Travelling Without Risks? Itinerant Entertainers in the Duchy of Brabant and their Uses of Passports at the End of the Eighteenth Century

This article examines the uses of passports among itinerant entertainers travelling through the Duchy of Brabant. Making their living with public performances ranging from singing, making music, acting and puppetry to acrobatics and bear dancing, they travelled on a daily, weekly or monthly basis over short and long distances with their shows. Their high level of mobility met with multiple restrictions imposed by the authorities. Travellers with little or no means were often arrested for vagrancy or begging on the charge of having no fixed residence or a steady job. Passports could help itinerant entertainers preventing their possible arrest. This article addresses the question how ambulant entertainers made use of passports for their travels. To this end I used passport registers on the one hand and vagrancy files of arrested itinerant entertainers on the other hand. The passport registers (available for the cities of Brussels and Antwerp) provide insight into who applied for a passport. Meanwhile, the vagrancy files shed light on entertainers travelling without a passport or with invalid ones. As such, this body of sources provides us with an exceptional insight into the variety of uses of passports by itinerant entertainers in Brabant at the turn of the century.     

The view from within: a curatorial account of the rise and fall of visits to London museums from 1851–2016. A research note

ABSTRACT

This note addresses two questions: what comparing patterns of attendance at a group of museums and art galleries since 1851 might reveal? and how might the museums themselves have explained those figures? This note considers the rises and falls of visit numbers amongst a sample of 15 London museums over a 160-year period, and how the institutions themselves perceived those figures. The data used here were gathered from the museums’ published annual reports and internal documents, including daybooks and memos. Their presentation here introduces readers to an exceptionally long time series, and to the conventionally neglected voices of museums’ managers, whose circumstances and attitudes informed those museums’ management. These notes show that certain external factors affected simultaneous rises and falls in the majority of museums’ figures across the sample, although there were always exceptions. Some trends are revealed as general tendencies over a number of years. Discrete internal factors, such as temporary closures and exhibitions create peaks and troughs at individual institutions.     

Intervention for maltreating fathers: Statistically and clinically significant change

ObjectiveFathers are seldom the focus of efforts to address child maltreatment and little is currently known about the effectiveness of intervention for this population. To address this gap, we examined the efficacy of a community-based group treatment program for fathers who had abused or neglected their children or exposed their children to domestic violence.MethodsUsing a sample of 98 group participants, we examined the magnitude and clinical significance of pre- to post-intervention changes in parenting, co-parenting and generalized aggression.ResultsIntervention led to considerable changes in fathers’ over-reactivity to children's misbehavior and respect for their partner's commitment and judgment, with results being statistically significant, medium in size, moving mean scores into the normative range and with 36–43% of men who initially scored in the clinical range recovering by the end of intervention. Changes in other domains were also evident though of lesser magnitude.ConclusionsAlthough this study is limited in length of follow-up and the lack of a control group, results are promising for continued development of fathering interventions for this population of high-risk men.     

Bringing a student-centered participatory pedagogy to scale in Colombia

This paper presents the experience of going to scale of Escuela Nueva, an educational innovation that started in Colombia and has influenced educational policy in several countries around the world during the last 30 years. The paper is based on the experience of the leaders of the innovation and its expansion over time. As an insider´s perpective, it relies on the knowledge of senior staff of Fundación Escuela Nueva and on the published evidence and experience accumulated during the decades following the creation of the innovation. The paper describes the context where Escuela Nueva was created and the practices of participating students, teachers, schools administrators and parents when undergoing learning and teaching. It presents the conceptual underpinnings of the innovation, and discusses existing evidence of impact of Escuela Nueva on students, teachers and parents. It then examines the experience of bringing Escuela Nueva to scale, using a three-stage framework: learning to be effective, learning to be efficient and learning to expand. The paper then discusses key factors for success, and the challenges of scale, impact and sustainability, and advances the argument that good design, adequate implementation and sustained support are essential to take an innovation to scale. To conclude, the following four key lessons of Escuela Nueva to the educational change field are discussed : (1) Teachers and students need to be the key actors of the change; (2) the proposed improvements have to be easily replicable within existing conditions; (3) the attitudinal change of teachers is positively affected as a result of demonstrating that the model was feasible, a good fit for its beneficiaries and that they could do it; and (4) a systemic approach is necessary to impact simultaneously on the critical factors of success.     

All in the Family: Connecting Home and School with Family Literacy

Family literacy has come of age during the past quarter of a century. This article provides a brief review of family literacy history and components. Pedagogical implications for teachers of primary grade students are considered, and suggestions given for increasing home–school literacy involvement through the following types of initiatives: sharing information, increasing access to materials, and implementing strategies that invite family involvement.     

The use of wikis in a science inquiry-based project in a primary school

This study explored the use of wikis in a science inquiry-based project conducted with Primary 6 students (aged 11–12). It used an online wiki-based platform called PBworks and addressed the following research questions: (1) What are students’ attitudes toward learning with wikis? (2) What are students’ interactions in online group collaboration with wikis? (3) What have students learned with wikis in a science inquiry-based project in a primary school context? Analyses of the quantitative and qualitative data showed that with respect to the first research question, the students held positive attitudes toward the platform at the end of the study. With respect to the second research question, the students actively engaged in various forms of learning-related interactions using the platform that extended to more meaningful offline interactions. With respect to the third research question, the students developed Internet search skills, collaborative problem solving competencies, and critical inquiry abilities. It is concluded that a well-planned wiki-based learning experience, framed within an inquiry project-based approach facilitated by students’ online collaborative knowledge construction, is conducive to the learning and teaching of science inquiry-based projects in primary school.     

STEM in England: meanings and motivations in the policy arena

STEM, an acronym for Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics, is widely used in science education. There is confusion, however, as to its provenance and meaning which is potentially problematic. This study examines the purpose of STEM practice in education in England and asks if there are differences in perceptions of STEM between science and mathematics educator stakeholders. The study’s contribution to the literature is its unusual focus on those who were responsible for making and enacting national STEM policy. A two-phase qualitative approach was followed comprising an analysis of government documentation together with semi-structured interviews with key contributors to the science and mathematics education discourse. Findings suggest that there is a disconnect between the interpretations of the science and mathematics educators with a danger-advantage dichotomy to participation in STEM being perceived by the mathematics educators. Early aims of the STEM agenda, including increasing diversity, gave way to a focus on numbers of post-16 physics and mathematics students. We conclude that if the term STEM is to continue to be used then there is a need for greater clarity about what it represents in educational terms and a wider debate about its compatibility with the aims of science education for all.