The conscience clause in religious education and collective worship: conscientious objection or curriculum choice?

The ‘conscience clause’ allows parents to withdraw their children from religious education and collective worship; however, the reasons why parents might wish so to do are not stated in the legislation. This article looks briefly at the legal issues to do with the place of religious education in the school curriculum, the type of religious education to be provided in schools without a religious affiliation (including an exploration of the meaning of the ‘Cowper‐Temple’ clause), and at the grounds on which parents may wish to exercise the conscience clause. It shows conclusively that withdrawal may only occur on the grounds of conscientious objection, not as a matter of choice.     

Curriculum Perceptions: a multivariate analysis

The curriculum decision‐making perceptions of a pilot sample of 75 American kindergarten through twelfth grade teachers doing graduate work in education were surveyed with a 42 item questionnaire. The first four questions established the demographics of the respondents and the next three items indicated that Americans feel more constrained in making curriculum decisions than their British counterparts. The cross‐cultural comparisons are based on the findings of Doherty & Travers (1984).

The final 35 items, adapted from the instrument developed by Doherty & Travers, were subject to a factor analysis. Five interpretable factors were extracted.

The factors were labelled (1) External Monitory, (2) External Professional, (3) Internal Professional, (4) Facilitative‐Constraining, and (5) Internal Professional Peers. These factors represented 32 items with three items unassignable to any factors. Interitem reliability of the factors was judged good. Though the British study also extracted five factors (from a 30 item pool), dissimilarities in labelling and ranking importance occurred. Some of the key differences were traced to the structure of the American educational setting.     

Helping social workers address the educational needs of foster children

OBJECTIVE: The main aim was to evaluate the effectiveness of the Education Initiative, an intervention program in one of the largest urban counties in the US seeking to increase the responsiveness of social workers to the educational needs of foster children. METHOD: A pre-post test control group design was used. Data from case files and social workers were examined at the start of the project and 18 months later to determine changes in social workers' (a) knowledge and practices regarding school programs and services and (b) maintenance of educational records for children on their caseloads. RESULTS: Data were analyzed from approximately 300 case files and over 200 questionnaires completed by social workers. Findings indicated that social workers who received training and had access to an education liaison (1) increased their knowledge about the school system and (2) were more likely to gather current educational data and comment on schooling needs in the case files. On questionnaires measuring knowledge and practices, supervisory social workers showed no gains while case workers increased their levels of knowledge and involvement. CONCLUSIONS: Evaluative data from both sources support the effectiveness of this collaborative model between the school and child welfare agency for addressing the educational needs of foster youth. Social workers in the pilot offices knew more and focused more on the school experience of youth on their caseloads than workers in the control offices. They reported more educational information in the case files and solicited current progress reports from the schools. Discrepancies between worker and school reported performance data raise questions as to whether social workers by themselves are the most effective advocates for foster children.     

Missing link: Integrated individual leadership development,employee engagement,and customer value‐added improvement

Long‐term care is a key public issue that affects all of us in some way at some time of our lives. Nowhere is performance improvement and quality management more imperative. Through an 8‐month field study and follow‐up case study, we discuss how using an integrated approach to individual leadership development, employee engagement, and customer value‐added improvement might provide the missing link toward sustaining and growing organizational culture change in a very demanding environment.     

Growth in emotion understanding across early childhood: A cohort-sequential model of firstborn children across the transition to siblinghood

Emotion understanding develops rapidly in early childhood. Firstborn children (N = 231, 55% girls/45% boys, 86% White, 5% Black, 3% Asian, 4% Latinx, M_age = 29.92 months) were recruited into a longitudinal study from 2004 to 2008 in the United States and administered a series of tasks assessing eight components of young children's emotion understanding from ages 1 to 5. Cohort sequential analysis across three cohorts (1-, 2-, and 3-year-olds) demonstrated a progression of children's emotion understanding from basic emotion identification to an understanding of false-belief emotions, even after controlling for children's verbal ability. Emotion understanding scores were related to children's theory of mind and parent reports of empathy, but not emotional reactivity, providing evidence of both convergent and discriminant validity.     

Transformative learning approaches for public relations pedagogy

Public relations educators are frequently challenged by students' flawed perceptions of public relations. Two contrasting case studies are presented in this paper to illustrate how socially-oriented paradigms may be applied to a real-client project to deliver a transformative learning experience. A discourse-analytic approach is applied within the case studies as a technique for identifying changes in students' understandings of the ideological structures, power relations and knowledge systems that underpin public relations and for determining whether transformative learning has taken place. The discourse engagement and normative/critical/ethical paradigmatic orientations examined in this paper provide conceptual foundations for developing civic responsibility that needs to be underpinned by salient social theory.