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.     

Piloting a dispersed and inter-professional Lesson Study using technology to link team members at a distance

This article presents an evaluation of distance technology used in a novel Lesson Study (LS) approach involving a dispersed LS team for inter-professional purposes. A typical LS model with only school teachers as team members was modified by including university-based lecturers with the school-based teachers, using video-conferencing and online video sharing. The aim was to examine the experiences of using video-conferencing and video transfer technology to support the use of LS procedures to connect team members between schools and university. The meetings from two LS teams (primary and secondary) were recorded and analysed using a discourse analysis framework, and team members were interviewed after the LS cycle. Despite some technical difficulties, the communication between the dispersed members of the teams was largely smooth and successful. Extending LS teams and practice to include non school teachers, using distance-linking technology, can more effectively support teachers, while reducing the practical constraints of bringing other professionals into the LS team.     

Child care quality: centers and home settings that serve poor families

The effects of center-based care on early development, outside of carefully controlled demonstration programs, appear to be positive yet often modest for children from low-income families. But little is known about variation in the quality of centers and preschools found among low-income neighborhoods. Evidence also remains scarce on the observed quality of home-based care, the settings that most children attend and into which large infusions of federal dollars are now directed. This paper reports on the observed quality of 166 centers and 187 nonparental home settings (including family child care homes and kith or kin providers) serving children in five cities situated in California, Connecticut, or Florida. Centers displayed higher mean quality as gauged by provider education and the intensity of structured learning activities, compared to home-based settings, but did not consistently display more positive child–provider interactions. Great variability among centers and home-based settings was observed, including between-city differences. Second, we found that contextual neighborhood attributes accounted for the quality of providers selected more strongly than family-level selection factors. Mothers with stronger verbal abilities (PPVT scores) did select higher quality centers; those employed longer hours each week relied on kith and kin providers with lower education levels. Interrelationships among different quality measures are detailed. The policy implications of such wide disparities in center and home-based care quality are discussed, including how states could more carefully strengthen regulatory or quality improvement efforts.     

Child Care Selection Under Welfare Reform: How Mothers Balance Work Requirements and Parenting

This paper examines the reasoning and experiences of mothers in selecting child care while trying to meet welfare-to-work requirements. Three theoretical positions that have been used to look at child care selection -rational choice, structuralist, and cultural - are examined and critiqued in light of a structural developmental psychology perspective. The paper then reports on semi-structured, open-ended interviews with seven mothers from three different ethnic groups—African- American, Anglo, and Latina—who range in age from 21 to 42. Interviews covered a 15-month period of time following the mothers' enrollment in a welfare- to-work program. The major finding is that mothers have hierarchically ordered criteria for evaluating child care possibilities, and the preeminent criteria is that they trust the child care provider to keep their children safe and well cared for. Structural constraints on the mothers choices are also analyzed. The findings in this article suggest that policy makers should focus on issues of trust and legitimacy of child care providers, as well as on more traditional concerns of supply and educational quality.     

Recognising the needs of gender-variant children and their parents

Gender variance confronts widely held assumptions that children born as males will act like ‘boys’ and children born as females will act like ‘girls’. This imposed binary has the effect of perpetuating negativity towards people who express themselves with gendered variations in attire, behaviour or preferences. Despite the existence of gender-variant individuals in every culture and throughout time, many people are unaware that diversity in gender expression and sexual formation is a naturally occurring phenomenon. This qualitative study aimed to establish the needs of gender-variant children and their parents in order to inform education programmes, policies and clinical approaches to gender variance. Three Internet surveys were conducted to explore the experiences of parents raising gender-variant children, the childhood experiences of transgender adults and the views of professionals who work with the transgender community. The needs of gender-variant children emerged in terms of the need for information, peer contact, personal gender expression, safety, and to be heard and accepted by their parents. The most common needs for parents were for information (stories from other parents, research and guidelines; peer support) and educational resources for schools, professionals and local communities. The paper provides comparisons between the three participant groups and recommendations for future research.     

Family functioning and early learning practices in immigrant homes

Poverty‐related developmental‐risk theories dominate accounts of uneven levels of household functioning and effects on children. But immigrant parents may sustain norms and practices—stemming from heritage culture, selective migration, and social support—that buffer economic exigencies. Comparable levels of social‐emotional functioning in homes of foreign‐born Latino mothers were observed relative to native‐born Whites, despite sharp social‐class disparities, but learning activities were much weaker, drawing on a national sample of mothers with children aging from 9 to 48 months (n = 5,300). Asian‐heritage mothers reported weaker social functioning—greater martial conflict and depression—yet stronger learning practices. Mothers’ migration history, ethnicity, and social support helped to explain levels of functioning, after taking into account multiple indicators of class and poverty.     

Computer Club for Girls: The problem with seeing girls as the problem

This paper presents findings from an evaluation of the Computer Clubs for Girls, an initiative originally delivered in the South East of England, designed to encourage more girls to take up information technology (IT) courses and careers. By targeting girls aged 10–14, the club aimed to provide members with a ‘gender relevant’ experience of IT, tackling issues of access, confidence and negative attitudes about IT. The evaluation, conducted over four years, included the collection of quantitative and qualitative data from members and non-members of the clubs. It included a longitudinal component in order to assess the longer-term impacts of the club. The findings support the critical view that initiatives based on assumptions about the relationship between girls and IT misinterpret ‘the problem’ about female under-representation in IT, and are unlikely to have a significant or sustained impact on what remains an occupational and subject area divided by gender typing. The paper argues for an approach which challenges the social and cultural discourses that maintain this gender divide.     

Verbal reasoning test scores and their stability over time

As part of an extended study into school assessment practices the use of verbal reasoning tests and their possible contribution to measuring pupil progress is being investigated. One phase of the study has involved testing the stability of individual verbal reasoning scores over time. The findings of this phase are presented here and located within the broader context of intelligence testing. The discussion concludes with a number of questions relating to the use of pupils’ academic achievements as appropriate measures of school success. The ongoing work considers how pupil success could be measured fairly, taking into account individual pupil differences, including both genetic and socio-economic factors. The work being developed has potential for both formative and summative assessment procedures and also as a tool for reporting the achievements of individual pupils and educational establishments. The full work will be published in due course.     

The Implementation and Evaluation of a Computer Simulation Game in a University Course

The purpose of this study was to implement a computer simulation game in a university course and to assess its value as an educational technique. College students (N = 200) were randomly assigned to a treatment or delayed treatment group. Lecture plus a computer simulation game was compared to lecture alone on a broad range of measures (attitudinal, attendance, achievement, information-seeking behavior). Students who participated in the game earlier in the semester responded more favorably than those who participated later in the semester, p = .02. Furthermore, students attended more during the earlier part of the course than in the later, p < .01. Students performed better on the final exam than on the second exam, p < .01. No students displayed information-seeking behavior. An implication of the results is that early implementation provides a more positive response to computer simulations.