Interactional power and support in digital inclusion of an adult with intellectual disabilities: a case study analysis

Digital inclusion of people with intellectual disabilities is not commensurate with those without disabilities. Societal, political, financial, individual and interpersonal barriers help explain this disparity. Caregivers can act as both support and gatekeeper to internet access and use by adults with intellectual disabilities. This study investigated micro-level interpersonal factors influencing access and use of the internet by an adult with intellectual disabilities to explore the balance and interplay of power and support around the processes of digital inclusion and online risk taking. Taking a case study approach, perspectives of three key stakeholders were gathered via interviews: the person with intellectual disabilities, his mother and a paid support worker. Perspectives and experiences were contrasted using systemic functional linguistic analysis of discourse to explore the ways power and support were represented in the language of negotiated digital inclusion. Dynamics between the parent and person with intellectual disabilities and between the parent and paid staff clearly influenced processes of digital inclusion and were affected by varying priorities, positions and perceptions of power to allow, disallow and monitor access and use of the internet. These had the power to shape and drive internet access. Language choices by the person with intellectual disabilities showed that he was not fully aware of the risks involved in engaging with certain aspects of digital inclusion but how he spoke about the internet indicated some autonomy in technology use. Supporting the development of digital competence, confidence and resilience in people with learning disabilities should be combined with support to increase self-awareness regarding digital risk. Those supporting people with intellectual disabilities towards digital inclusion need additional guidance on how to do this effectively for the people they support.     

Contextual cues and memory retrieval in rats: Alleviation of forgetting by a pretest exposure to background stimuli

With a relatively complex maze, reliable forgetting is clearly seen when the training-test interval is 25 days. This forgetting is evidenced by the longer time taken to run the maze and in an increase in the number of errors from the last training trial to the first test trial. In this case, forgetting is a lapse, not a loss, since performance attains the last training trial level at a subsequent test. Furthermore, a reminder which does not in itself contain sufficient information to facilitate performance of a naive animal, significantly improves maze performance of animals which have “forgotten,” even on the first retention test. With the use of additional control groups, it is shown that there must be a memory lapse before contextual cues can be demonstrated to be effective in facilitating memory retrieval.     

Adaptation and Pilot Testing of a Sexual Health Intervention for Female Survivors of Violence

Experiences of violence and behaviors that increase the risk of acquiring a sexually transmitted infection are high among women in the United States, and they often intersect (Meyer, Springer, &; Altice, 2011 Meyer, J. P., Springer, S. A., &; Altice, F. L. (2011). Substance abuse, violence, and HIV in women: A literature review of the syndemic. Journal of Women's Health (2002), 20(7), 991–1006. doi:10.1089/jwh.2010.2328[Crossref] , [Google Scholar]; Montgomery et al., 2015 Montgomery, B., Rompalo, A., Hughes, J., Wang, J., Haley, D., Soto-Torres, L., &; Hodder, S. (2015). Violence against women in selected areas of the united states.e1-e11. Am J Public Health, 105(10), 2156–2166 [Google Scholar]; World Health Organization (WHO), 2010 World Health Organization (WHO). (2010). Addressing violence against women and HIV/AIDS: What works?. Geneva, Switzerland: World Health Organization. [Google Scholar]). However, there are few evidence-based HIV-prevention interventions that address the special needs and challenges faced by female survivors of violence (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, (CDC), 2017a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (2017a). Compendium of evidence-based interventions and best practices for HIV prevention. Atlanta, GA: Division of HIV/AIDS Prevention, National Center for HIV/AIDS, Viral Hepatitis, Sexual Transmitted Diseases and Tuberculosis Prevention. Retrieved from https://www.cdc.gov/hiv/research/interventionresearch/compendium/rr/index.html [Google Scholar]). To address this gap, we adapted and pilot-tested an existing evidence-based women-focused sexual risk-reduction intervention (The Future Is Ours) with 23 self-identified female survivors of violence. The intervention comprised eight-weekly, two-hour cognitive behavioral group sessions focusing on reducing sexual-risk and improving trauma-based coping skills. Using mixed-methods analyses, the adapted intervention was determined feasible and acceptable to participants, and preliminary results suggest that participation could reduce risk factors for sexually transmitted infections. Therefore, testing on a larger scale is warranted.     

Supervision and evaluation: The Wyoming perspective

The intent of this study was to assess the perceptions and actions of Wyoming principals concerning their role in supervising and evaluating teachers. A survey was sent to all 286 principals in the state of Wyoming, of which, 143 returned surveys, a response rate of 50%. Findings suggested that principals utilized supervisory behaviors more often than evaluative behaviors. Elementary principals perceived their evaluative practices as significantly more prevalent than secondary principals. Furthermore, principals indicated that their greatest frustrations in supervising teachers were time, the evaluation instrument, and teachers’ unwillingness to change. Additionally, findings suggested that Wyoming principals utilized classroom walkthroughs because they provided a snapshot of teaching and provided a medium for providing feedback. In regards to developmental supervision, principals indicated that novice teachers received much more supervision than veteran teachers. However, their reported use of differentiated supervision only applied to teacher autonomy concerning professional development goals. Principals reported that teachers had little input concerning the methods by which they were supervised. Finally, a majority of the Wyoming principals felt that improvement plans were effective at changing mediocre teaching behaviors, but 40% were speculative that such plans truly remediated poor teachers.     

Classifying the Context Clues in Children's Text

This study aimed to determine which types of context clues exist in children's texts and whether it is possible for experts to identify reliably those clues. Three experienced coders used Ames’ clue set as a foundation for a system to classify context clues in children's text. Findings showed that the adjustments to Ames’ system resulted in 15 clues that can be used to capture the majority of clues found in children narrative and expository text. This study adds to the limited empirically validated systems available for classifying different context clues. A usable classification of context clues has application to reading research that considers or controls for text factors as well as teaching reading strategies in K–12 classrooms.     

Father involvement in young children’s care and education: exploring boundaries and starting conversations

This paper analyses the impact of a UK local authority initiative – Fathers’ Friday – aiming to involve fathers in their children’s education, which took place in 20 early years’ and primary school settings. Whilst the study involved a range of methods, in this paper interview data associated with practitioners’ perspectives of the initiative are used. Theoretically, Bernstein’s concept of boundary and related notions of classification and framing provide a framework for exploring fathers’ positioning, and Bernstein’s concept of ‘voice’ helps to explain how relations are repositioned, as fathers engage with settings through their participation in the initiative. The authors’ contention is that whilst an existing structure of social relations positions how settings and individuals can relate to one another, experiencing the Fathers’ Friday initiative under changed conditions produces a weakened boundary space for fathers, from which ‘conversations can start’. Children themselves form part of this process of redrawing weakened boundaries.     

A Murray Cod assemblage: Re/considering riverScape pedagogy

ABSTRACT

This article enacts Deleuze and Guattari's (1987 Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1987). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia (B. Massumi, Trans.). Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. (Original work published in 1980) [Google Scholar]) concept assemblage to craft a riverScape pedagogy that is informed by, and responsive to, the Murray Cod, the river, and its circumstances. The Murray Cod, the largest fish species in Australia's Murray-Darling Basin, has diverse cultural meanings. Cod are at once a creation being of Indigenous people, a migratory predator that breeds in response to warm floodwaters, and a fish suffering significant ecological decline as a result of changes to land and water use in its habitat. Murray Cod assemblage weaves these elements together to re/create a bioegalitarian pedagogy, part thought experiment and part teaching strategy.     

Early childhood arts curriculum: a cross-cultural study

Many countries, including Australia, China, the United States, the United Kingdom and New Zealand, have included art subjects in their core curriculum. Using the theory of governmentality as a critical lens to investigate the intricate power–knowledge system in relation to curriculum, arts and pedagogy, this paper makes a comparative document analysis of two contemporary arts curricula for children aged 5–6 years—the Beijing Kindergarten Happiness and Development Curriculum in the arts learning area (upper class in kindergarten), and the Australian Curriculum: The Arts (Foundation level). Curriculum is best understood as a multi-faceted phenomenon and this paper draws from research which categorized curriculum into three phases: the intended (or planned) curriculum, the enacted (or implemented) curriculum and the experienced (the learner experience) curriculum. By focusing on the first phase: the intended curriculum, this paper compares the documents that comprise the planned curriculum from two very different contexts, and thus makes a contribution to cross-cultural understanding of early childhood arts curriculum in ways that may lead to social change.     

Research Literature Review on Social Work Education Instructional Methods: 1998–2008

This article presents a review of research studies examining instructional methods reported in the social work education literature published between 1998 and 2008. From a sample of 91 studies, 31 were identified as having used either a single group pre/post test design or a comparison of two or more groups and inclusion of a learning outcome measure. Most of the studies were deficient in either the employment of comparison groups, pre/post designs, utilization of multiple learning outcome measures, or a clear delineation of the connection between teaching methods and learning outcomes. Very few studies were based on previous work. A challenge is made to the field to conduct better designed studies and several suggestions for doing so are offered.