HPE teachers’ negotiation of environmental health spaces: discursive positions,embodiment and materialism

A National Curriculum in Health and Physical Education (HPE) has recently been developed in Australia. This new curriculum reflects, among other educational priorities, both environmental sensitivities and a commitment to the enhancement of young people’s health and wellbeing. HPE is one of the key sites in the curriculum where a focused consideration of the relationship between the environment and health is possible. However, to date no research has considered the ways that HPE teachers might recognise and negotiate these spaces. The research described in this paper addresses this gap through an analysis of semi-structured interviews with generalist primary and specialist secondary HPE teachers, drawing on a ‘narrative ethnography’ approach derived from cultural geography. This analysis highlights the consequences of the absence of a knowledge tradition that explicitly links the fields of the environment and health in HPE. Participants who were able to conceptualise environmental health almost exclusively drew on dominant neoliberal and risk discourses. At the same time, teachers’ embodied histories and affective encounters with non-human nature helped them to rupture or challenge dominant assumptions about environmental health. We argue that corporeal knowledge developed through embodied experiences has the potential to assist teachers in formulating environmental health in ways that highlight how interactions with the environment might enhance health and wellbeing.     

Attachment Security and Developmental Patterns of Growth in Executive Functioning During Early Elementary School

Despite the extensive research demonstrating the importance of child executive functioning (EF) for school adjustment, little longitudinal work has formally examined developmental change in EF during the early school years. Based on a sample of 106 mother–child dyads, the current longitudinal study investigated patterns of growth in child performance on three executive tasks between kindergarten (M_age = 6 years) and Grade 3 (M_age = 9 years), and the predictive role of earlier mother–child attachment security in these patterns. The results suggest that early elementary school is a period of significant developmental improvement in child EF, although child performance on different EF tasks follows distinct trajectories across time. The study also provides evidence for a sustained relation between children's early attachment security and their ongoing acquisition of executive skills.     

Internalizing and externalizing in adolescence: the roles of academic self‐efficacy and gender

This study examines academic self‐efficacy and gender as predictors of internalizing and externalizing behaviors in adolescence. In addition, the role of gender was considered as a moderator in the relationship between academic self‐efficacy and internalizing/externalizing difficulties. Participants were 4,318 predominantly African American, low‐income high school students who completed self‐report measures on the constructs of interest. Academic self‐efficacy and gender were both significant predictors of risk for internalizing problems, whereas only academic self‐efficacy predicted risk for externalizing (hyperactivity/distractibility) problems. Gender did not predict externalizing difficulties, nor did gender serve as a moderator in any analysis. Implications include focusing on academic self‐efficacy in the development of strategies for prevention and intervention of internalizing and externalizing problems.     

The ‘good life’ and the ‘rich portfolio’: young women,schooling and neoliberal subjectification

This paper explores the ways two young women, living in Australia, make sense of themselves, their activities, and futures. The two young women come from two different schooling contexts—a prestigious private school and a government school. We analyse their self‐narratives in relation to neoliberal discourse, and consider how, and with what effects, their school contexts privilege and make available neoliberal discourses, and work to produce different subjectivities and notions of ‘worthwhile’ or ‘good’ lives. Conceptualising schools as sites of subjection, we analyse the discourses that their respective schools make available to the young women, and how they have appropriated them. We suggest that the different exposure and access to neoliberal discourses position the women very differently in terms of future possibilities and work‐life scenarios in the neoliberal economy. In that way, the article seeks to make a contribution towards understanding schools as implicated in social (re)production and in the (re)production of classed subjectivities.     

Teacher Beliefs and the Overrepresentation of Black Students in Classroom Discipline

Racial disparities in teacher-issued office discipline referrals are less discussed than the well-documented suspension gaps. Discipline referrals, like suspension, can lead to lost instructional time. Although individuals are sent out of the classroom for a range of reasons, Black students, as a group, are at greater risk of being sent out than White students. In fact, studies have shown that when comparing students with similar characteristics, Black students remain at higher risk of being referred. In this article, we argue there is a need to raise teacher awareness about negative racial beliefs and the conditions under which those beliefs impact decision-making during discipline incidents. We further point out the need to foster teacher awareness about the power of positive beliefs in affecting student outcomes and the malleability of beliefs and disciplinary practices through intervention.     

Analysis of speed accuracy using video analysis software

Determining an athlete’s speed from broadcast video is a common practice in sport. Many software packages that perform data extraction from video files are expensive; however, open source software is also available, but lacks published validation for speed measurements. The purpose of this research was to examine the error of speed measurements extracted from video during an ice hockey skating exercise using open source software. The subject completed four exercises, at two speeds recorded by broadcast cameras set at five angles. The speeds from the broadcast cameras were compared to speeds calculated from a high-speed camera placed orthogonally to the exercise. Speeds from the broadcast cameras correlated well with the high-speed video for motion more than 12 m away from the broadcast camera. When comparing all the measured speeds, no significant difference was found between the speeds calculated by the high-speed camera (slow: 4.46 m/s ± 0.2; fast: 7.2 m/s ± 0.7) and the speed calculated from the broadcast cameras (slow: 4.50 m/s ± 0.4; fast: 7.34 m/s ± 0.6) (p > 0.05). The open source method was found to be less accurate when the athlete was close to (within 12 m of camera position) or moving directly toward the broadcast cameras.     

Temporal specificity in patterning of the rabbit nictitating membrane response

Rabbits were trained in either positive patterning (AX+, A−, X−) or negative patterning (A+, X+, AX−) using one of four intervals between the onset of A and the onset of X on AX trials. These intervals were 0, 800, 2,400, and 5,600 msec. In each task, all groups acquired an appropriate pattern of discriminative responding. Following acquisition, all rabbits were tested with the four different A-X intervals. All positive patterning groups showed an excitatory gradient, in which the highest level of responding occurred at the interval used in training. Conversely, all but one of the negative patterning groups showed an inhibitory gradient, in which the lowest level of responding occurred at the interval used in training. The one exception was the negative patterning group trained with simultaneous AX stimuli (0 msec), which showed a low, broad gradient, indicating transfer of inhibition across all the intervals. The results are discussed with respect to temporal encoding mechanisms and accounts of conditional discriminations.     

The effect of feature-target intervals in conditional discriminations on acquisition and expression of conditioned nictitating membrane and heart rate responses in the rabbit

Nictitating membrane (NM) and heart rate (HR) responses were investigated in a conditional discrimination (A→X+ vs. B→X−), using feature-target intervals of 0, 5, 15, and 45 sec. Conditional control of NM responses, but not of HR responses, was acquired to the 400-msec X stimulus in all the groups tested. However, differential conditioning of both the NM and the HR responses to A versus B feature cues appeared for the three shorter intervals. Following acquisition, all the rabbits were tested with the four different feature-target intervals. All the groups showed a gradient of NM responding to X, in which the highest level of responding occurred at or near the interval used in training. The results are discussed with respect to the relationship of simple conditioning of the feature cues to their control over responding during presentation of the target stimulus, the putative role of HR as an index of preparatory processes during presentation of feature cues, and mechanisms of temporal specificity in conditional discriminations.     

The Nature and Consequences of Essentialist Beliefs About Race in Early Childhood

It is widely believed that race divides the world into biologically distinct kinds of people—an essentialist belief inconsistent with reality. Essentialist views of race have been described as early emerging, but this study found that young children (n = 203, M_age = 5.45) hold only the more limited belief that the physical feature of skin color is inherited and stable. Overall, children rejected the causal essentialist view that behavioral and psychological characteristics are constrained by an inherited racial essence. Although average levels of children's causal essentialist beliefs about race were low, variation in these beliefs was related to children's own group membership, exposure to diversity, as well as children's own social attitudes.     

Transnational Mothers and School Related Decisions

The Urban Review - This article addresses the question of how transnational Mexican mothers negotiate and participate in the educational trajectories of children in the United States and in Mexico....