEMAS data and a content analysis, this article reviews local and federal law enforcement agency websites and investigates specific job requirements, as well as noted disqualifiers, for both local and federal law enforcement positions. Furthermore, this article offers suggestions to criminal justice educators for assisting students in being prepared for realistic employment opportunities in the criminal justice field upon graduation.     

Poverty,family resources and children's early educational attainment: The mediating role of parenting

This study uses longitudinal data from the UK Millennium Cohort Study to show the extent to which episodic and more persistent poverty in early childhood and the lack of other family resources disadvantage children at the start of their school careers in terms of whether they have achieved the target indicator of ‘good level of achievement’ on the Foundation Stage Profile. Positive parenting is shown to be an important contributor to school achievement that matters for children, regardless of poverty experience or family disadvantage. It is also shown to be an important mediator in redressing the effects of poverty and disadvantage.     

The Place of English Revisited

In this essay I explore the constraints and opportunities confronting me as a newly qualified teacher and how these affect my pedagogy. I have reflected on my own development from beginning to newly qualified teacher and considered how such forces have shaped my identity as a teacher, my values and my approach to the job. As part of my exploration of my practice and the values I hold, I have revisited ‘The Place of English’, an essay I wrote midway through my Postgraduate Certificate in Education (PGCE) year; I have reconsidered how the current climate of educational reform and my subsequent experience have altered or strengthened these initial perceptions. In what follows I have reflected critically on two episodes of teaching and learning with my Year 10 class, my most challenging group, in order to further understand the way in which I have responded to the responsibilities and pressures placed on a classroom teacher. These pressures, I suggest, are intensified by the preconceptions of age and gender within my school and implicit more widely in the traditional values of our culture. The fragments of my practice that I have explored reveal tensions that gesture at a gap between educational theory, first-hand professional experience and governmental policy. They present an argument to resist the temptations of oversimplified, linear conceptions of teaching and learning, and maintain the place of English as a subject of creativity, exploration and expression that, at its heart, values both individual and collective student voices and identities.     

Data and scholarly publishing: the transforming landscape

This article sets the scene for the special issue on research data and publishing. Research data – that material commonly accepted by the scholarly community as required evidence for hypotheses and insights, for verification and/or reproducibility of experiments – has become an increasingly critical issue for publishers given recent developments in funders' mandates, technological advances, policymakers' interests, and so forth. I outline some of the recent initiatives that are responding to policy directives, particularly Project ODE, and consider how publishers are working with data and integrating their practices with other collaborative efforts. A summary of the new policies, products, and partnerships demonstrates that the onus is now with scholarly publishers to gain an understanding of these developments and how they are affecting fellow key stakeholders within the research communications ecosystem.