Engaging novice teachers in semiotic inquiry: considering the environmental messages of school learning settings

Katherine Fogelberg’s insightful study of the messages of zoo signs describes the complex, sometimes contradictory nature of the messages they communicate. The construction and content of signs are influenced by institutional power. Fogelberg argues that the creation of zoo signage designed to inform the public can, through its messages, silence a perspective of care and compassion for animals. The research presented in the following article extends discussion about the value of critical considerations of cultural and institutional messages created and read in another type of setting designed to educate and inform, the school learning setting. The article reports on a project that engaged novice teachers in explorations of the nature and types of environmental messages found in learning settings. During our inquiry work together, novice teachers suggested areas of particular concern to them, and began to construct ideas about aspects of their work in which they plan to take action or engage in future inquiry. The research also reveals some of the challenges involved when novice educators first begin the process of engaging in semiotic interpretive readings of learning settings.     

Hospital-based multidisciplinary teams can prevent unnecessary child abuse reports and out-of-home placements

OBJECTIVE: To determine how often and for what reasons a hospital-based multidisciplinary child abuse team concluded that a report of alleged or suspected child abuse was unnecessary in young children with fractures. METHODS: A retrospective review was completed of all children less than 12 months of age who, because of fractures, were referred to the hospital multidisciplinary child abuse team for consultation regarding the need to consider child abuse. RESULTS: The team received 99 consultations, reported 92 (93%) children as alleged or possible victims of physical abuse, and did not report 7 (7%). Age at presentation of those who were reported was 4.2 months compared to 3.0 months in the non-reported group. The average number of fractures in the reported group was 2.9 (SD 3.53) compared to 3.4 (SD 4.6) in the non-reported group. Factors that led to cases not being reported included: (a) a trauma history consistent with the fracture (n=4), (b) a diagnosis of bone fragility secondary to genetic, nutritional or medical therapy etiologies (n=2), and (c) iatrogenic fracture (n=1). CONCLUSIONS: Seven percent of the children less than 12 months of age and with at least one fracture referred to the multidisciplinary team for evaluation of possible child abuse were not reported as alleged or suspected physical abuse. The involvement of the hospital multidisciplinary child abuse team may have prevented unnecessary investigation by the county social services agency and/or police, and possible out-of-home temporary placement.     

When the Exception Is the Rule: School Shootings,Bare Life,and the Sovereign Self

Much discourse on school shootings tends to imply a binary separation between what is considered normal and exceptional, between an expected course of human events and sociohistorical aberrations. In this article Harvey Shapiro suggests the need for new directions in our responses: First, he shows how responses to school shootings tend to expropriate and (paradoxically) dismiss certain kinds of violence in order to articulate a vision of the self as sovereign, exerting power over bodily life, exercising a self‐removal from community conversations, and thus claiming what Giorgio Agamben and others call the “sovereign exception.” Second, he suggests how Agamben's development of Walter Benjamin's concept of “divine violence” can unmask prevailing states of exception and can inform education's efforts to challenge binaries of good and evil, urban and suburban, individual and community, justice and law, normal and exceptional, that confound our deliberations and long‐term responses to mass shootings.     

Doing teacher research: a qualitative analysis of purposes,processes and experiences

In this paper we draw upon 14 semi‐structured interviews with the participants in a teacher‐researcher project on the theme of ‘ensuring African Caribbean attainment’ with the aim of shedding light on the purposes, processes and lived experiences of teacher research in a difficult and contentious intellectual and practical domain. After briefly reviewing the history and policy background of teacher research in England, we introduce the project and the specific purposes and motivations of its various stakeholders. In the second half of the paper we analyse the challenges and the rewards of participating in the project, including the challenges of facilitating teacher research, and we review the key implications of the research for policy and practice. We conclude that, in trying to make teacher research happen in a way that is meaningful and productive for those involved (whether as facilitators or teacher researchers), three things have to be negotiated at once: new roles for academic facilitators, new dimensions of teacher roles, and a viable conception of research that is authentically teacher research. All of these things involve rethinking assumptions about what it means to be a teacher and an academic and what is meant by research. Drawing on the lessons of this project, we suggest that the central challenge of building successful teacher research is the creation of genuine partnerships, characterised by respectful and critical dialogue, between university staff and teacher researchers.