Moving Toward Family-Centered Early Care and Education: The Past, the Present, and a Glimpse of the Future

Over the past 4 decades, early care and education programs in the United States have struggled to overcome obstacles to active parent and family participation, especially in the wake of recent welfare reform guidelines requiring parents to work outside the home. This article highlights the vision and activities of four Wisconsin Early Childhood Centers for Excellence, which offer family-centered services along with services to young children. Using various strategies, these programs have empowered parents and strengthened bonds between parents and professionals. Their success suggests that new models based on family-centered goals can improve the overall quality of early care and education for young children.     

THE ROLE OF UNIVERSITIES IN PROMOTING LITERACY

This article offers a critique of the traditional role of the university in relation to the promotion of universal literacy. It describes some of the developments in university Involvement in adult basic education in the United Kingdom and suggests possibilities for the future. K argues that universities must commit themselves to a lifelong learning approach to education. They must support new access routes for adult students and collaborative models of research and practice in developing the field of literacy.     

Announcing The Encyclopaedia of School Stories

Editorial Introduction

Announcing The Encyclopaedia of School Stories     

The International Adult Literacy Survey: What Does It Really Measure?

The paper evaluates the work of the International Adult Literacy Survey as reported in OECD 1997. It assesses its contribution to understanding literacy in terms of the perspective of the New Literacy Studies. It outlines this perspective as a basis for a critique that is mostly concerned with the validity of the test. Three criticisms of the survey are made: that it provides only a partial picture of literacy; that culture is treated as bias; and that the test items do not represent the real-life items as claimed. Finally, the paper concludes with an overall evaluation of what the IALS achieves in terms of its own aims.     

Vocational knowledge in motion: rethinking vocational knowledge through vocational teachers’ professional development

The paper presents empirical data to consider some of the current debates concerning the nature of vocational knowledge taught in Further Education colleges to students following craft, vocational and occupational courses. The concept of ‘knowledge in motion’ and workplace learning theories are employed as a conceptual framework to examine the continuing professional development (CPD) activities of vocational teachers. This is used to shed light on the ways in which teachers use CPD as a means of accessing and transporting vocational knowledge from occupations to classrooms. Empirical data were gathered through questionnaire, in-depth interviews and participant observation. The findings are presented around five themes: (1) the range of CPD engaged with by vocational teachers; (2) the limitations of propositional, explicit knowledge; (3) engaging with and capturing tacit knowledge; (4) managing the temporality of vocational knowledge; and (5) networking within and to the occupation. Findings suggests that vocational knowledge is distributed and networked and this conceptualisation makes visible some of the ways teachers are able, through CPD activity, to transport vocational knowledge from occupations to classrooms.     

The Teacher''s Role in Facilitating Memory and Study Strategy Development in the Elementary School Classroom

The efforts of 69 elementary school teachers to instruct children in cognitive processing activities were observed. Although the teaching of such activities was relatively infrequent, it varied by grade (occurring more often in grades 2-3 than in higher or lower grades) and by the content of instruction. Teachers of grade 4 and above more often provided rationales for the use of cognitive strategies than did teachers of younger children. In a second study, children of three achievement levels were selected from classrooms in which teachers varied in their use of suggestions regarding cognitive processes. Subsequent to training in the use of a memory strategy, children's performance on a maintenance trial was evaluated: Among average and low achievers, those whose teachers were relatively high in strategy suggestions showed better maintenance and more deliberate use of the trained strategy than did children whose teachers rarely made strategy suggestions. The role of school experience in the development of children's memory skills is discussed.     

The stability of attachment security from infancy to adolescence and early adulthood: general discussion

For over three decades, critics of the developmental and psychometric paradigms have argued that individual differences are neither stable, coherent, nor clinically significant. The present studies extend a long line of research demonstrating the coherence of individual development in attachment security. They make it clear that attachment security can be stable from infancy through early adulthood and that change in attachment security is meaningfully related to changes in the family environment. The task now is to better understand the roles of cross-age consistency in caregiver behavior and the structure of mental representations of early experience in stability and change.     

Systems negotiation training

The paper presents a model developed in the U.S./Mexico border area for teaching persons the art of using their personal assets to gain access to highly impersonal social systems. The model focuses on the use of small group dynamics and psychodrama using articulated videotape feedback in the development of effective job-seeking behaviors. The model training format was used over a three-year period to train approximately three thousand persons ranging from incarcerated Mexican Nationals to college graduates in the art of accessing social systems. Most of the participants in the programs viewed themselves as victims of powerful social systems and initially saw themselves as having no control over their lives. The model was successful in demonstrating to the participants the aspects of the human interaction process they indeed had control over and, that by exerting this control in a structured fashion, they could net positive results.     

Techniques of Mediocrity

The mission statements of many public (taxpayer-supported) colleges promise economic development outreach to local business communities. Unfortunately, faculty may be hard-pressed to devote time to outreach. The author looks for specific outreach activities that garner strong support from both faculty and business representatives. The author examines the case of four-year business schools. Survey data were collected from a sample of faculty and a sample of business leaders. The win—win activities tended to have a strong teaching component, including degree programs for working adults and community-class-room links such as student projects and internships.