Child play therapists’ understanding and application of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child: a narrative analysis

Narrative inquiry was used to explore the ways in which play therapy practitioners understand and uphold the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child in their practice. Seven play therapy practitioners responded to questions about their experiences of working within a rights-based framework. Analysis of their responses revealed 5 themes: Child play therapy upholds Article 39; respondents demonstrated an implicit rather than explicit understanding of children’s rights; children are sometimes perceived only in terms of their behaviors; there can be a tension between the rights of the child and adults’ rights; and therapists aim to support children’s right to choice, privacy, and confidentiality, but this is not always easy. These findings are intended to support further development of curriculum and course content for trainee therapists and professional development for practitioners. The results add further evidence regarding the need to engage a rights framework when developing policy for early years therapeutic support services.

Global forms and local forces : PhD enrollments and graduations in Australia, Canada, the Czech Republic, the United Kingdom, and the United States

 This chapter presents and discusses data from five different nations—Australia, Canada, the Czech Republic, the United Kingdom, and the United States—on doctoral candidates and graduates. These data are from governmental and institutional sources for the years 1998–2004, a sample that enables changes across a five-year span to be identified. They span important basic characteristics, such as gender, age, discipline, and study load (that is, full-time or part-time study). Therefore, readers can see national as well as international trends and differences in such characteristics and can match these to equivalent and/or contemporary data in their own nations. The five countries considered here are among those whose data were discussed at the 2007 CIRGE research synthesis meeting in Australia. Although these countries are not universally representative of doctoral education, their practices do offer a vivid sense of how vastly the enterprise of doctoral education differs in its scope and dimensions around the world