Tutors Talking

What do form tutors say about tutoring? For this special edition of the journal, focusing on tutors, I contacted some experienced tutors for some insights into the role. I asked them to respond to four questions.  What do you enjoy about being a form tutor?  What, in your experience, are the most significant problems you face in your role as form tutor?  What do you think your students get from you as a form tutor?  What advice would you give to a new teacher who is taking on the role of form tutor?Their positive and engaging responses reinforce how the care they give to the young people is a significant part of their work as teachers.     

Distant cities,travelling tales and segmented young lives: making and remaking youth exclusion across time and place

A substantial body of research suggests that incipient moral anxiety is growing in relation to excluded youth, and is manifestly cross-national in nature. While these anxieties are often assumed to be most evident in recent times, historians of childhood and youth persistently remind us of the long history of anxiety recorded in the public record about disadvantaged urban youth [e.g. Gleason. 2013. Small Matters: Canadian Children in Sickness and Health, 1900–1940. Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press]. However, the degree and nature of local differentiation in the forms of moral anxiety being generated have yet to be systematically researched in relation to youth exclusion in diverse city spaces. There is also limited research on how senior members living in the same city spaces, many of whom were excluded as young people, remember and re-represent – through individual and collective memory – what it was like to be young in the past [Cubbit. 2007. History and Memory. Manchester: Manchester University Press]. Drawing on cross national studies and diverse sources, including oral history accounts, media representations, and interviews with young people, this article explores the perspectives of low-income young people living at the fringe of two different urban centres and who identified as having experienced varying degrees of educational and/or social exclusion. We argue that such multi-layered analyses challenge the binaries often invoked about inclusion, exclusion and marginalised youth, particularly concerning questions about history, memory, and the bordering and classification practices of individuals [see Balibar. 2009a. We, the People of Europe?: Reflections on Transnational Citizenship. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press; Rumford. 2011. Citizens and Borderwork in Contemporary Europe. London: Routledge]. More specifically, the article analyses representations of exclusion, in the present and past, in reference to what Balibar, We, the People of Europe?: Reflections on Transnational Citizenship, has termed ‘borderwork'. Overall, we argue that narratives of risk, forms of border anxiety [Newman. 2006. “Borders and Bordering: Towards an Interdisciplinary Dialogue.” European Journal of Social Theory 9 (2): 171–186] and the consequent moralising claims made about economically disadvantaged youth are crucial in understanding how youth exclusion is represented and remembered, and made and remade across time and place.     

Learning safely from error? Reconsidering the ethics of simulation-based medical education through ethnography

‘Human factors’ is an influential rationale in the UK national health service to understand mistakes, risk and safety. Although there have been studies examining its implications in workplaces, there has been little investigation of how it is taught, as a form of professional morality. This article draws on an observational study of human factors teaching in four hospital simulation centres in London, UK. Its main argument is that the teaching of human factors is realised through an identification and positive evaluation of ‘non-technical skills’ and the espousal of ‘non-judgemental’ pedagogy, both of which mean that mistakes cannot be made. Professional solidarity is then maintained on the absence of mistakes. We raise questions about the ethics of this teaching. The study is situated within a history of ethnographic accounts of medical mistakes, to explore the relationship between claims to professional knowledge and claims about failure.     

Comparing action gestures and classifier verbs of motion: evidence from Australian Sign Language, Taiwan Sign Language, and nonsigners' gestures without speech

Recent research into signed languages indicates that signs may share some properties with gesture, especially in the use of space in classifier constructions. A prediction of this proposal is that there will be similarities in the representation of motion events by sign-naive gesturers and by native signers of unrelated signed languages. This prediction is tested for deaf native signers of Australian Sign Language (Auslan), deaf signers of Taiwan Sign Language (TSL), and hearing nonsigners using the Verbs of Motion Production task from the Test Battery for American Sign Language (ASL) Morphology and Syntax. Results indicate that differences between the responses of nonsigners, Auslan signers, and TSL signers and the expected ASL responses are greatest with handshape units; movement and location units appear to be very similar. Although not definitive, these data are consistent with the claim that classifier constructions are blends of linguistic and gestural elements.     

How have target pupil,peer and school level outcomes related to peer-mediated interventions for pupils with ASD been evaluated?

There is an increasing interest in the role of peers in facilitating the social interaction skills of pupils with autism spectrum disorder through peer-mediated interventions (PMI). Several reviews provide promising evidence for the effectiveness of this approach; however, there has been limited consideration of the range of outcome foci and methods used to evaluate PMI. The purpose of the current review is to provide an overview of methods used to evaluate the impact of PMI and illuminate key examples of innovative practice. Database and web searches were conducted between July and August 2015 to identify PMI studies published between 2000 and 2015. Ten studies met criteria for inclusion. The review found that although measuring the outcome of PMI at the level of target pupils has been a focus, less attention has been given to exploring the experiences of participants; the impact on peers and the extent to which PMI can truly be implemented within an educational context. Implications for future methods of evaluating PMI are discussed.