Healthy Birth Practices Revisited

In this column, the editor of The Journal of Perinatal Education describes this special issue where distiguished authors provide updated evidence-based reviews of the Lamaze International Six Healthy Birth Practices that promote, support, and protect natural, safe, and healthy birth.This issue is dedicated to Elisabeth Bing on the occasion of her 100th birthday.     

Knowledge and Skills of the Lamaze Certified Childbirth Educator: Results of a Job Task Analysis

Content validity of certification examinations is demonstrated over time with comprehensive job analyses conducted and analyzed by experts, with data gathered from stakeholders. In November 2011, the Lamaze International Certification Council conducted a job analysis update of the 2002 job analysis survey. This article presents the background, methodology, and findings of the job analysis. Changes in the test blueprint based on these findings are presented.     

Identifying Key Intercultural Urgencies,Issues, and Challenges in Today's World: Connecting Our Scholarship to Dynamic Contexts and Historical Moments

In the next section of the discussion, the participating scholars elaborate on their views of the most pressing intercultural urgencies, issues, and challenges that we face in today's world. The discussants identify both historically persistent and newly emerging challenges and crises that greatly impact our world's communities, their health and well-being, the environment, war and violence, oppression, domination, resistance, and political consequences far into the future. It is clear that the perceived “intercultural urgencies” reach deep within and far beyond specific relational episodes and communicative moments. These scholars delineate the many trajectories for much-needed examination, analysis, critique, and intervention.     

Introducing the Discussion and One Another

Over a month-long period, the Journal of International and Intercultural Communication hosted an online discussion among 11 intercultural scholars across and outside of the discipline in response to four key questions. Editor-in-Chief, Dr. Rona Halualani, facilitated the discussion and introduced the question prompts. The goal was to create a vibrant, interactive dialogue about definitional framings of intercultural scholarship and their views of key urgencies, issues, and challenges in today's intercultural world. This section features the introduction of the discussion and of the scholar discussants themselves.     

Computers for Literacy: Making the difference?

Starting from the premise that literacy is a set of practices situated within particular contexts, and that any practice of literacy always involves technologies which affect its forms and use, this paper draws on three diverse examples of classroom and curricular practice, in order to explore how particular forms of cultural difference are being produced through different practices of literacy pedagogy. One form of literacy pedagogy uses drill-forskill programs via information and communication technologies (ICTs) for reasons of efficiency. Where such programs are used, they may promote assimilation in several overlapping forms. In a second form of pedagogy ICTs are used for enhancement or amplification. But even a liberal constructivist environment may lead to the reproduction of a schooled sameness - of information, types of text, and the literacy practices that teachers and students accept as the norm. A third pedagogical approach encourages transformation through new genres and new hypermedia literacy practices. Where a curriculum is driven by teachers' intentions to negotiate difference explicitly, they and their students may use ICTs to manipulate texts, knowledge and positions for comprehending and composing. Nonetheless, given the complex relationships among teachers, students, classrooms and ICTs, no practice is likely to be 'pure' or certain in its effects. Partly for these reasons teacher educators need to help pre- and in-service teachers to be scrupulous in analysing the role of ICTs in pedagogic work with least-advantaged groups of students.     

Some reflections on the therapeutic power of poststructuralism

Social constructionism is fast gaining currency as a major theory of social and personal change. Although its origins are in philosophy and sociology, social constructionism has major implications for psychology, and in particular, for applied psychology. This paper looks at some of the poststructuralist assumptions which underpin social constructionism, contrasting these with some of the major beliefs upon which much of humanistic psychology is based. It argues that many of the practices of liberal humanistic psychology are fundamentally pessimistic, in that they essentialise aspects of the self and the personality, suggesting strategies of adaptation rather than personal transformation. Further, the absence of an adequate psychological theory of context renders applied psychology all but helpless in confronting issues of power and social control. Poststructuralist theory suggests ways of theorising human interactions without denying agency, or indeed, claiming too much. The paper suggests ways in which counsellors are well placed to take theoretical and practical advantage of these perspectives.A version of this paper was presented at the Conference of the International Round Table for the Advancement of Counselling, Auckland, New Zealand, August 1993.     

The Systems Theory Framework of Career Development and Counseling: Connecting Theory and Practice

The practice of career counseling has been derived from principles of career theory and counseling theory. In recent times, the fields of both career and counseling theory have undergone considerable change. This article details the move toward convergence in career theory, and the subsequent development of the Systems Theory Framework in this domain. The importance of this development to connecting theory and practice in the field of career counseling is discussed.