Religion and literacy: observations on religious education and the literacy strategy for secondary education in Britain

The target for the year 2004 is that 70% of all 14-year-olds should achieve Level 5 English. This figure rises to 85% for 2007. ‘Schools that are beginning to work on literacy across subjects … are asked to prioritise objectives from the Framework for teaching English: years 7–9’ (Department for Education and Employment, 2001 Department for Education and Employment (DfEE) (2001) Key Stage 3 National Strategy. Literacy across the Curriculum Ref DfEE 0235/2001  [Google Scholar], p. 3). When Literacy Across the Curriculum (LAC) is introduced in these terms, the implication is that all teachers should assist English in improving its standards. Even in the model lessons that appear in official documents, there are signs that religious education is expected to yield its learning objectives to English. This paper, however, is about LAC not for the sake of English but for the sake of religious education. It proposes an approach to literacy beyond the narrow conceptions of some LAC strategists, such as the collection and classification of subject-specific vocabulary.     

Parent Resource Centers: An Innovative Mechanism for Parental Involvement in School Choice Decisions

This qualitative investigation reports on the use of Parent Resource Centers (PRCs) as a mechanism for parental involvement in public school choice decisions. Interviews with parents and staff at seven PRCs in Florida revealed that PRCs employ multiple strategies to communicate choice information to parents: community-, school- and media-based outreach; outreach to hard-to-reach parents; and collaboration with other agencies. Personalized assistance and provision of choice materials are also highlighted as useful strategies. Results indicate that there is low level of awareness about school choice options among parents and thus clear and consistent communication of choice information is needed. While PRCs hold promise for increasing parental engagement in school choice, structural and systemic barriers to exercising choice decisions such as transportation and collaboration between schools and PRCs should be addressed. Methodologically, this study illustrates the power of triangulating data from parents and PRCs to illuminate our understanding of how parents make choice decisions.     

Learning about technology: Family vs. peer pairings

Recently a number of institutions have begun sponsoring nondeficit science and/or technology learning experiences for parents and their middle school-aged children which are intended to be enriching rather than remedial or compensatory in purpose. Very little research documenting the effects of parental involvement in the education of older children has been reported, however. The intent of this article was to present two studies designed to determine whether middle school-aged children's attitudes and content achievement are different when they take a technology course with their parents (parent-child treatment) or with their peers (child-child treatment). The first study focused on learning about communications technology (primarily telegraphs, telephones and radios); the second study focused on microcomputers. Results indicate that parents have little affect in helping their children learn the subject matter of technology courses. Likewise, parents do not affect children's attitudes toward computers. Both results were attenuated by the fact that the students in the studies were high achievers who were interested in and motivated to learn the subject matter, regardless of treatment. Significant differences were noted for computer literacy favoring the parent-child group, however. Parents also seemed to effect children's attitudes toward the subject matter of the courses. Further research needs to be done with less appealing course content or with less motivated students to fully determine the effect of parent-child and child groupings in science and technology courses.