Grammar in the Curriculum for English: What Next?

It is clear from several government reports and research papers published recently that the curriculum for English in primary and secondary schools is about to change yet again. After years of bureaucratic stranglehold that has left even Ofsted report writers criticising the teaching of English, it seems as if the conditions are right for further revisions. One of the questions that inevitably arise when a curriculum for English is reviewed, relates to the place and purpose of the teaching of grammar. This paper outlines a possible curriculum for grammar across both primary and secondary phases, arguing that for the teaching of grammar to have any salience or purpose at all, it has to be integrated into the curriculum as a whole, and not just writing. A recontextualised curriculum for grammar, of the kind proposed here, would teach pupils to become critically literate in ways which recognise diversity as well as unity, and with the aim of providing them with the means to analyse critically and appraise the culture in which they live.     

Serving,learning and mentoring through the Big Brothers Big Sisters Program

This study describes the collaborative partnership between a Big Brothers Big Sisters organization, an elementary school and the College of Education at a public university. The partnership utilized a mentoring system consisting of elementary students, college students, elementary teachers and university faculty. Benefits of the various stakeholders are discussed.     

Teaching medical information retrieval and application courses in Chinese universities: a case study

An important aspect of Chinese academic health science libraries is their involvement in teaching medical information retrieval courses as part of the medical curriculum. Health science librarians in China have a more formal teaching role than is generally found in Western countries, including many full-time teaching positions. This article provides a case study of Kunming Medical University Library, where courses are provided as credit units at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels. The teaching practices of Chinese health science libraries are compared with teaching experiences reported in Western countries. It is noted that Chinese government's educational policy is similar to that of the United States in promoting the role of the library in teaching subjects as part of the medical curriculum. In China, this has lead to the development of teaching departments within health science libraries and the appointment of full and part-time teacher librarians.     

The Parental Experience of Having an Infant in the Newborn Intensive Care Unit

The purpose of this systematic review was to explore and describe the experience of parents with an infant in the newborn intensive care unit (NICU). A literature search covering the period 1998–2008 was conducted. Fourteen articles reporting qualitative studies describing parental experiences and meeting the inclusion criteria were evaluated and themes were identified. Findings revealed that parents with an infant in the NICU experience depression, anxiety, stress, and loss of control, and they vacillate between feelings of inclusion and exclusion related to the provision of health care to their neonate. Nursing interventions that promote positive psychosocial outcomes are needed to decrease parental feelings of stress, anxiety, and loss of control. Interventions need to focus on family-centered and developmentally supportive care.     

Border Crossing

This paper describes a programme I have led on behalf of Tate Britain over the last five years, and sets out some initial thoughts about the impact on it of a range of different, sometimes conflicting, influences and pressures. The programme is Nahnou‐Together, which translates from the Arabic as ‘we together’ and, in this context, implies mutual learning. It is a partnership between Tate Britain, the British Council, the Adham Ismail Centre of Plastic Arts in Damascus and Darat‐al‐Funun, and the Jordan National Gallery of Fine Art in Amman, with support from the Jordan Ministry of Education.     

Bearing witness: straight students talk about homophobia at school

ABSTRACT

Homophobia is an enduring issue within schooling contexts internationally. This paper attempts to rethink homophobia from the perspective of heterosexual students’ accounts of bearing witness to it. Within the existing literature it has been LGBTQ students who have held the responsibility for naming and recounting homophobia. This paper re-orients this conventional account by positioning heterosexual students as its narrators to see what this might reveal about homophobia’s operation at school. While this strategy does not disrupt the ‘othering’ and ‘victimization’ of LGBT youth in these stories, it has other effects. When heterosexual students name homophobia as unjust, it is possible to see the instability of the victim/perpetrator binary that typically structures these accounts. Narratives of participants in this study did not fit neatly into this binary, revealing its inability to capture the complexity of homophobia’s operation. To have any hope of effectively addressing homophobia at school, we need to move beyond the victim/perpetrator binary. This is because it masks some of homophobia’s more nuanced moves, such as targeting difference, rather than sexual identity exclusively.