Information Support for Survivors of Intimate Partner Violence: Public Librarianship's Role

Public libraries have the potential to provide rich information support for survivors of intimate partner violence (IPV). Librarians who understand the complex information gaps and barriers that IPV survivors confront during repeated attempts to achieve safety can create more effective services and policies. This study examines an IPV online support network's postings during ten months. The content analysis of the postings correlates survivors' expressed information needs, barriers, and resource preferences during the three basic stages of crisis. As funding for crisis centers disappears and IPV survivor needs increase, librarians can help to save lives by adjusting services to enhance privacy, safety, and confidentiality.     

E-government support for people in crisis: An evaluation of police department website support for domestic violence survivors using “person-in-situation” information need analysis

The crisis of intimate partner violence (IPV) requires a comprehensive array of government services in law enforcement, health, and social services. Impacting over 5 million victims in the U.S. annually, the beating, rape, stalking, assault, and other abuse of IPV force survivors to face multiple points of crisis. Repeatedly, most of these individuals move through separate dynamic situations that require different types of information. Building from the research literature on IPV survivors' experiences, this paper presents an original four-part framework of the Everyday Life Information Seeking (ELIS) information needs of IPV survivors. Using the person-in-progressive-situation approach of ELIS, this framework delineates 16 concrete information needs which occur throughout the four points of change: considering leaving an abuser, actually leaving an abuser, surviving after leaving, and long-term survival after leaving. Police departments are the local government first-responders most directly responsible for IPV survivors at the point of crisis. Their well-established use of community policing techniques requires police to serve as key information gatekeepers for all crime victims but particularly for IPV survivors. Police departments are examined in light of this original framework to determine the extent to which their websites address these situational information needs of IPV survivors. Using the original four-part framework as an analytic lens, this examination of 172 police department websites in the nation's 100 largest metropolitan areas reveals major gaps in provision of essential information. Solving these problems requires more than simply filling the information gaps. The fundamental approach to local e-government social service information delivery must be firmly rooted in the information experiences of individuals' situations. Findings are contextualized in terms of information theory most relevant to individuals in crisis; future research needs are delineated.     

Learning to teach STEM disciplines in higher education: a critical review of the literature

ABSTRACT

Enrolments in STEM disciplines at universities are increasing globally, attributed to the greater life opportunities open to students as a result of a STEM education. But while institutional access to STEM programmes is widening, the retention and success of STEM undergraduate students remains a challenge. Pedagogies that support student success are well known; what we know less about is how university teachers acquire pedagogical competence. This is the focus of this critical review of the literature that offers a theorised critique of educational development in STEM contexts. We studied the research literature with a view to uncovering the principles that inform professional development in STEM disciplines and fields. The key finding of this critical review is how little focus there is on the STEM disciplines. The majority of studies reviewed did not address the key issue of what makes the STEM disciplines difficult to learn and challenging to teach.     

Books in review

THROUGH NAVAJO EYES: AN EXPLORATION IN FILM COMMUNICATION AND ANTHROPOLOGY. By Sol Worth and John Adair. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1972; pp. 286. $12.50.

VAGINAL POLITICS. By Ellen Frankfort. New York: Quandrangle Books, Inc., 1973; pp. 250. $6.95.

POWER AND INTERPERSONAL RELATIONS. By Wally D. Jacobson. Belmont, California: Wadsworth Publishing Company, 1972; pp. 190. (paper) $3.50.     

Child abuse in South Africa: an examination of how child abuse and neglect are defined

OBJECTIVE: The purpose of this study was to explore which of 17 categories of child maltreatment South Africans evaluated as most serious and to determine if those working with abuse and neglect evaluated abuse and neglect differently from those who did not. METHOD: A revised version of Giovannoni and Becerra's [Giovannoni, J., & Becerra, R. (1979). Defining child abuse. New York: The Free Press] questionnaire exploring the definition of abuse and neglect was completed by 181 residents of Cape Town, South Africa. The new form had 17 categories of child maltreatment, including 4 categories of societal abuse. Respondents were social workers (n = 57), human service workers (n = 42), laypersons (n = 65), and members of the child protection unit of the South African Police (n = 18). ANOVA was used to compare the groups' responses. When significant differences among groups were found, a Bonferroni post hoc test was run to determine differences between groups. RESULTS: The respondents ranked sexual abuse and child prostitution as most serious and housing and child labor as least serious of the 17 categories. There was a significant difference (p < or = .01) between groups on nine categories. When post hoc tests were run, differences were found for eight categories with laypersons generally evaluating categories as significantly more serious than social workers. CONCLUSIONS: Reasons for the order of the rankings are discussed, but concern remains that differences in the evaluation of child maltreatment will lead to difficulty in implementing a protocol for identifying and responding to incidents of abuse and neglect.     

Empowering teachers: empowering children? How can researchers initiate and research empowerment?

The relationship between reading and empowerment, though often taken for granted, is complex. The paper describes a pilot research project, which sought to explore how teachers might change their practice in such a way as to empower the children in their care, rather than enculture them into the rather more passive and compliant practices of schooled literacy in the time of the National Literacy Strategy. The paper particularly explores the challenge of methodology: a project about empowerment needs emancipatory research methods. Can research empower, and can teachers, so dominated by the status quo, find the confidence to take on the responsibility that power confers? The paper describes the attempt to empower teachers and the researchers' attempt to gather evidence of that empowerment.     

Responsible Leadership

The world in which educational leaders operate is changing—from one dominated by national interests to one of a global community. In this transition, schools must prepare the present generation of young people to participate as active citizens of the global community, rather than as spectators or tourists. Schools face major challenges as they prepare their charges for a world which requires (a) agreements among nations to share in managing the earth's fragile ecology; (b) sharing ideas on human, cultural, and economic capital and on manufacturing and medical technologies to improve the quality of life for all people; and (c) guarantees of global peace and security. Schools need to target their curriculum toward preparing youngsters with the desperately needed understandings, perspectives, and skills this global transition will demand. A different kind of school leader will be required—a multidimensional leader that understands the various dimensions of the learning tasks which schools must cultivate. In turn, these leaders must have a moral vision of what is required of them and of the whole community. A moral vision of taking proactive responsibility for making this kind of learning a reality is required.     

Policy into practice in Hong Kong pre-primary kindergartens: the impact of a reform agenda viewing early childhood as the foundation for lifelong learning

In this paper we outline the provision of pre-primary education in the Hong Kong SAR and discuss how the educational reform initiatives of 2000 (Learning to Learn) and global imperatives provided the impetus to reshape a new educational approach to early childhood education. We use the example of a half-day pre-primary (kindergarten) programme to illustrate the ways in which policy and guidelines are enacted and how they appear to reflect all the attributes of the reform movement that have adopted contemporary ideas from the international educational arena. We highlight the interpretations and enactments of these new educational imperatives in a system that has a long history of different cultural pedagogical traditions that often do not resonate with western pedagogical approaches.     

Immediate shock,passive avoidance,and potentiated startle: Implications for the unconditioned response to shock

Three experiments were performed to study the immediate-shock freezing deficit, a deficit in freezing in rats that results when electric shock is delivered immediately upon exposure to a novel context. This deficit was accompanied by failures to detect evidence of passive avoidance (Experiment 1) or potentiation of the auditory startle response (Experiment 2). The deficit in freezing was attenuated by preexposure to the shocked context (Experiment 3). The results support the view that fear-related behaviors are activated by signals for shock rather than by shock itself. They also suggest that the immediate-shock freezing deficit is due to a failure to process the to-be-conditioned contextual cues (Fanselow, 1986a, 1990).