Dorothy's Wars: school leadership during the Birmingham Blitz

This essay examines the school leadership experiences of an infant school head teacher in Birmingham, England, during the Second World War. Drawing on the letters of Dorothy Walker, the essay offers insights into school leadership wartime deprivations. The impact of an international war on the home front was not head teacher Dorothy Walker's only challenge. As the youngest and one of the few women head teachers in Birmingham, Dorothy Walker struggled with the traditional masculine hierarchy of the local educational system and with traditional social and familial gender roles. Dorothy Walker also battled with a traditional educational school culture as she promoted progressive educational practices. These three challenges – the war, gender relations, and progressivism – are referred to as ‘Dorothy's Wars’, or the battles that she faced as a woman school leader in Birmingham during the early years of the Second World War.     

Improving the quality of home visitation: an exploratory study of difficult situations

OBJECTIVE: The primary purpose of this study was to use an ecological assessment model to obtain a better understanding of difficult situations that home visitors confront when implementing home visitation services. METHOD: A mixed method study was used which included conducting focus groups to identify specific situations faced by home visitors who implement the Healthy Families America model of child abuse and neglect prevention. The results of the focus groups were used to design a survey. The survey had 91 Healthy Families home visitors rate situations according to frequency and difficulty. RESULTS: The results revealed that situations that were ranked most difficult included working with families where there are limited resources, where family mental illness is present (e.g., threatening suicide), where there is substance use in the home, and where families are unmotivated. A factor analysis of the situations produced five factors that reflect the difficulty of doing home visitation: having a lack of clinical skill, addressing family difficulties, addressing parenting difficulties, resolving personal difficulties, and having a lack of experience. CONCLUSION: The situations identified in this study can assist in developing the competencies needed by home visitors. The factor analysis results can be conceptualized into an inventory for staff supervision, with workers completing the inventory to identify individual areas of training needs.     

A vital fluid: risk, controversy and the politics of blood donation in the era of "mad cow disease"

This article examines the reasons for, and likely impact of, the decision by the US and other countries to permanently defer blood donors who have spent time in Britain or Europe, for fear they may transmit new variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD), the human form of "mad cow disease". It begins by discussing how vCJD and blood transfusion are linked, and how these have been translated into policy. First, maintaining a safe and stable supply of blood entails not only maintaining the trust of recipients in the system, but also that of donors, who need to be assured that their blood will be welcomed and used. Often, the balance, once upset, is regained by sacrificing donors, but accompanying costs might also be high. Second, the article highlights the impact of various forms of globalization -of commerce, disease and travel, and immigration- on blood policies and public and policy attitudes. Third, it assesses the decision by the US to restrict blood donations from Europeans and travelers to combat such a pervasive risk. The conclusion discusses how donor deferral policies may be interpreted by the public in the light of earlier discussions, and raises issues for future research.     

What goes on inside my head when I'm writing? A case study of 8–9‐year‐old boys

This article explores the idea that in order to improve the way we teach children to write, we need to improve our understanding of children as writers. Although developing their metacognitive skills can give us a clearer window into children's understanding, we must be wary of assuming that they ascribe the same meaning to their metacognitive metalanguage as we, their teachers, do. But we also need to beware of making assessments based just on the children's writing – children can use writing to hide from us what they do not know and cannot do. Through the presentation of three brief case studies of lower‐attaining Year 4 (8–9‐year‐old boys) the article considers the implications of assessing writing without acknowledging the role of the writer.     

Immigration in 2018: What is a Teacher Educator to Do?

ABSTRACT

This article contemplates the unique responsibilities of teacher educators toward immigrant students and teachers in a changing immigration landscape. The article highlights scholarship in critical care pedagogy and culturally sustaining pedagogies and identifies three “action areas” where teacher educators can apply these theories. The authors also recommend practices that can be adopted to create more caring and culturally sustaining spaces for immigrant teachers and students.     

Relationships and learning: a review and investigation of narrative coherence in looked‐after children in primary school

This review and investigation draws on principles from attachment theory regarding the importance of early relationships and their impact on the coherence and organisation of psychological functions. Comparisons are made between the narrative coherence scores of an experimental group of 17 looked‐after children with problematic relationship histories in mainstream school and a matched control group of 17 of their peers. There were significant differences between the groups in the coherence of children's narratives, denial and avoidance in story play themes and in their use of intentionality. The paper considers the theory and discusses the results in terms of the implications for teaching, learning and intervention.     

Innovating for a cause: the work and learning required to create a new approach to healthcare for homeless people

Innovation occupies a pivotal place in our understanding of knowledge-based economies, and this is raising questions about sources of innovation, how it originates, and the role played by employees, work practices and learning. This paper explores these issues through case study research into a new approach to providing healthcare for homeless people in England, and by bringing together conceptual insights from the employee-driven innovation literature, and more broadly from social and practice-based learning theory and organisational theory. Applying these perspectives to our case enables illumination of the innovation as a process – not an event – and as an ongoing set of organisational practices that transcend their origins. Through our analysis we argue that the notion of ‘a cause’ is helpful in elucidating the impetus and the commitment to making the innovation happen (and go on happening). Our findings are presented under three themes: ‘establishing a cause’, ‘organising for innovation’, and ‘innovative capability in practice’. Building on these, we have identified five key inter-related dimensions which help conceptualise the work and learning that it took to create and (re-)enact the innovation and that we suggest may have relevance for understanding and characterising other employee-led innovations in and perhaps beyond healthcare.     

Creativity in events and practices: a lens for understanding children's multimodal texts

This article argues that it is possible to look at children's texts in relation to the lens of literacy events and practices from the New Literacy Studies, and apply this perspective to an understanding of creativity. Teachers can then use the possibilities within a text to ask children different kinds of questions. Drawing on a 2‐year ethnographic study of a partnership between a group of artists and teachers in an Infants School in England, and their impact on children's text‐making, the paper seeks to understand the ways in which such a text can be identified as creative. A detailed analysis of one child's text is offered as evidence of this argument. This account is set within a project to map children's play in a Foundation classroom.