Women's voices on recovery: a multi-method study of the complexity of recovery from child sexual abuse

OBJECTIVE: The current study was exploratory and used multiple methods to examine patterns of stability and change in resilient functioning across 7 years of early adulthood. Second, qualitative data were used to examine in greater detail survivors' own narratives about correlates of healing. METHOD: This study was longitudinal and used both structured and open-ended interviews. Eighty women with documented hospital records of child sexual abuse were interviewed at two time points 7 years apart in early adulthood. Structured interviews including investigator-based questions and standardized measures of trauma exposure and functioning were conducted. A subset of 21 survivors participated in in-depth, open-ended interviews about coping with sexual abuse. RESULTS: Quantitative findings showed patterns of both stability and change on an index of resilient functioning across multiple domains in the 7 years between interviews with 76% of participants showing less than a one standard deviation change in scores. Lower resilience was associated with exposure to additional trauma between the two interviews (r=-.44) while positive functioning was related to social role satisfaction and positive sense of community. Qualitative data permitted examination of the dynamic quality of recovery over time including the role of "turning points" across the lifespan. CONCLUSIONS: The findings extend previous studies of resilience in the examination of how it changes over the course of one segment of the life cycle. This study supports recent work that described resilience as a non-linear process and further highlights factors including the role of re-traumatization, social supports, and opportunities for making new choices that may be important correlates of recovery processes among sexual abuse survivors over time.     

If it Bleeds it Leads

This paper examines newspaper coverage of sexual and reproductive health and violence against women, from 1995 until 2015, in two print newspapers from Buenos Aires, Argentina. The analysis shows that while coverage of violence against women increased over the 20-year period, coverage of sexual and reproductive health did not. Moreover, drawing on framing theory, content analysis indicates that, regardless of the level of coverage, throughout the period examined, articles on these topics tended to eschew a gender equality approach, and to be framed in episodic, rather than thematic frames. Finally, articles about violence against women are significantly less likely to use either the equality frame or the thematic frame than stories about sexual and reproductive health. This paper draws on these findings to reflect on the relevance of portraying these issues as social concerns with impact in gender equality.     

The Evolution of Smokey Bear: Environmental Education About Wildfire for Youth

Many environmental education programs in the United States educate youth about the prevention of wildfire and its role in ecosystems. We reviewed 50 wildfire education programs for youth (WEY) in the U.S. through an Internet search and interviews with program providers. We investigated whether they reflect current wildfire science, environmental education (EE) instructional strategies, and place-based education (PBE) approaches. We found that while one-third of the programs focus exclusively on wildfire prevention, suppression, and safety topics, one-third focuses on fire ecology, management, and science, and one-third includes all these topics, mirroring evolving scientific approaches to wildfire. Also, while state and federal agencies design and disseminate much of the curricula used, 60% of WEY programs incorporate local social and ecological contexts, revealing the close relationship between WEY and PBE.     

Teachers’ negative experiences and expressions of emotion: being true to yourself or keeping you in your place?

A discourse of marketisation prevails in recent publications on higher education in Ireland. Higher education is urged to heed the call to the markets and to become the driver of Ireland's future economic success, as Ireland seeks to build a knowledge-based economy. This article questions the dominant marketisation discourse in higher education. It explores the arguments for and against a market-led approach to education and argues that there can be no pure markets in education. It suggests that the real discourse is one of urging universities to follow government- or corporate-led agendas. It proposes a wider-encompassing discourse on higher education's role in society rather than one confined to the socially constructed language of performativity.     

Auditory processing interventions and developmental dyslexia: a comparison of phonemic and rhythmic approaches

The purpose of this study was to compare the efficacy of two auditory processing interventions for developmental dyslexia, one based on rhythm and one based on phonetic training. Thirty-three children with dyslexia participated and were assigned to one of three groups (a) a novel rhythmic processing intervention designed to highlight auditory rhythmic information in non-speech and speech stimuli; (b) a commercially-available phoneme discrimination intervention; and (c) a no-intervention control. The intervention lasted for 6 weeks. Both interventions yielded equivalent and significant gains on measures of phonological awareness (at both rhyme and phoneme levels), with large effect sizes at the phoneme level. Both programs had medium effect sizes on literacy outcome measures, although gains were non-significant when compared to the controls. The data suggest that rhythmic training has an important role to play in developing the phonological skills that are critical for efficient literacy acquisition. It is suggested that combining both prosodic/rhythmic and phonemic cues in auditory training programs may offer advantages for children with developmental dyslexia. This may be especially true for those who appear resistant to conventional phonics training methods.     

“Your Tern Now My Tern Later”: A Tribute to the Outlaw Writer Russell Hoban

Russell Hoban died in December 2011. In this article, Victoria de Rijke celebrates this mysterious writer’s huge contribution to children’s literature over 52 years; a career which began and ended with two mythological books: The Mouse & His Child (1967) and Soonchild (2012). Published in CLE over the years, Hoban wrote about the importance of myth and the writer’s “outlaw self”. This piece explores his unique thinking about the craft of writing fantasy and actuality, and argues for books in “nameless categories” which children and adults can appreciate together.     

Moral Development,HIV/AIDS Knowledge,and Attitude toward HIV/AIDS among Counseling Students in the United States

People living with HIV/AIDS will likely require services from mental health professionals to address the complex psychosocial effects of the illness. In the United States, counseling students are not likely to be well prepared to serve clients affected by HIV/AIDS, and little is known about their HIV-related knowledge and attitudes. The present study assessed the moral development, HIV/AIDS knowledge, and attitudes toward HIV/AIDS among a national sample of counseling students in the United States. Results indicated that students held biases toward people living with HIV/AIDS and that their attitudes toward HIV/AIDS were inversely related to their level of moral development.     

Rethinking the relationship between pedagogy,technology and learning in health and physical education

This paper seeks to address two key questions: (1) how could a pedagogically driven approach to the use of DigiTech in health and physical education (HPE) benefit young people’s learning and (2) what steps are required to develop new DigiTech pedagogies? The paper is a response to the largely pessimistic views presented in this journal by Gard, Lupton and Williamson about the role of technology in HPE. In this paper, we argue that while we need to be aware of the risks, we also need to explore the opportunities for digital technologies (DigiTech) to shape HPE in new and positive ways. Specifically, we argue that a focus on pedagogy is largely missing from earlier discussions. In mapping the evidence-base on DigiTech against a three-dimensional categorisation of pedagogy – in the form of learners and learning, teachers and teaching, and knowledge and context [Armour, K. M. (Ed.). (2011). Sport pedagogy: An introduction for coaching and teaching sport. Harlow: Prentice Hall] – we are able to demonstrate the value of a pedagogically informed debate on this topic. The paper concludes by arguing for a ‘profession-wide’ debate to co-construct, trial and evaluate new ways in which we should – and should not – use DigiTech to optimise young people’s learning in HPE.     

Dramatizing the Authentic Research of a Local Scientist to Urban Elementary Students Through Professional Theater

This article focuses on the impact of a professional play that we developed in order to introduce elementary learners of an urban school to the research of a scientist working at a local university. The play was written in a way that might increase student understandings of the nature of science, scientific inquiry, the identity of scientists, and the work that scientists do. We collected pre-and post-play questionnaire responses and drawings of scientists from third and fourth grade students who attended the play. We also interviewed five of the ten teachers whose students attended the play. Findings indicated that most of these teachers felt strongly that their students had learned about scientific inquiry, the identity of scientists, and the work that scientists do as a result of attending the play. However, less than half of the student questionnaires and drawings of scientists indicated such growth as a result of the play. That being said, numerous students were able to tell us what they learned from the play and many questionnaire responses and drawings indicated such learning. Implications for partnerships between schools and university faculty from various disciplines in order to develop potentially impactful plays that portray authentic scientific research are discussed.