A Burning Desire for Social Justice

The relationship between personal prayer and perceived purpose in life is explored among two samples of twelve‐to‐fifteen‐year‐olds. The first sample comprises 914 males and 726 females who never attend church. The second sample comprises 232 males and 437 females who attend church most weeks. The data demonstrate a significant positive relationship between frequency of personal prayer and perceived purpose in life among both groups.     

OLDER WOMEN,THE STUDENT ROLE AND MENTAL HEALTH

Returning women students over 50, although growing in number, have been largely ignored as a unique group by both educational gerontologists and scholars interested in non‐traditional women students.

Matched groups (N = 106) of student (outwardly oriented) and non‐student (home oriented) women (mean age = 55.67, s.d. = 5.25) were compared on measures of subjective age and attitudes toward age, perceived happiness and satisfaction, perceived physical health, number and severity of depressive symptoms, self‐esteem and autonomy. The student group was found to report better health, fewer and less severe depressive symptoms and higher autonomy.

Psychological transitions facing mid‐life women are discussed. Possibilities of educational participation as preventive of mid‐life depression for women are discussed. Future longitudinal, cohort‐sequential research should focus on mid‐life and older women students as a unique group.     

The educational developer’s portfolio

The roles and responsibilities described in internationally advertised job opportunities for educational developers reflect the diversity and emerging professionalism of the field. Models adapted from the traditional teaching portfolio are a promising means of articulating these roles and responsibilities, and of defining the nature of the educational development profession.     

Using ambiguity and entertainment to win compliance in a lower-level US History class

This paper examines the dynamics of authority relationships and curriculum enactment in a lower-level, college-preparatory US History class. It explains how a teacher and his students construct a relaxed order shaped by uncertain educational goals, the use of entertainment, and students' wants. Ambiguity and entertainment in the teacher's practise signal tensions within the school's moral order, and reflect the values of egalitarianism, individualism, and anti-intellectualism. This approach wins compliance and popularity; it also perpetuates ambivalence towards schooling and low investment in educational aims.     

Adult Education Today and Tomorrow

Educational Management: an ethical critiqueAbstract

This paper argues that much of the management literature in education at the present time is fundamentally flawed and ethically unpalatable. Its current stress upon effectiveness deflects attention from the more central question of what normative ends education should be engaged in pursuing. Its concentration upon treating teachers as resources in a national economic plan reduces the art of teaching to a functional and uncritical application of hierarchical directives. In so doing, it suggests that educational practitioners and recipients are to be viewed in an essentially manipulative manner — the manager/headteacher of the staff, the teacher of the pupil. It is argued that not only is such an approach ethically unacceptable, but that it also has grave practical consequences for education as a whole.     

THE GERIATRIC INTERDISCIPLINARY TEAM APPROACH: CHALLENGES AND OPPORTUNITIES IN EDUCATING TRAINEES TOGETHER FROM A VARIETY OF DISCIPLINES

The special health needs of older persons and the organization of managed care systems necessitate interdisciplinary team health care. However, there is a paucity of training or familiarity with team care among most health care professionals. This article describes one nationwide initiative, funded by the John A. Hartford Foundation, in which eight sites trained health care workers from different disciplines to participate as interdisciplinary geriatric health care team members. Although the goal of the initiative was to develop trained interdisciplinary team participants, a major concern of the programs was the initial overcoming of challenges to training professionals from different disciplines together. Both benefits and challenges are identified and several training modalities and techniques to meet the challenges are discussed. These include case studies, standardized patients, cross-discipline role-playing, glossaries, and use of the DISC Personality Profile. The benefits of each of these modalities are examined, and potential pitfalls and perils to be avoided are emphasized.     

Teacher perceptions of a physical education statewide assessment program

A statewide program assessment was established to make positive change in physical education school programs in South Carolina. Reform efforts depend both on balancing accountability for change and teacher support for change (Odden &Anderson, 1986). The purpose of the study was to determine teacher perceptions of the South Carolina Physical Education Assessment Program and its effects across six related themes including: changes in teaching and learning, changes in curriculum and instruction, teacher awareness of the assessment program, teacher support for the program, work place conditions, and the advocacy role of the program. It was also the purpose of this study to determine if the survey responses were in any way related to teacher and school variables. The overall results of the study indicated positive change and support for the assessment program, supporting the viability of the standards, assessment, and accountability reform effort to positively impact physical education programs.     

Indigenous Digital Art as Politics in Australia

This essay contributes to discussions about Indigenous politics and debates about contemporary democracy. It uses a case study of video art produced by young indigenous people and a community development organisation in the Pilbara, Australia. Those involved in the project use digital media under the auspices of the Big hART Yijala Yala Project to produce an interactive comic series. The essay addresses the following questions: Do contemporary community development projects play a conservatising role serving the interests of a neoliberal polity? Given the long-standing practice of representing modern media as a vehicle for western domination what, if anything, do these projects imply about the political relations between Aboriginal and non-indigenous Australians? Are Indigenous media and cultural work inherently political? What conceptions of the political are at stake in such arguments? We focus on how certain groups of young people use new media, and how their activities are political. The argument is that Indigenous media like these are ‘inherently political’ because they are about efforts to reclaim the images of indigenous peoples for themselves.