Home Away from Home: Acclimatization of Filipino Elderly from being Home to a Sense of being “At Home” in an Elderly Institution

This grounded study examined the process of acclimatization or the process of changing perspectives of a person so as to get used to or feel “at home” among a select group of Filipino elderly in a nursing care facility. As institutionalization of the elderly is not typical in the Philippine context, varied responses were analyzed to understand the factors and the course that an elderly person undergoes over a set period of time to achieve acclimatization. Twenty elderly (n = 20) residents were purposively recruited and subjected to an in-depth interview that chronicled their experiences on their previous and present lives and on the process by which they were able to adjust to a relatively new setting. Preliminarily, a robotfoto was devised to obtain demographic data including visitation frequencies and familial relationships, and this was followed by an in-depth interview. Through the constant comparison method, an interesting model called the Hourglass of Acclimatization emerged. This model yielded two distinct phases contributing to successful acclimatization. One is the Conversion phase, or imbibing the main notion of transforming one's perspectives of him or herself and his or her environment; there is also the Immersion phase, which describes how an elderly involves him or herself completely into the life he or she is supposed to live. This emerged model can contribute to the development of nursing interventions focusing on elderly experiences in the entire course of relocation to a new environment other than what they call “home.”     

Froebelian women: networking to promote professional status and educational change in the nineteenth century

Recent comments by Baroness Warnock have reignited controversy over the relative merits of policies designed to promote inclusion and address special educational needs. These debates, conducted mainly between practitioners and parents, do not encourage input from historians but can usefully contextualize earlier models of service delivery. This paper concentrates on the interwar period when provision for children, whom we would now understand to have a moderate to severe learning disability, was shaped by the requirements of the 1913 Mental Deficiency Act. Existing studies that have examined the implementation of this legislation have tended to concentrate on the management of long‐stay institutions. This has led to a focus on medical care and the social control of adolescents and adults. Education has featured in these accounts but often in a fairly limited way, with more emphasis on school failure leading to admission than the educational potential of either the mental deficiency institution or its inmates. This paper seeks to redress the balance by offering a brief survey of the way education served as a way in, through and out of one of the largest specialist institutions in the South West of England before 1948.     

The Counties of England: a nineteenth-century geographical game to amuse and instruct

This study examines a Victorian geographical card game entitled The Counties of England published by Jaques & Son. Advertised as highly instructive and educational, it was designed to teach children about the principal towns in each county, their products and notable buildings. The aims of the study were to discover whether the information printed on the cards accurately reflected the towns’ main features and if the number of cards allocated to each county was representative of its population size. The study found that many towns included in the first edition of the game were accurately represented, but later issues, despite some modification, carried somewhat outdated information. Counties with large populations were also generally allotted more cards. Several factors were identified as possibly influencing which towns were selected and how they were presented, including tourist appeal, the card designer’s interests and knowledge and the rules and conventions of the game.     

‘Take more time to actually listen’: students' reflections on participation and negotiation in school

Behaviour in schools is an emotive topic and one of enduring political interest and sensitivity. The media often portrays schools as violent and dangerous places and young people as ever more unruly. This paper explores findings from a recent large‐scale national study on behaviour and focuses on the data from primary and secondary school students within this study. The comments and suggestions offered by students move beyond a discussion of behaviour to focus on the broader questions of participation, engagement and meanings of active citizenship in school.     

Resampling with TinkerPlots

The constructivist data handling software TinkerPlots is used to carry out resampling in a manner that illustrates the stages of the process without the need for programming skills.     

Broadening Conceptions of Curriculum for Young People: Reports from three student-teachers on exchange

Research reports prepared by three Australian preservice teachers--Paula Shaw, Chris Sharp and Scott McDonald--undertaking their teacher education practicum in Canada, form the basis of this paper. The reports provide critical insights into three aspects of education for young people in both Canada and Australia. They also provide critical insight into the ways in which a practicum research project, along with the opportunities afforded through an international experience, enabled the preservice teachers to broaden their understanding of the curriculum for young people, of issues relevant to the diverse needs of young people, and of themselves and their priorities as teachers. The preservice teachers investigated three topics: attempts to reduce homophobia in schools; the presence or absence of Aboriginal content in the school curricula in British Columbia and Queensland; and "schools-within-schools" as a means to meet the needs of diverse student populations. Linda Farr Darling from the University of British Columbia provides a response to the three reports.     

Beyond the Screen: Narrative Mapping as a Tool for Evaluating a Mixed-Reality Science Museum Exhibit

This article describes the authors' work as formative evaluators of a mixed-reality science museum installation, Journey with Sea Creatures. Looking beyond the focal point of the screen to the spatial and temporal surroundings of the exhibit, the authors employed a technique they call retrospective narrative mapping in conjunction with sustained on-site observations, follow-up interviews with museum visitors, and the development of personas to better understand the user experience in multimodal informal learning environments.     

Differences in educational outcomes of African American students from different socioeconomic backgrounds

This research tested a structural equation model of educational outcomes for three socioeconomic status (SES) groups of African American students enrolled in a community college. The structural model, which was based on a variant of Tinto's (1987) model, contained two exogenous constructs, educational intentions/commitment and external commitments, and three endogenous constructs, academic integration, social integration, and educational outcomes. The study demonstrated that higher levels of academic and social engagement had positive direct effects on educational outcomes for all students regardless of SES background. Other paths that were supported included the positive direct effects of educational intentions/commitment on academic and social integration and the negative impact of external commitments on social integration. Significant structural differences were not present in the measurement of model constructs or the process of educational outcomes among lowest, lower to middle, and middle to upper SES groups.