Youth Voice,Civic Engagement and Failure in Participatory Action Research

In this article, we tell the story of a changing urban landscape through the eyes of the youth we work with in an ongoing after-school program and community-based research project rooted in Photovoice methodology. In particular, we focus on the work that, over the 6 years of our time with youth, has “ended up on the cutting room floor” (Paris and Winn (eds) Humanizing research: decolonizing qualitative inquiry with youth and communities. SAGE Publications, Thousand Oaks, 2014, p. xix). This attention to the work that has fallen through the cracks is a move to engage the central tenets of Humanizing Research, but it’s also a call to think critically with and through the failures that emerge in work with youth. We attend specifically to an ongoing failure in our work as a way to think about the kinds of promises that are often made and broken in participatory action research. In doing so, we tease out the implications of our work with youth and the steps community-based researchers can take to navigate the challenges that can impede the goals of fostering meaningful change.     

Emotional risk to children caught in violent marital conflict—The Basildon treatment project

This paper outlines the work of the Basildon Marital/Family Violence Project set up as a result of two studies undertaken by the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (N.S.P.C.C.) School of Social Work, which looked at the effect of marital violence upon the children involved. These effects were classified under the following headings: (1) the children were scapegoated; (2) used as pawns in the marital battles; (3) turned agression against themselves; (4) had relationship problems at school; (5) were physically assaulted by the parents in 25% of the cases. The project, which is now in its 4th year, has offered social work services, consultation, training courses and research. Work with the families, and particularly with the children, has further emphasised the severe emotional damage that marital violence can have upon the children. The paper optimistically reports that after intensive work using a five-point treatment programme, and direct work with the children, there has been considerable diminution of violence in many of the cases and in some cases no repetition of such violence at all. The worker's approach, it is suggested, should be characterised by optimism combined with indestructible calm, genuine empathy combined with 24-hour access, persistence in the face of lack of progress, enhancement of parents' low self-esteem, regular contact and an ability to contain destructiveness.     

Conditioning copulatory behavior to an artificial object: Efficacy of stimulus fading

Copulatory behavior rarely occurs in response to an arbitrary inanimate object. However, such behavior can provide important information about the stimulus control of copulatory behavior. In the present study, male Japanese quail were administered 15–20 conditioning trials that included exposure to an inanimate object and an opportunity to copulate with a live female quail. For some subjects, the stimulus object was always entirely covered with terrycloth. For other birds, the stimulus object contained a taxidermically prepared head and neck of a quail hen. Fading consisted of gradually covering up the neck and then the head portions of the stimulus object over successive trials. After conditioning, all subjects were tested with the entirely covered object. The fading procedure facilitated the conditioning of copulatory behavior to the entirely artificial object. In subjects that received the fading procedure, learning did not depend on pairings of the stimulus object with copulatory opportunity. The results are discussed with respect to an associative mediation mechanism.     

Scientific Education,Girls’ Schools and the Industrial Fund: a research note

During the 1950s a group of major companies launched the Industrial Fund for the Advancement of Scientific Education in Schools to build and equip laboratories in independent and direct grant schools. The Industrial Fund remains as one of the most impressive industrial initiatives in school education. It is sometimes criticised for either neglect or parsimony towards girls’ schools. This research note provides a brief account of the initiation and operation of the Industrial Fund. Although the Industrial Fund did provide fewer resources for girls’ schools this outcome stemmed from using the same and not different criteria for boys’ and girls’ schools and reflected the state of schools at the outset of the Industrial Fund.     

Emotional Intelligence and Education: A critical review

In recent years there has been an increased interest in the role of emotional intelligence in both the academic success of students and their emotional adjustment in school. However, promotion of emotional intelligence in schools has proven a controversial pursuit, challenging as it does traditional “rationalist” views of education. Furthermore, research findings in this area have been inconsistent at best. In this article we discuss the following key questions relating to this important debate. What do we mean by emotional “intelligence”? What impact would improved emotional intelligence have on learners’ emotional health and well‐being, academic achievement, and other adaptive outcomes? Can emotional intelligence be taught? It is felt that these are the key issues for consideration in developing policy, practice, and further research in this area.     

Systems Not Projects: focusing on evaluating overall student experience,rather than isolated innovations

This article describes evaluation of the Veterinary Bacteriology and Mycology problem‐based learning multimedia project at the University of Melbourne over a period of seven years. The design of the initial project will be described, together with learning benefits that short‐term evaluations revealed — including better information management skills, improved higher order cognitive skills, increased interest in the subject, better collaborative learning skills, better written and oral communication skills and better computer skills. All very impressive. However, follow‐up studies with staff and students in clinical years of the veterinary course indicated clearly that the positive benefits were not sustained in the long term, as this was a once‐off experience for students. We clearly needed a new approach. Since 1995, the institutional climate, opportunities provided by new technologies and international links have shifted the policy in the Faculty of Veterinary Science towards the development of online problem‐based subjects, hopefully enabling students to have a much greater exposure to a problem‐based learning approach.     

Hall of Mirrors: The Dilemmas of Presenting Information Technology Culture Through Information Technology Interactives and Artifacts

This paper examines how the problem of exhibiting computing artifacts was confronted by the development team of the Powerhouse Museum's new computing exhibition: Universal Machine. Universal Machine uses a mix of objects, activity trails and computer-based audiovisual and interactive technologies to take visitors on a journey through the origins, meaning and impact of contemporary information technology. It explores the interpretive partnerships developed between objects, new and traditional media, as well as the ways in which experience-based and multiple intelligence education theory informed design and content development.     

Prenatal Maternal Stress,Child Cortical Thickness,and Adolescent Depressive Symptoms

Prenatal maternal stress predicts subsequent elevations in youth depressive symptoms, but the neural processes associated with these links are unclear. This study evaluated whether prenatal maternal stress is associated with child brain development, and adolescent depressive symptoms using a prospective design with 74 mother child pairs (40 boys). Maternal stress was assessed during pregnancy, child cortical thickness at age 7, and depressive symptoms at age 12. Prenatal maternal stress was associated with less cortical thickness primarily in frontal and temporal regions and with elevated depressive symptoms; child cortical thickness additionally correlated with adolescent depressive symptoms. The observed associations are consistent with the possibility that cortical thickness in superior frontal regions links associations between prenatal maternal stress and adolescent depressive symptoms.