Child care and low-income children's development: direct and moderated effects

A large literature has documented the influence of child care on young children's development, but few studies have examined low-income children in community care arrangements. Using data from Welfare, Children, and Families: A Three-City Study (N = 204), this study examined the influence of child care quality and the extent of care on low-income children's (ages 2-4 years) cognitive and socioemotional development over time. Higher levels of child care quality were modestly associated with improvements in children's socioemotional development, and extensive hours in child care were linked to increases in children's quantitative skills and decreases in behavior problems. Analyses suggest that child care quality may be particularly salient for subgroups of children from low-income families.     

Changing practice: The National Literacy Strategy and the politics of literacy policy

Drawing on a recent ESRC‐funded research project, 1 this paper will explore some of the contradictory structural features of the National Literacy Strategy (NLS), which have helped shape its evolution over time, and reflect on some of the tension points which have arisen at different levels of implementation as the Strategy unfolds. In the process, the paper will consider NLS not so much as a neutral means of transferring ‘what works’ from one site to another, but rather as itself constituting a new social context in which literacy teaching and learning take place. It will pay particular attention to the new pace of teaching that NLS has ushered in and the way in which this is driven by the kind of planning regime that NLS introduced.     

Modifying faculty roles to institutionalize continuing professional education

New functions in the university often begin as satellites, marginal to the core of the academic disciplines and the faculty. With success they seek to institutionalize those functions sometimes by incorporating them into the faculty role pattern. This study examined the receptivity across a university faculty to the role changes associated with continuing education for established professionals. Working with mid-career practitioners may offer an unusual degree of intellectual stimulus and affinity to faculty members. Respondents evaluated the importance of a set of role behaviors, some traditional, some new. Application of multiple discriminant analysis to these ratings identified agreement on several basic values along with four subcultural groupings based on views of applied knowledge and the degree of relationship to an established profession.     

Developing a material-dialogic approach to pedagogy to guide science teacher education

Abstract

Dialogic pedagogy is being promoted in science teacher education but the literature on dialogic pedagogy tends to focus on explicit voices, and so runs the risk of overlooking the important role that material objects often play in science education. In this paper we use the findings of a teacher survey and classroom case study to argue that there is a gap in the way that science teachers think about the role of materials and that this could be addressed by changes in the theory base of teacher training, augmenting the current constructivist and dialogic theory with the addition of new materialism in the form of Barad’s ‘Agential Realism’. Our findings suggests that science teachers do not regularly explicitly consider the relationship between the material resources they deploy and the dialogic learning taking place. We argue that science teacher training and professional development should pay more attention to the material-dialogic relationships in the learning that emerges in science classrooms.