Peace Education: Exploring Some Philosophical Foundations

Peace education has been recognized as an important aspect of social education for the past three decades. The critical literature as well as official documents, however, have given little attention to its philosophical foundations. This essay explores these foundations in the ethics of (1) virtue, (2) consequentialism, (3) aesthetics, (4) conservative politics and (5) care. Each of these alone composes a significant element of peace education, although ultimately its solid basis can only be established through an integrative approach encouraging a culture of peace. The more complete development and articulation of the philosophical rationale of peace education is yet to be accomplished and remains a task for the future.     

Library Cartography: Mapping Workflow Processes in an Academic Library

This article will introduce and illustrate process mapping as a valuable tool in the academic library setting. Commonly used in the business world, process mapping is the practice of gathering information regarding a specific workflow and diagraming it visually, usually in the form of a flowchart. This representation can then be analyzed for process improvement. In addition to helping assess current workflow efficiency, process mapping is a valuable way for employees throughout the library to see how they are contributing to essential processes. Process mapping can also help to identify areas where departments can work to further collaborate and can contribute to knowledge management and continuity. This article will highlight the valuable benefits of process mapping and document the authors’ experience focusing this activity on the operations at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte’s J. Murrey Atkins Library.     

Program-Wide Positive Behavior Support in Preschool: Lessons for Getting Started

There is growing concern over the number of young children who display challenging behavior and preschool teachers are reporting children’s challenging behavior as their greatest concern. Program-wide Positive Behavior Support (PWPBS) is a promising model for supporting appropriate behavior and decreasing challenging behavior in early childhood programs. Implementation in early childhood settings is relatively new and guidance on how to implement PWPBS in early childhood settings is growing. This article documents the implementation process for an early childhood program serving children from 6 weeks to 5 years of age, shares lessons learned and offers practical advice for getting started with PWPBS.     

Evaluation of a randomized intervention to delay sexual initiation among fifth-graders followed through the sixth grade

US adolescents initiate sex at increasingly younger ages, yet few pregnancy prevention interventions for children as young as 10-12 years old have been evaluated. Sixteen Washington, DC schools were randomly assigned to intervention versus control conditions. Beginning in 2001/02 with fifth-grade students and continuing during the sixth grade, students completed pre-intervention and post-intervention surveys each school year. Each year, the intervention included 10-13 classroom sessions related to delaying sexual initiation. Linear hierarchical models compared outcome changes between intervention and control groups by gender over time. Results show the intervention significantly decreased a rise over time in the anticipation of having sex in the next 12 months among intervention boys versus control boys, but it had no other outcome effects. Among girls, the intervention had no significant outcome effects. One exception is that for both genders, compared with control students, intervention students increased their pubertal knowledge. In conclusion, a school-based curriculum to delay sexual involvement among fifth-grade and sixth-grade high-risk youths had limited impact. Additional research is necessary to outline effective interventions, and more intensive, comprehensive interventions may be required to counteract adverse circumstances in students' lives and pervasive influences toward early sex.ClinicalTrials. gov identifier: NCT00341471.     

Non‐optimal uses of video in the classroom

This paper examines some instructional practices concerning the non‐optimal uses of video, films and other mass media in the K–12 classroom. Based on a six‐year process of observing and interviewing teachers regularly in two school districts in Massachusetts, USA, this paper presents a typology of seven common patterns of non‐optimal media use, instructional practices that diminish or weaken the value of film and video viewing as a learning tool. A telephone survey was conducted with a purposive sample of 130 middle‐school and high‐school teachers to provide additional evidence concerning teacher perceptions of the frequency of their colleagues' non‐optimal use of video. Teachers in the USA report that their colleagues frequently use media for non‐educational purposes, including to fill time, to keep students quiet, as a break from learning, or as a reward for good behavior. The implications of non‐optimal media use are considered in light of renewed interest in integrating media literacy into K–12 instruction.     

Evaluating climate change behaviors and concern in the family context

Abstract

Although research suggests that family dynamics likely play a role in shaping children’s behaviors, few studies focus on environmental behaviors, and none to our knowledge investigate how parents shape climate change mitigation behaviors among their children. We begin to fill this gap through a quantitative case study using matched household-level survey data from 182 coastal North Carolina families (n?=?241 parents aged 29–77; n?=?182 students aged 11–14) associated with 15 middle school science teachers. Family climate change discussions, parent behaviors, and children’s climate change concern levels predicted the degree to which children will participate in individual-level climate mitigation behaviors. These results provide evidence that promoting climate-related conversations within households may promote climate action even when parents are apathetic about climate change. Similarly, parental behaviors, but not their concern levels, were important predictors of adolescent behaviors. This study highlights novel ways that family dynamics may promote climate change mitigating behaviors and a new pathway to promoting climate mitigation at familial, and ultimately, societal levels.     

Common sense: A form of teacher knowledge

This essay discusses an analytic construct - common sense knowledge - that might be helpful in empirical studies of teacher knowledge. I suggest that we consider whether teacher talk is common sense knowledge, in the sense that Geertz defines the term, and that if it is, that we take it seriously on its own terms and in context, rather than trying to 'fix' it.