Family Fun Nights: Collaborative Parent Education Accessible for Diverse Learning Abilities

Quality early childhood education programs have a responsibility to provide enriched educational services to preschool students paired with parent support, education, and outreach. Pearl Buck Preschool, a non-profit organization devoted to the delivery of preschool services for children of parents with intellectual disabilities or learning difficulties, created a unique parent program titled Family Fun Night. This six-session series was developed with a strengths-based, collaborative framework and was connected to the Program-wide Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports implementation in the preschool. The following paper discusses the development, facilitation, implementation, logistics, and assessment of the Family Fun Night series. Barriers to implementation are also discussed.     

Conceptualising the surveillance of teachers

Schools are risky places: the risk of a poor Ofsted report, the risk of sliding down league tables, the risk of teachers abusing children, the risk of teachers being falsely accused of abuse. As a result of risk anxiety and the ever-increasing sophistication of technology, the surveillance of teachers has proliferated, becoming a future-oriented pursuit to manage this risk. Drawing on the surveillance studies literature, this article attempts to theorise the surveillance of teachers. Firstly the article argues that there are three types of teacher surveillance: the vertical perpetuated by Ofsted and senior school leaders such as teaching observations and learning walks, but also students recording their teachers on mobile phones; horizontal surveillance enacted by peers in terms of concertive control, but also parental surveillance via online and offline networks; and, finally, intrapersonal surveillance embracing reflective practice, data reporting and self-policing proximity from children. The article then concludes by arguing that while surveillance in schools embraces the themes of modern surveillance in general, by doggedly retaining the proximal and the interpersonal, it should be considered a hybrid form between traditional and modern forms of surveillance.     

International Student Support Groups: Learning from Experienced Group Members and Leaders

A multisite qualitative study investigated the experiences of six group leaders and 10 group members who participated in seven different university counseling center international student support groups. Analyses of interview data using hermeneutic interpretation resulted in nine major themes and 10 subthemes organized into four sections: (a) recruitment and group design, (b) experiences of group members, (c) experiences of group leaders, and (d) additional considerations.     

Beyond product: Materials development as a vehicle for professional growth

For several years in distance education settings, teaching‐learning specialists have collaborated with subject specialists to produce learning materials. In such partnerships, while a major focus has been on production per se, another outcome has been the professional development of the subject specialist. This paper reports on a collaborative project where the development of learning materials served as a vehicle for quite comprehensive professional development. This paper argues that such an approach, where product development and professional development are intertwined, is most effectively facilitated on a one‐to‐one basis where the specifics of the process are tailored to the needs of the subject specialist. Such collaborations are also most likely to be effective if grounded in strong theoretical principles. The case study reported here was founded on principles of action research.     

Comparisons of the IQ and vocabulary scores on Wechsler Preschool and Primary Scale of Intelligence-Revised and Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test-Revised

The Wechsler Preschool and Primary Scale of Intelligence-Revised and the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test-Revised were administered to 51 preschool, kindergarten, first-grade, and second-grade students. Although 2 of 4 Pearson correlations between these two instruments were statistically significant, they may not be of practical significance.     

The Rockefeller Foundation and Central Europe: a Reconsideration

This paper argues that the health-related work of the RockefellerFoundation in Central Europe following the First World War flowed not somuch from geopolitical concerns as from the Foundation's ambition tocreate a global network in scientific medicine. It examines theassumptions and values that underpinned this project, and indicates someof the questions that these pose for today's world.