Home,work, families and children: New labour,new directions and new dilemmas

This article considers the relationships between children, parents and the state in the context of changing global, social and family structures and policy developments, providing a case study of New Labour policies in Britain. It first considers the changing ideological discourses about families, parents, especially lone mothers, children, 'home' and 'work'. Secondly, it reviews the evidence about the changing socio-economic context and for what has been termed the fragmenting family. Thirdly, it provides an analysis of the New Labour government's approach to education, welfare and family policies, including the national child care strategy and supporting families consultation document. It sets this analysis in the context of changing political discourses and from a feminist perspective, arguing that the policies are not 'joined up' but fragmented and diverse, deriving from a variety of sources and targeted on a number of different groups. Thus it is difficult to argue that there is but one modernisation project or 'third way' being espoused by New Labour. However, the underlying theme of all the policy developments is economic and oriented to work. This involves a rebalancing of home and work and the involvement of parents, especially mothers, in work rather than education or child care. The measures taken to achieve this have been both coercive and controlling and involve new methods of surveillance and regulation through standards. Whilst New Labour has developed a new direction for families in balancing home and work, this is fragmented and diverse and covers a variety of policies from education - early childhood through to lifelong learning - and social services, to fiscal measures, to health and welfare and finally involving the Home Office in new parenting initiatives. The balancing of home and work has become the central business of government in its various and diverse activities.     

Personality Analysis in British Columbia Schools

World War II — A Survey of Recent Literature, Joseph S. Roucek

BIOGRAPHY: The Hero in America by Dixon Wetter. Illustrated. Charles Scribner's Sons. 530 pp. $3.50.

The Soong Sisters by Emily Hahn. Illustrated. Doubleday Doran. 349 pp. $3.00.

EDUCATION: Parental Income and College Opportunities by Helen Bertha Goetsch. Bureau of Publications, Teachers College, Columbia University, New York City. 146 pp. $1.85.

And Still the Waters Run by Angie Debo. Princeton University Press. 402 pp. $4.00.

Planning the Community School by N. L. Engelhardt and N. L. Engelhardt, Jr. The American Book Company. 176 pp. $2.50.

The Nineteen Forty Mental Measurements Yearbook by Oscar Kreisen Buros, editor, The Mental Measurements Yearbook, Highland Park, New Jersey. 674 pp. $6.00.

The Junior College Movement by Carl E. Seashore. Henry Holt and Company- 156 pp. $1.75.

The Teaching and Administration of High School Music by Peter W. Dykema and Karl W. Gehrkens, C. C. Birchard &; Company, Boston. 614 pp. $4.00.

The Universities in Transformation by Adolf Löwe. The Macmillan Company. 62 pp. $40.

FICTION: Feast of Reason by Dorothy Walworth. Farrar and Rinehart. 320 pp. $2.50.

Northern Winter by Gösta af Geijerstam, E. P. Dutton and Company. 178 Pp. $2-50.

Spring Symphony by Eleanor Painter. Harper and Brothers. 362 pp. $2.50.

The Longbow Murder by Victor Luhrs, W. W. Norton. 304 pp. $2.00.

GENERAL LITERATURE: Garden Clubs and Spades by Laurence McKinney. Pictures by Helen E. Hokinson, E. P. Dutton and Company, Inc. 64 pp. $1.00.

The Gang's All Here by Harvey Smith. Princeton University Press. 325 pp. $2.50.

Their Finest Hour. Edited by Allan A. Michie and Walter Graebner. Illustrated. Harcourt, Brace and Company. 226 pp. + xiv. $2.50.

True Comics, published bi-monthly by the Parents Institute, 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York City, 64 pp. 10c a copy. 60c a year. Published by George J. Hecht, edited by David T. Marke, with an editorial board of junior advisors including Shirley Temple and Mickey Rooney, and senior advisors including George H. Gallup, Gertrude Hartman, Arthur T. Jersild (Professor of Education, Teachers College, Columbia University), David C. Knowlton (Professor of Education, Social Studies, New York University), Clara Savage Littledale (Editor of Parents' Magazine), David S. Muzzey (Emeritus Professor of History, Columbia University), and Hendrik Willem van Loon.

HISTORY:The Kaw: heart Of A Nation by Floyd Benjamin Streeter. Illustrated. Farrar and Rinehart. 371 pp. $2.50.

The Shaker Adventure: an Experiment in Contented Living by Marguerite Fellows Melcher. Princeton University Press. 319 pp. $3.00

Turkey by Emil Lengyel. Illustrated. Random House. 474 pp. $3.75.

SCIENCE: The Principles of Electrochemistry by Duncan A. MacInnes, Reinhold Publishing Corp., 478 pp. $6.00.

SOCIAL STUDIES: Faith for Living by Lewis Mumford. Harcourt, Brace and Company. 333 pp. $2.00.

Kabloona by Gontran de Poncins. Reynal and Hitchcock. Illustrated. In collaboration with Lewis Galantiere. 339 pp. $3.00.

We Have A Future by Norman Thomas. Princeton University Press. 236 pp. $2.50.

TRAVEL: Hawaii, A Profile, with 87 Pictures; Porto Rico, A Profile with 87 Pictures; The Virgin Isles, A Profile, with 92 Pictures. By Merle Colby, Duell, Sloane and Pearce, New York. $1.00 each.     

Revisiting curriculum inquiry: the role of visual representations

Curriculum materials and knowledge about curricular purposes and structures are valuable tools that teachers often draw upon to organize instruction and facilitate student learning. Careful analysis of teachers’ curriculum implementation and the decision-making that undergirds their curriculum use is critical for fully understanding enactment. This paper compares how integrity analyses of implementation of curriculum materials and actor-oriented analysis of teachers’ curriculum use can help researchers, teacher educators, and curriculum designers interpret teachers’ decisions about what aspects of new materials to use and how to use such materials. Drawing on evidence from teacher interviews and observations, we compare two teachers’ enactments of a new elementary-level environmental biology unit. Our analyses of integrity point to differences in teachers’ adaptations with respect to their consistency with the purposes and structures of curriculum materials as construed by designers. By contrast, our actor-oriented analysis explain how the teachers’ different approaches to interpreting the goals and structures of the curriculum unit partly account for patterns in their enactment in ways that can inform refinements to materials and the design of professional development supports for teachers. In so doing, we show how implementation integrity and actor-oriented analyses offer complementary perspectives to inform curriculum research and development.     

Involving Older Adults as Co-researchers in Social Work Education

This article examines the contribution of older adults as co-researchers to the evaluation of a gerontological social work course. The evaluation was conducted at an Israeli college as part of a collaborative project with a United Kingdom university. Here, we follow the older adults who are service users through their transition to the role of co-researchers and reflect on their experiences in the process. Insights gained by the different stakeholders from the co-researching experience are discussed, and the growing interest in service-user contributions to social work education in various fields such as aging and disabilities is recognized.     

In Support of Pair Programming in the Introductory Computer Science Course

A formal pair programming experiment was run at North Carolina to empirically assess the educational efficacy of the technique in a CS1 course. Results indicate that students who practice pair programming perform better on programming projects and are more likely to succeed by completing the class with a C or better. Student pairs are more self-sufficient which reduces their reliance on the teaching staff. Qualitatively, paired students demonstrate higher order thinking skills than students who work alone. These results are supportive of pair programming as a collaborative learning technique.     

Understanding pictorial information in biology: students’ cognitive activities and visual reading strategies

ABSTRACT

In classroom, scientific contents are increasingly communicated through visual forms of representations. Students’ learning outcomes rely on their ability to read and understand pictorial information. Understanding pictorial information in biology requires cognitive effort and can be challenging to students. Yet evidence-based knowledge about students’ visual reading strategies during the process of understanding pictorial information is pending. Therefore, 42 students at the age of 14–15 were asked to think aloud while trying to understand visual representations of the blood circulatory system and the patellar reflex. A category system was developed differentiating 16 categories of cognitive activities. A Principal Component Analysis revealed two underlying patterns of activities that can be interpreted as visual reading strategies: 1. Inferences predominated by using a problem-solving schema; 2. Inferences predominated by recall of prior content knowledge. Each pattern consists of a specific set of cognitive activities that reflect selection, organisation and integration of pictorial information as well as different levels of expertise. The results give detailed insights into cognitive activities of students who were required to understand the pictorial information of complex organ systems. They provide an evidence-based foundation to derive instructional aids that can promote students pictorial-information-based learning on different levels of expertise.     

Epistemological resources for thought experimentation in science learning

Thought Experiments (TEs) are reasoning processes that are based on 'results' of an experiment carried out in thought. What is the validity of an experiment- that has not been actually executed- for knowledge about the physical world? What are the features that make it distinctive and how do we integrate it into learning environments to support such thought processes? This study suggests that a thought experiment draws on three epistemological resources: conceptual-logical inferences, visual imagery and bodily-motor experience. We start by stating how students' TEs are related to recent research on learning science and then proceed to describe the nature of TEs. The central part of the paper deals with cognitive theories and empirical examples of visual imagery and bodily imagery. It also deals with how these enable implicit knowledge about the world to be retrieved. Students may have, but are not aware of, such knowledge for it is hidden when learning is only based on formal representations. We show that imagination is structured, goal-oriented, based on prior experiential imagery and internally coherent. Students can, for example, mentally rotate objects at constant velocity. Students can 'zoom in and out' to inspect imaginary situations, transfer objects, predict paths of imaginary moving objects and imagine the impact of forces on mechanical systems. We show that the TEs are powerful because of these capabilities. We further claim that these are not exploited by school learning environments and offer a first step towards understanding imagery in science learning.     

Retired Teachers Reflect on Learning from Experience

An attempt to clarify how learning from experience takes place and the role memory plays in the process was carried out in the frame of a study of retired teachers' accounts of their teaching, focusing on their views on the transformation of experience into professional wisdom. Forty-three retired teachers participated in the study and were asked to talk about their professional memories. The stimulus question was: 'What can you tell me about recollected events of your teaching practice?'. Further data was collected through lengthy and repeated interviews with 15 teachers. In the interviews, retired teachers were asked what the role of experience was in the development of their professional knowledge. They focused on the necessary conditions for learning from experience, as well as on the process itself. Among the necessary conditions for learning from experience, teachers in the present study mentioned time, maturity, and interaction with others. The following characteristics of the learning process were identified: the importance of narratives; the emotional aspects of learning from experience; and the role of disequilibrium and reframing. Teachers' recollections concerning their practice and insights about learning from experience represent cases of practice that can be analyzed and discussed in pre-service and in-service courses. They serve to create a sense of professional identity and continuity.     

Book review

This paper reports an evaluation of an innovative university–school partnership in which teacher practitioners work as university lecturers in a regional Australian pre‐service teacher education programme. The philosophy of this programme encompasses authentic partnerships between universities, schools and other industry employers. The study was motivated by an interest inunderstanding the experiences and outcomes for the teacher practitioners and in documenting their experiences. Staff members who are currently on contract as university lecturers as well as teachers who have completed secondments and returned to school settings are surveyed. This paper focuses on suggestions to improve the partnership and discusses future directions for the partnership.