The Benefits of Using Sociodrama in the Elementary Classroom: Promoting Caring Relationships Among Educators and Students

In the current age of academic rigor, standards and accountability, the fostering of caring relationships in the classroom may not always be a priority. Expressing care for another person is a skill that can be taught and nurtured through a supportive educational environment. Sociodrama encourages each of its participants to develop self-confidence and self-expression through risk-taking and exploration in activities that explore real life personal feelings and situations. By using sociodrama as a means for exploring issues in the classroom it is possible to celebrate participants’ individuality and to create caring and nurturing relationships among educators and students. This article examines the research describing the benefits of including sociodrama in the elementary curriculum.     

Process or Product? The Argument for Aesthetic Exploration in the Early Years

Early childhood educators often deliberate the difference between the use of arts versus crafts in the classroom as learning opportunities. This paper discusses the distinct differences between the two and how encouraging young children to engage within art making provides great opportunity for personal and communal exploration, expression, and discussion. Open-ended activities that focus on the process, and not necessarily the end product, provide children with authentic, differentiated, and holistic methods of exploration and learning. Fostering a willingness to creatively engage within an aesthetic problem-solving process that allows children to select, represent, and explain their thoughts and actions will help them develop skills necessary for success in an unknown future.     

Educators as Authors: Teaching Beyond the Classroom

This article discusses why educators might consider writing and submitting papers for consideration of publication in professional journals and magazines. A general overview of teachers’ challenges to the writing process and corresponding responses is provided.     

COURSES OF STUDY FOR YOUNG PEOPLE

Poetry is a bridge across diverse realities; it bridges the expressible and inexpressible, the present and future. Poetry is also a powerful force in human life; it reveals, nourishes, binds, critiques, empowers, constructs, and confronts. From such movements come visions for educational action, both actual and metaphoric. These include: dancing, meditating, singing, chanting, improvising, and drumming.     

“Ready,Set, Grow!” Nurturing Young Children Through Gardening

This editorial describes one class’ experience of participating in a community-funded gardening project entitled “Ready, Set, Grow!” Children at risk who lived in an urban setting were encouraged to plant fruits, vegetables, and flowers in order to learn about healthy eating and active living. Numerous easy to implement strategies for how educators can replicate this program and engage young children in a container gardening program in their own classrooms are included throughout the text.     

Exploring the retention and success of students with disability in Australian higher education

The proportion of higher education students with disability is increasing. We know there is institutional variation in retention and performance of higher education students with disability, and there is a need to understand the reasons for this. This exploratory national study examines supports and adjustments provided by universities, including the role of disability practitioners, influence retention and performance of students with disability. The study uses a mixed-methods approach. National equity retention and performance data are analysed by higher education institution. Qualitative data on institutional policies and practices collected from a purposive sample of Australian higher education institutions are then analysed. Findings from the study include identification of factors linked to retention and performance of students with disability, including different types of disability.     

Universities in ‘the condition of publicity’: how LSE engages with the wider world

This article analyses how one institution, the London School of Economics under Anthony Giddens’s directorship, sought to occupy the ‘condition of publicity’ that is increasingly a prerequisite for university success in ‘knowledge‐society’ contexts. In particular, we illustrate how the LSE has sought to develop a brand and practice that is policy‐relevant, close to society, media‐savvy and think‐tank‐like, whilst at the same time remaining impeccably academic. Whilst one goal of the paper is the relatively modest one of giving local texture to some of the general tendencies identified in wider debates about ‘academic capitalism’, ‘the postmodern university’, and the like, we also develop some initial considerations that are intended as a contribution to the assessment of those theoretical themes.     

Theoretical orientations of Australian counselling psychologists

One hundred and thirty two Australian counselling psychologists responded to a mail survey seeking information about their theoretical orientation to therapeutic practice. The theoretical orientation self-ascribed most frequently was Cognitive-Behavioural (34%), followed by Psychodynamic (26%), Experiential (18%), Family Systemic (14%), and Eclectic (7%). Mean scores on the two dimensions of the Counsellor Theoretical Position Scale, Rational-Intuitive and Objective-Subjective, confirmed epistemological differences among the self-ascribed theoretical position groups. Almost all the counselling psychologists reported that they made use of some concepts and techniques from orientations other than their primary self-ascribed orientation, with 34% listing Cognitive-Behavioural and 29% listing Family Systemic as a secondary theoretical orientation. This finding is consistent with a reported trend toward theoretical integration among North American counsellors and psychotherapists.     

Disinterested,disengaged, useless: Conservative or progressive idea of the university?

There is evidence aplenty of academics' increasing incorporation into the life and fate of their university's brand, just as it is clear that university structures and incentives generally are dependent upon increasingly competitive resource capture under tightened managerial ideologies of institutional commitment (albeit by way of innumerable “consultation” and “responsibilisation” mechanisms). In that context, it becomes important to re‐think and re‐imagine the very “idea of the university”, especially now that images and imperatives around the Engaged University are a) omnipresent and b) convene a whole range of entirely disparate activities, governed by very different intellectual rationales. While hardly wishing to be “against” university involvement in the “wider world”, this article critically questions the new metaphysic of Engagement, and the discursive framings and traps that sustain it. In an age when perhaps only paradox and counter‐intuitive gesturing seem to work as prompts towards thinking otherwise, I make the case that some “traditionalist” ideas of higher education can be part of a reasserted “progressivist” social ethics.     

Learning from mistakes and moving forward in intercultural research with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples

The ongoing challenges in equitable research involving Indigenous peoples and their communities and ways to overcome these are discussed in this article. Central to this article is the narrative reflection of a non-Indigenous researcher following research on Indigenous spirituality, well-being and resilience in the Yaegl community of northern New South Wales, Australia, conducted between 2003 and 2010. Upon reflection several years after the studies, the researcher has identified several inadequacies in the ways in which the research was conceptualised, designed, conducted and supervised. In seeking to critically reflect on and learn from this experience, with the hope of contributing to better understanding and protocols in research with Indigenous peoples, as well as improved models of higher degree research (HDR) supervision in this space, the researcher has collaborated with an Indigenous academic to incorporate theory and Indigenous knowledge in highlighting considerations for better research training and practice.