Uncovering a hidden professional agenda for teacher educators: A mixed method study on Flemish teacher educators and their professional development

Taking into account the pressing need to understand more about what teacher educators’ professional development characterises, this article adopts a mixed method approach to explore Flemish (Dutch-speaking part of Belgium) teacher educators’ professional development needs and opportunities. Analysis results of a large-scale survey study with 611 teacher educators and analysis of five qualitative focus groups (with 24 teacher educators) are presented. The results confirm the lack of attention for teacher educators’ professional development in the Flemish teacher education system. Moreover, the findings indicate a structural need for participation in professional development activities that are linked to teacher educators’ own practices, organised as long-term sustainable professional development trajectories, and formally recognised. To conclude, a professional development agenda for research, policy and practices related to teacher educators’ professional development is discussed.     

Supporting Two Households: Unaccompanied Mexican Minors and Their Absences From U.S. Schools

This article illustrates simultaneous household participation in the lives of undocumented, unaccompanied Mexican teenage minors in New York City and its impact on their school attendance. Emigrating without parents, some Mexican youths arrive to enter into the labor market, not school. Unable to assume monetary dependence, these youths’ absences from New York classrooms is driven by financial participation in their natal households in Mexico and current New York City households. Drawing from fifty-three interviews with Mexican teenagers in Mexico and New York City, this article explores how these youth laborers learn to, understand and fulfill monetary obligations to two households.     

Pedagogic practices in the family socializing context and children's school achievement

This paper describes a qualitative study about pedagogic practices in the family. The pedagogic code underlying family practices is characterized and related to specific social groups. Students' achievement is discussed in relation to family and school pedagogic practices. The analysis of family pedagogic practice was based on a model derived from Bernstein's theory. The model considers two main dimensions, the coding orientation and its specific realizations in both the instructional and regulative contexts. It provided indicators of the family discursive context and the form in which knowledges and values are transmitted. The model developed allowed a deep and delicate analysis of the family socializing context. The study showed that families differ in their coding orientation and pedagogic practices, and suggested that there are factors other than social groups to determine family's pedagogic practice. It also suggested that specific familial practices may explain children's differential achievement at school.     

The efficiency of information transmission of sign and spoken language

Rhe study compares sign and oral language in terms of information transmission efficiency. The sample consisted of 36 hearing people with no knowledge of sign language and 36 deaf people reasonably fluent in sign language. (The deaf participants' level of hearing loss ranged from severe to profound.) Oral and sign language comprehension was assessed by means of texts at three different difficulty levels. After being exposed to the texts, the study participants had to tell what they had understood about them, answer a set of related questions, and offer a title for each text. When the hearing group's comprehension of oral versions of the texts was compared to the deaf group's comprehension of signed versions, the deaf group showed better comprehension of the explicit content of the texts but added more invented content and made more errors.     

The role of injection cues in the production of the morphine preexposure effect in taste aversion learning

The attenuation of an LiCl-induced conditioned taste aversion (CTA) by LiCl preexposure is mediated primarily by associative blocking via injection-related cues. Given that preexposure to morphine attenuates morphine-induced CTAs, it was of interest to determine whether injection cues also mediate this effect. Certain morphine-induced behaviors such as analgesic tolerance are controlled associatively, via injection-related cues. Accordingly, animals in the present experiments were preexposed to morphine (or vehicle) every other day for five total exposures, followed by an extinction phase, in which the subjects were given saline injections (or no treatment) for 8 (Experiment 1) or 16 (Experiment 2) consecutive days. All of the animals then received five CTA trials with morphine (or vehicle). The morphine-preexposed animals in Experiment 1 displayed an attenuation of the morphine CTA that was unaffected by extinction saline injections, suggesting that blocking by injection cues during morphine preexposure does not mediate this effect. All of the morphine-preexposed subjects in Experiment 2 displayed a weakened preexposure effect, an effect inconsistent with a selective extinction of drug-associated stimuli. The attenuating effects of morphine preexposure in aversion learning are most likely controlled by nonassociative mechanisms, like drug tolerance.     

Educational interventions targeted at minors in situations of grave social vulnerability and their families

The aim of this article is to outline and assess an educational intervention programme targeted at improving the skills of families and the personal and social development of children living in situations of grave social vulnerability. The sample comprised 10 families during the first phase of the intervention and six during the second. The design, intervention and assessment process of this study was carried out in two phases over a period of a year and a half. For both phases, three different groups—of men/fathers, women/mothers and children—were established. Study variables (parenting skills and children’s personal and social development) were evaluated before and after the intervention in every group, as well as during the entire process. The results, taking into account the improvements reported by all the participants (social workers, group monitors, fathers, mothers, children) show that inter-professional involvement and coordination at all phases of the intervention is vital in order to achieve small but significant improvements.