Combining school attendance with home-based interventions for autism

Despite the increased parental involvement in interventions for autism over recent decades, and the wide variety of home-based interventions which now exist, little is known about how these fit in with school attendance. Families' use of one intensive home-based intervention, the Son-Rise Program, was examined through a one-year longitudinal questionnaire and interview study. Issues relating to school attendance were examined, including parents' decision-making processes regarding concurrent school attendance, issues of compatibility between home and school, and issues arising for those families who discontinued school attendance in order to run a full-time intervention at home. Rather than using the Program exclusively and intensively, it was found that many families used the recommended intervention techniques part-time in the home whilst continuing their child's school attendance, and found the two learning contexts to be compatible with each other. Parents also identified a number of ways in which compatibility could be further maximised.     

Continuing educational participation among children in care in five countries: some issues of social class

Young people who have spent all or part of their childhoods in public care are at particular risk of social exclusion as adults and yet the pathway out of exclusion identified by policy-makers at both European and national levels, namely, education, is very difficult to access. Using data from a five-country study of the post-compulsory educational pathways of young people in public care, this paper examines the rates of participation of young people in further and higher education and considers what might account for the gap, looking at two factors: the impact of background social class on educational support and the educational intentions and practices of the care system. The paper concludes by considering the policy context and some possible tensions between policy aims and young people’s contexts and experiences.     

Locating and building knowledges outside of the academy: approaches to engaged teaching at the University of Sheffield

This article draws on three case studies, which illuminate a number of practical, ethical and intellectual issues that arise from ‘engaged’ teaching activities within the curriculum. Projects from the disciplines of Architecture, English and Journalism Studies illustrate the possibilities offered by learning and teaching projects which emphasise public facing, co-produced knowledge as central components. It is argued that such approaches enable dynamic forms of learning to emerge, which work to expand the parameters of subject-specific knowledge while enabling the development of citizenship attributes and employability skills amongst students in ways that deepen, rather than dilute, intellectual rigour. The article locates these practical pedagogical reflections within theoretical frameworks offered by those working (largely in North America) on publicly engaged approaches to scholarship and seeks to draw connections with contemporary developments in learning and teaching in the UK.     

Family-based care buffers the stress sensitizing effect of early deprivation on executive functioning difficulties in adolescence

We examined whether family care following early-life deprivation buffered the association between stressful life events (SLEs) and executive functioning (EF) in adolescence. In early childhood, 136 institutionally reared children were randomly assigned to foster care or care-as-usual; 72 never-institutionalized children served as a comparison group. At age 16 years, adolescents (n = 143; 54% female; 67.1% Romanian) self-reported recent SLEs, completed a battery of memory and EF tasks, and completed a go/nogo task in which mediofrontal theta power (MFTP) was measured using electroencephalogram. More independent SLEs predicted lower EF and more dependent SLEs predicted lower MFTP, but only among adolescents with prolonged early deprivation. Findings provide preliminary evidence that family care following early deprivation may facilitate resilience against stress during adolescence on EF.     

Mapping the daily media round: novel methods for understanding families’ mobile technology use

The pervasiveness of mobile devices in families’ homes has dramatically changed the physical and temporal arrangement of co-viewing media content; the representative image of American families seated around a TV set is an anachronism. But understanding and describing contemporary co-participation arrangements around digital media is challenging because of the mobile nature of these activities. As researchers, our greatest challenge is to observe people's digital media use that is increasingly ‘on-the-move’ in an effort to understand the significance and possibilities these devices have in family life, learning, and engagement in and across different settings. This article describes an innovative study design for understanding how mobile technologies influence the ways in which families learn together. We analyze the movement of digital media practices, where they are located, and how digital co-participation within families is distributed across time and space.     

Teachers and students with severe learning difficulties working together to co‐construct personal narratives using Storysharing®: the teacher perspective

The telling of personal stories is a feature of everyday life. Young people with learning difficulties may find it difficult to report what has happened to them. A project was set up to investigate the impact of Storysharing® on the co‐construction of personal narratives by staff and students in a special school. The current study investigated the teacher's perspective. The sample was comprised of four special education teachers who had been involved in the implementation of Storysharing®. Semi‐structured interviews were carried out at the end of the intervention period. The data were analysed using thematic analysis. Three organising themes emerged from the data: ‘Enactment Process’; ‘Benefits to Child’; and ‘Curriculum.’ The Storysharing® intervention appeared to be positively associated with perceived changes to the educational practice of the teachers, revealing its potential for developing narrative in the classroom.