Young people whose parents are separated or divorced: A case for researching their experiences at the intersection of home and school

Background: Young people whose parents are separated or divorced form a significant and increasing proportion of young people who attend school. To date, empirical research with young people whose parents are separated or divorced has tended to focus on either their household context, or their school context, rather than on both contexts together. This paper redresses this singular focus by examining the intersection of the experiences of young people at both home and school. Purpose: The paper seeks to map the empirical evidence of young people's home and school experiences as they move between households and schools. Sources of evidence: The paper provides a narrative review of the literature from the 1990s to the present, locating Australian research within an international context. The review is framed by four main questions. What is the impact upon young people of the family transitions that occur when parents separate or divorce? What is the everyday impact upon young people of moving between one household and another? What does the research reveal regarding educational, social and emotional outcomes for this group? What does the research reveal regarding their school experiences? Main argument: The review reveals a paucity of Australian research at the intersection of home and school. It shows that, while young people from these contexts form a growing proportion of the school population, there is little empirical evidence of what is actually occurring in their everyday lives. The review reveals the importance of researching from the perspectives of the young people themselves. Conclusions: Evidence provided in the paper shows that many young people whose parents separate or divorce are affected socially, emotionally and educationally. Such evidence points to the need for research into the everyday experiences of the young people at school, in order to identify, from their perspective, how schools can better cater for these young people and their families.

Mapping the language of science and science teaching practices : a case study of early childhood school science

Concerns raised in educational reports about school science in terms of students. outcomes and attitudes, as well as science teaching practices prompted investigation into science learning and teaching practices at the foundational level of school science. Without science content and process knowledge, understanding issues of modern society and active participation in decision-making is difficult. This study contended that a focus on the development of the language of science could enable learners to engage more effectively in learning science and enhance their interest and attitudes towards science. Furthermore, it argued that explicit teaching practices where science language is modelled and scaffolded would facilitate the learning of science by young children at the beginning of their formal schooling. This study aimed to investigate science language development at the foundational level of school science learning in the preparatory-school with students aged five and six years. It focussed on the language of science and science teaching practices in early childhood. In particular, the study focussed on the capacity for young students to engage with and understand science language. Previous research suggests that students have difficulty with the language of science most likely because of the complexities and ambiguities of science language. Furthermore, literature indicates that tensions transpire between traditional science teaching practices and accepted early childhood teaching practices. This contention prompted investigation into means and models of pedagogy for learning foundational science language, knowledge and processes in early childhood. This study was positioned within qualitative assumptions of research and reported via descriptive case study. It was located in a preparatory-school classroom with the class teacher, teacher-aide, and nineteen students aged four and five years who participated with the researcher in the study. Basil Bernstein.s pedagogical theory coupled with Halliday.s Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) framed an examination of science pedagogical practices for early childhood science learning. Students. science learning outcomes were gauged by focussing a Hallydayan lens on their oral and reflective language during 12 science-focussed episodes of teaching. Data were collected throughout the 12 episodes. Data included video and audio-taped science activities, student artefacts, journal and anecdotal records, semi-structured interviews and photographs. Data were analysed according to Bernstein.s visible and invisible pedagogies and performance and competence models. Additionally, Halliday.s SFL provided the resource to examine teacher and student language to determine teacher/student interpersonal relationships as well as specialised science and everyday language used in teacher and student science talk. Their analysis established the socio-linguistic characteristics that promoted science competencies in young children. An analysis of the data identified those teaching practices that facilitate young children.s acquisition of science meanings. Positive indications for modelling science language and science text types to young children have emerged. Teaching within the studied setting diverged from perceived notions of common early childhood practices and the benefits of dynamic shifting pedagogies were validated. Significantly, young students demonstrated use of particular specialised components of school-science language in terms of science language features and vocabulary. As well, their use of language demonstrated the students. knowledge of science concepts, processes and text types. The young students made sense of science phenomena through their incorporation of a variety of science language and text-types in explanations during both teacher-directed and independent situations. The study informs early childhood science practices as well as practices for foundational school science teaching and learning. It has exposed implications for science education policy, curriculum and practices. It supports other findings in relation to the capabilities of young students. The study contributes to Systemic Functional Linguistic theory through the development of a specific resource to determine the technicality of teacher language used in teaching young students. Furthermore, the study contributes to methodology practices relating to Bernsteinian theoretical perspectives and has demonstrated new ways of depicting and reporting teaching practices. It provides an analytical tool which couples Bernsteinian and Hallidayan theoretical perspectives. Ultimately, it defines directions for further research in terms of foundation science language learning, ongoing learning of the language of science and learning science, science teaching and learning practices, specifically in foundational school science, and relationships between home and school science language experiences.

Rooms on view : home and design exhibition

The expression of a narrative realized through a constructed interior environment provides a significant and engaging response that falls between the realms of design and theatre in which the space itself provides the role of actor.

Home and the embodiment of privacy

A home is an embodiment of human privacy, apart from providing shelter, security and several other functions. Achieving the desired level of privacy at home is very important in Muslim societies. Privacy is intended to protect the female members of the family from strangers, especially while entertaining guests at home. One way of controlling levels of exposure of the domestic domains to strangers is by controlling privacy levels. This research will investigate perceptions of privacy among Australian Muslims when entertaining guests at their homes. This research will also investigate the extent that modesty (achieved through both appearance and design) acts as the balancing factor in achieving a family’s desired levels of privacy while also affording them the capacity to be hospitable to guests. This research will use a qualitative approach to investigate Australian Muslim homes around Queensland, predominantly in the Brisbane area. A total number of 20 to 60 participants (10 to 30 males, 10 to 30 females) ranging from 25 to 55 years old will be interviewed. Ideally, participants will be those who have children or extended families (parents or siblings) living in the house. The data will be coded and analysed for the purpose of generating new knowledge for architects and designers when designing Muslim homes. It will also extend the current body of knowledge related to privacy mechanisms in housing designs, thereby benefitting architects and designers in the future.

Whose business is dying? Death, the home and palliative care

The process of dying at home brings the nexus between the paternalism of conventional palliative care and a social understanding of end of life care into sharp focus. Away from institutional places of care, issues of ownership, compliance and communal responsibility are heightened. At this interface, palliative care services are confronted with the irony of relinquishing their 'ownership' of dying whilst leading communities to reclaim their principal role in the business of dying. This benign – but enduring – paternalism remains a barrier to a paradigmatic shift towards a more complete understanding of the business of dying. Whilst nascent attempts to promote community engagement in end of life issues are evident in the interface between palliative care and public health, dying remains, for the most part, the remit of health care services. In this article, I contend that the business of dying is incompletely attended. This lack of attention will be partially redressed here by considering the home as a fitting death scene.

Children's understanding of sustainability in their home and kindergarten

This article presents an ongoing study within early childhood education for sustainability at the Department for Early Childhood Education in Stavanger, in collaboration with the School of Early Childhood, Queensland University of Technology, in Brisbane, Australia. The study commenced in 2014, and will compare the responses to interviews of young children (4-5 years) in Brisbane with those of children in Stavanger, in order to find out ways to enhance learning about sustainability topics, to identify which kind of environmental/sustainability activities are memorable for young children, and to obtain mutual inspiration about early childhood education for sustainability from the different countries.

Associations between early shared music activities in the home and later child outcomes : findings from the Longitudinal Study of Australian Children

The benefits of early shared book reading between parents and children have long been established,yet the same cannot be said for early shared music activities in the home. This study investigated the parent–child home music activities in a sample of 3031 Australian children participating in Growing Up in Australia: The Longitudinal Study of Australian Children (LSAC) study. Frequency of shared home music activities was reported by parents when children were 2–3 years and a range of social, emotional,and cognitive outcomes were measured by parent and teacher report and direct testing two years later when children were 4–5 years old. A series of regression analyses (controlling for a set of important socio-demographic variables) found frequency of shared home music activities to have a small significant partial association with measures of children’s vocabulary, numeracy, attentional and emotional regulation, and prosocial skills. We then included both book reading and shared home music activities in the same models and found that frequency of shared home music activities maintained small partial associations with measures of prosocial skills, attentional regulation, and numeracy. Our findings suggest there may be a role for parent-child home music activities in supporting children’s development.

Developing a supportive culture for teaching and learning : a university, faculty and school perspective

In the early 1990's the University of Salford was typical of most pre-1992 Universities in that whilst students provided much of it's income, little attention was paid to pedagogy. As Warren Piper (1994) observed, University teachers were professional in their subject areas but generally did not seek to acquire a pedagogy of HE. This was the case in Alsford. Courses were efficiently run but only a minority of staff were engaged in actively considering learning and teaching issues. Instead staff time was spent on research and commercial activity.----- In the mid-1990's the teaching environment began to change significantly. As well as Dearing, the advent of QAA and teaching quality reviews, Salford was already experiencing changes in the characteristics of its student body. Wideing access was on our agenda before it was so predominant nationally. With increasing numbers and heterogeneity of students as well as these external factors, new challenges were facing the University and teaching domain.----- This paper describes how a culture which values teaching, learning and pedagogic inquiry is being created in the university. It then focuses on parts of this process specific to the Faculty of Business and Informatics, namely the Faculty's Learning and Teaching Research Network and the establishment of the Centre for Construction Education in the School of Construction and Property Management.----- The Faculty of Business and Informatics' Learning and Teaching Research Network aims to raise the profile, quality and volume of pedagogic research across the five schools in the faculty. The initiative is targeted at all academics regardless of previous research experience. We hope to grow and nurture research potential where it exists and to acknowledge and use the existing expertise of subject-based researchers in collaborative ventures. We work on the principle that people are deliged to share what they know but need appreciation and feedback for doing so. A further ain is to surface and celebrate the significant amount of tacit knowledge in the area of pedagogy evidenced by the strength of student and employer feedback in many areas of the faculty's teaching.----- The Faculty embraces generic and core management expertise but also includes applied management disciplines in information systems and construction and property management where internationally leading research activities and networked centres of excellence have been established. Drawing from this experience, and within the context of the Faculty network, a Centre for Construction Education is being established with key international external partners to develop a sustainable business model of an enterprising pedagogic centre that can undertake useful research to underpin teaching in the Faculty whilst offering sustainable business services to allow it to benefit from pump-priming grant funding.----- Internal and external networking are important elements in our plans and ongoing work. Key to this are our links with the LTSN subject centres (BEST and CEBE) and the LTSN generic centre. The paper discusses networking as a concept and gives examples of practices which have proved useful in this context.----- The academic influences on our approach are also examined. Dixon’s (2000) work examining how a range of companies succeed through internal knowledge sharing has provided a range of transferable practices. We also examine the notion of dialogue in this context, defined by Ballantyne (1999) as ‘The interactive human process of reasoning together which comes into being through interactions based on spontaneity or need and is enabled by trust’ Social constructionist principles of Practical Authorship (Shotter, 1993, Pavlica, Holman and Thorpe, 1998)) have also proved useful in developing our perspective on learning and knowledge creation within our community of practice.

Documenting reproduction and inequality : revisiting Jean Anyon’s “Social class and school knowledge”

Jean Anyon’s (1981) “Social class and school knowledge” was a landmark work in North American educational research. It provided a richly detailed qualitative description of differential, social-class-based constructions of knowledge and epistemological stance. This essay situates Anyon’s work in two parallel traditions of critical educational research: the sociology of the curriculum and classroom interaction and discourse analysis. It argues for the renewed importance of both quantitative and qualitative research on social reproduction and equity in the current policy context.

Teachers' attitudes towards the gifted : the importance of professional development and school culture

Given that teachers have one of the most significant influences on the educational development of gifted students, reports of negative attitudes and beliefs in popular myths about giftedness are cause for concern. It is important to understand teachers’ attitudes and beliefs to implement effective training and educational practices to improve education for gifted students. This study explored the attitudes of Australian primary school teachers (N = 126) towards intellectually gifted children and their education at eight schools. These schools could be categorised into four different classifications in regards to their involvement in gifted education. Key findings include significant associations between teachers’ attitudes and their school classifications (p < .001), and their participation in gifted and talented education inservice training (p < .001). Findings from this study suggest that further teacher training and school-wide involvement in gifted education may assist in improving attitudes towards intellectually gifted children and their education.

An initial technology roadmap for home automation : home and personal life management

Home Automation (HA) has emerged as a prominent ¯eld for researchers and in- vestors confronting the challenge of penetrating the average home user market with products and services emerging from technology based vision. In spite of many technology contri- butions, there is a latent demand for a®ordable and pragmatic assistive technologies for pro-active handling of complex lifestyle related problems faced by home users. This study has pioneered to develop an Initial Technology Roadmap for HA (ITRHA) that formulates a need based vision of 10-15 years, identifying market, product and technology investment opportunities, focusing on those aspects of HA contributing to e±cient management of home and personal life. The concept of Family Life Cycle is developed to understand the temporal needs of family. In order to formally describe a coherent set of family processes, their relationships, and interaction with external elements, a reference model named Fam- ily System is established that identi¯es External Entities, 7 major Family Processes, and 7 subsystems-Finance, Meals, Health, Education, Career, Housing, and Socialisation. Anal- ysis of these subsystems reveals Soft, Hard and Hybrid processes. Rectifying the lack of formal methods for eliciting future user requirements and reassessing evolving market needs, this study has developed a novel method called Requirement Elicitation of Future Users by Systems Scenario (REFUSS), integrating process modelling, and scenario technique within the framework of roadmapping. The REFUSS is used to systematically derive process au- tomation needs relating the process knowledge to future user characteristics identi¯ed from scenarios created to visualise di®erent futures with richly detailed information on lifestyle trends thus enabling learning about the future requirements. Revealing an addressable market size estimate of billions of dollars per annum this research has developed innovative ideas on software based products including Document Management Systems facilitating automated collection, easy retrieval of all documents, In- formation Management System automating information services and Ubiquitous Intelligent System empowering the highly mobile home users with ambient intelligence. Other product ideas include robotic devices of versatile Kitchen Hand and Cleaner Arm that can be time saving. Materialisation of these products require technology investment initiating further research in areas of data extraction, and information integration as well as manipulation and perception, sensor actuator system, tactile sensing, odour detection, and robotic controller. This study recommends new policies on electronic data delivery from service providers as well as new standards on XML based document structure and format.

The role of social skills and school connectedness in preadolescent depressive symptoms

In the current study, we tested whether school connectedness mediates more distal deficits in social skills in influencing depressive symptoms in a sample of 127 sixth- and seventh-grade students. Results demonstrated that school connectedness and social skills accounted for 44% and 26% of variance in depressive symptoms respectively and 49% in a combined model. Although the full mediation model hypothesis was not supported, follow-up analyses revealed that school connectedness partially mediated the link between social skills and preadolescent depressive symptoms. Thus, school connectedness appears to play as strong a role in depressive symptoms in this younger preadolescent age group.

The democratic deficit and school-based management in Australia

Purpose: The paper seeks to apply the theory of the democratic deficit to school-based management with an emphasis on Australia. This theory was developed to examine managerial restructuring of the Australian Public Service in the 1990s. Given similarities between the use of managerial practices in the public service and government schools, the authors draw on recent literature about school-based management in Australia and apply the democratic deficit theory to it. ----- ----- Design/methodology/approach: This paper is conceptual in focus. The authors analyse literature in terms of the three components of the democratic deficit – i.e. the weakening of accountability, the denial of the roles and values of public employees, and the emergence of a “hollow state” – and in relation to the application of this theory to the Australian Public Service.----- ----- Findings: A trend towards the three components of the democratic deficit is evident in Australia although, to date, its emergence has not been as extensive as in the UK. The authors argue that the democratic principles on which public schooling in Australia was founded are being eroded by managerial and market practices.----- ----- Practical implications: These findings provide policy makers and practitioners with another way of examining managerial and market understandings of school-based management and its impact on teachers and on students. It offers suggestions to reorient practices away from those that are exclusively managerial-based towards those that are public-sector based.----- ----- Originality/value: The value of this paper is that it applies the theory of the democratic deficit to current understandings of school-based management.