A comparative study of the child bereavement and loss responses and needs of schools in Hull,Yorkshire and Derry/Londonderry,Northern Ireland

This paper reports the findings from a study of schools' responses to child bereavement in Hull, Yorkshire and Derry/Londonderry, Northern Ireland. In order to gain an insight and compare how schools in both geographical areas respond to and manage bereavement, the questionnaire ‘Loss in schools’ was selected as an appropriate tool. It has been utilised on previous occasions in Hull and shown to be an effective method of highlighting the issues, needs and concerns of schools. Some significant and important issues emerge in the results of the present survey. While schools rate child bereavement and parental separation highly in terms of their priorities, there is a shortfall in the number of schools in both study sites that have a formal procedure or policy in place around the management and response to death and loss. Although there is evidence that a number of staff have attended training in loss and bereavement, schools in Derry/Londonderry and Hull report that they have sought help from other agencies in times of need. For example, the Western Education and Library Board Bereavement Team and Cruse Bereavement Care (Derry/Londonderry) and the Educational Psychology Service (Hull) are identified. Schools are asking for help and support to develop policies and to gain the knowledge and skills they require to respond with confidence to a child who experiences a loss.     

Quality Teaching and Learning in Australian and South African Universities: Comparing policies and practices

Over the last decade universities across the world have been grappling with quality and quality assurance issues. In several countries national policies on higher education quality assurance have been evolving, mostly with the purpose of putting external systems of quality assurance in place. In many instances, these policies and systems had less effect on the quality of teaching and learning than had been expected. This paper serves as a comparison of national quality policy developments in two countries, Australia and South Africa, and goes on to investigate the emerging tensions in quality policy processes in these countries. Whereas a number of similarities were discerned, differences were as evident, verifying the underlying assumption of the authors that notions of quality, and quality policies and their implementation are very much dependent on the particular localised contexts in which they exist.     

Supporting Lesotho teachers to develop resilience in the face of the HIV and AIDS pandemic

HIV and AIDS threaten to erode the wellbeing of teachers who are faced with an increasing number of children rendered vulnerable by the pandemic. This article explores the usefulness of a supportive group intervention, Resilient Educators (REds), in supporting Lesotho teachers to respond to the HIV and AIDS-related challenges. A time-series pre- and post-intervention design was used to evaluate the programme. The findings indicate that the intervention led to an increase in the sense of agency of participating teachers both on a personal and community level. The findings have international significance for teachers working in similar contexts characterised by extreme adversity.     

Writing Experiences of Community College Students with Self-Reported Writing Anxieties and Linguistic Insecurity: A Perspective for College Counselors

This explanatory case study researched the writing experiences of 11 community college students who differed subculturally and who were all part of the African diasporic community. The theoretical perspectives used for this study were Arthur Chickering's (1969 Chickering , A. ( 1969 ). Education and identity , (2nd ed.) . San Francisco , CA : John Wiley & Sons . [Google Scholar]) classical concept of academic competence and community dialect theory (Baxter & Holland, 2007 Baxter , M. , & Holland , R. (2007). Addressing the needs of students who use a nonstandard dialect. Adult Basic Education and Literacy Journal , 1(3), 145–153. [Google Scholar]). Academic competence is a stage in college that explores how students learn acquired skills for educational attainment. Community dialect theory argues that African American dialect writers have a low-to-some awareness of how their dialect differs from standard English in the area of subject-verb agreement. Two research questions guided this inquiry: (a) How does Black English influence writing anxiety in academic settings? (b) Why should college counselors have a strategy to assist students who express fears of enrolling in remedial English? A mixed method strategy was used to gather the data. This strategy consisted of a qualitative interview, and two educational tests. The study found that most of the students had a low awareness of how their dialect differed from standard English. Furthermore, Black English directly induced writing anxiety in academic settings for this group of community college students. Their writing anxieties and insecurities were detected by the words and situational experiences these students related during the interviews. In addition, college counselors should have an intervention strategy in place for this population of students to reduce the gap between academic competence and students of African descent who are dialect writers with writing anxieties and linguistic insecurities in academic settings.     

Northern Ireland head teachers’ perceptions of inclusion

Inclusion has been a central educational issue for well over a quarter of a century, with continuing emphasis worldwide on initiatives by governments, Higher Education Institutions and schools that respond to the needs of children and young people with learning difficulties, disabilities or other disadvantage. This paper reports how Northern Ireland head teachers interpret inclusion in the nursery, primary, post‐primary and special sectors. Those in mainstream schools showed whole‐hearted commitment to the philosophy and practice of inclusion, and could critically examine what they have achieved so far. However, they recognized persistent and varied constraints both within and beyond their schools. Head teachers in the special sector perceived their schools to have a multiple role in providing for pupils with the greatest need, reintegrating those on placement into their regular schools, and offering outreach support to mainstream colleagues. The implications for all aspects of teacher education were identified, for beginning teachers, for more experienced practitioners and for the head teachers themselves. A number of key factors were suggested to make inclusion work.     

What factors promote student resilience on a level 1 distance learning module?

Resilience is understood to be the ability to adapt positively in the face of adversity. In relation to new students on a distance learning module, this can mean how they adapt and make sense of the demands of their chosen study to enable them to persist in their studies. This article reports a small-scale study involving semi-structured telephone interviews with students on a level 1 distance learning module at the UK Open University. Students identified the challenges they experienced such as carving out time to study alongside other commitments, as well as developing their academic writing. Students also identified factors that enabled them to adapt to these challenges and be successful in continuing to study. Students rated highly the support they received from tutors in the form of tailored, detailed feedback on their assignments. Other factors that enabled students to persist in their studies were time management, self-belief and motivation.     

The construction of a questionnaire to evaluate the science orientedness of students' identities as learners from a cognitive perspective

Forming a science-oriented identity is considered a process underlying both interest and achievement in science education. A questionnaire is developed for describing “identities as learners” and evaluating their science orientedness. The instrument (k = 65) focuses on cognitive aspects. An internal coherence of .88 was found. Five subscales were defined that proved interrelated yet distinguishable. A pilot amongst 40 students from Dutch general secondary education showed that preferring science over non-science subjects and relatively high grades for sciences subjects were strongly correlated to science orientedness of the learner identity (r_s  = .65; p < .001). The results support the reliability and validity of the questionnaire but also point to the importance of identity as a central concept in studying science education. It is concluded that we made a promising step in constructing an instrument for monitoring the development of cognitive aspects of science-oriented identities during (innovative) science education.     

Case Studies of School Improvement in East Africa: A New Addition to School Effectiveness Research

This article gives an account of how and why the term 'value added' has come to be used in an educational context, focusing on the early years of that usage in the UK. It discusses the fact that the term value added has developed, has been understood and defined in diverse and sometimes conflicting ways; and identifies what are called 'functional ambiguities' in the term; that is to say, ambiguities which cannot be altogether eliminated because they are necessary to how the term is made to function. Nonetheless, some criteria emerge in the course of the article for making evaluative judgements of what should and should not count as meaningful definitions of value added.     

Academic and Extracurricular Support for Refugee Students in the US: Lessons Learned

This article examines students’ experiences as resettled refugee and asylee students in international schools in New York City. Specifically, it looks at how teachers and school leaders provide critical academic and extracurricular support to facilitate students’ adjustment to academic environments that differ markedly from those compared in their countries of origin or the countries of asylum visited prior to their arrival in the United States. Drawing on a qualitative study conducted in New York City at two international schools, as well as program staff from an outside organization that often collaborates with international schools hosting refugee and asylee students, the article documents promising practices and offers practical recommendations for teachers working with refugee students.