Perceived contingency of reinforcements,helplessness, locus of control,and academic performance

To determine the relationships among perceived contigency of teacher-administered reinforcements, locus of control, teacher ratings of children's helplessness-competence, and academic achievement, 86 sixth graders (43 girls and 43 boys) were studied. In general, children's internality of locus of control and their perceptions that teachers administer rewards contingently were predictive of good academic achievement and teacher ratings of the children as competent as opposed to helpless. Perceptions of the contingency of teacher-administered punishments were unrelated to academic achievement or teacher ratings. For boys, locus of control and perceived contingency of teacher-administered rewards were significantly related, while for girls they were unrelated. Results are related to prior research linking perceived contingency of reinforcements, locus of control, and academic achievement.     

Youth cultures,activism and agency: revisiting feminist debates

Following the invitation issued by the London Feminist Salon Collective in the pages of Gender and Education, this paper offers further theoretical suggestions for understanding agency. Based on an ethnographic study with young people engaged in activist politics, I offer a conception of agency that is at its core relational. I build this theoretical contribution upon a lineage of feminist theorising about the nature of agency, which began in debates about poststructuralism/postmodernism but have since moved to incorporate Pierre Bourdieu's cultural sociological approach. I suggest that while previous theorising has been enormously important for yielding insights into the possibilities for agency, it has not adequately accounted for the everyday means by which agency takes place. My empirical work highlights one of the modalities through which young people come to take political action – that is, through relational processes. I suggest that such an understanding about agency can further illuminate the means by which progressive and feminist goals might be reached.     

Story as a Bridge to Transformation: The Way Beyond Death in Philip Pullman's The Amber Spyglass

In The Amber Spyglass, Philip Pullman extends the psychological depth of literature for young readers by presenting in palpable terms a confrontation with death met by the human capacity for dealing creatively, through story, with personal mortality. Pullman's portrayal of the power of storytelling is placed within the context of the Platonic tradition and neo-Platonic, 19th-century Romanticism. The co-protagonists' descent into the Land of the Dead, Lyra's freeing of the ghosts by the power of story, and their shared emergence into the sunlit land of the living draws on key elements of 19th-century Romanticism, specifically, the ideas of two poets: Percy Bysshe Shelley's concept of the creative imagination as the instrument of moral good, and John Keats' notion of negative capability and his metaphor of the world as a vale of soul-making. All told, Pullman's fantasy portrays young protagonists transcending the dualism of good and evil and learning to live creatively in the face of life's contradictions, complexities, and, most potently, their own mortality.     

Creating more ‘elbow room’ for collaborative reflective practice in the competitive,performative culture of today's university

We live in ‘a world of clashing interests’ [Zinn, H. (1991). Declarations of independence: Cross-examining American ideology. Toronto: Harper Collins, p. xx]. In a grapple for survival, universities choose to spend less money and time on teaching and learning, less time on robust evaluation of student learning and concomitantly less active support for collaborative reflective practice. However, the situation is even more dire than that outlined above because university management seeks to portray its focus on teaching and learning as genuine and a priority. Considerable effort is spent on encouraging teachers to compete for teaching excellence awards at the same time as universities push academics harder and harder into ‘real research’, that is, research that is not about teaching and learning. This is further exacerbated by the use of teaching quality instruments which have been criticised as unreliable indicators of student learning. This paper argues that individual reflective practitioners collecting and collaborating together can advocate for teaching in the current higher education environment but the outreach of this advocacy is likely to be limited when the advocacy remains within ‘pockets of resistance’. To further promote change from within the institution and extend the breadth and depth of an individual's influence beyond the pockets of resistance, we suggest that individuals use collaborative reflective practice-based strategies aligned with each of the dimensions of the institution's ‘cultural web’. Collaborative reflective practice has the potential to advocate for teaching beyond small groups of enthusiasts because it taps into the often hidden but heart-felt passion and commitment to teaching held by many academics.     

Reinforcement schedules,effort vs. Ability attributions,and persistence

Two treatment studies of special education students markedly helpless with regard to arithmetic are reported. The first experiment compared an attribution retraining (Dweck, 1975) treatment to a control treatment matched to it in schedule of successes and failures. Both the attribution retraining and control treatments proved effective in alleviating helplessness, but they were not differentially effective. The second experiment compared the effects of three success-failure schedules (100% success, 76.9% success, and 46.2% success) on attributions and persistence. Only the 76.9% success schedule increased attributions of failures to lack of effort and improved behavioral persistence in the face of failure. The results were interpreted as supporting one aspect of Weiner's (1979) theory, which implies that an infrequently experienced event, i.e., failure, will be attributed to an unstable cause, i.e., lack of effort.     

Substance use: A life skills perspective

The paper proposes a life skills perspective for understanding substance use, in which generative and context based competences and control strategies are central. Within that framework, reasons for substance use, general goal related competence, and specific strategies used to control substance use were examined for 360 young people (144 males, 216 females) aged 18–20 years. Relationships were established between frequency of use of alcohol, tobacco, and other drugs and participants’ self reported knowledge of methods and effects of use, as well as of how much use was made of knowledge of effects in social situations. Participants also answered short tests on actual knowledge of effects and results on these were related to the extent of use reported. Finally perceptions of the best ways to learn about the effects of using these substances were related to patterns of reported use. The results supported the application of the life skills perspective to the domain of substance use in six areas; goal orientation; perceived competence; control over one’s actions; contextual competence; personality traits; and utilisation of knowledge. Educational strategies to develop this perspective were suggested.     

Young people mobilizing the language of citizenship: struggles for classification and new meaning in an uncertain world

This paper presents research findings from an ethnographic study carried out with 24 low‐income youths (ages 14–16) living on the economic fringes of urban inner‐city Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. Our primary aims are: to expose the stratified subcultural articulations of citizenship as they are expressed, through language and symbol, by the young people within our study; and to demonstrate how critiques of (neo‐)liberalism in political thought, when combined with a cultural sociology of youth, might alter our subcultural reading of young people's conceptions of citizenship under the dynamics of radical social change. Our ultimate goal is to develop a more nuanced sociological examination of the ways in which young people deploy and utilize the language of citizenship as part of their own cultural struggles, exacerbated in times of state retrenchment, to classify themselves and others as one method of achieving visibility and legitimacy in urban concentrations of poverty.