This paper presents the stories of three mothers with learning difficulties whose children have been involved in care proceedings. Drawing on the example of the legendary interviewer, Studs Terkel, the authors let the mothers describe their experiences of the child protection system in their own words. From out of their intensely personal accounts…

Three studies were conducted using the interpersonal grid, a method for assessing perceptions of agentic and communal behavior based on the interpersonal circumplex. The 1st examined consistency across perceivers and convergence between perceiver and the perceived person. The 2nd examined whether responses to the interpersonal grid were sensitive…

In this article, I examine my attempts as an instructor in a university-based school leadership program to cross the generational divide with my students by using democracy as the central concept for understanding what is meant by a quality American education for all children. I guide the course according to the democratic learning principles that…

This paper presents the final analysis of a mixed methodological study of participatory action research (PAR) as professional development. The participants were administrators and teachers studying extreme educational disadvantage caused by homeless and transient living conditions. Two questions are answered: 1. What was the experience of…

Peer mediation is a school-based intervention program that was implemented in response to the rising violence in schools, and to the need for alternative and more proactive discipline plans. Using the theoretical framework of the Social Identity Theory, this article highlighted the importance of peer mediation in helping adolescents resolve their…

This article assesses David Ng's contribution to religious education with children. Ng offered practical strategies for full inclusion of children in faith communities. One limitation in Ng's work on children is its lack of attention to the role of culture, an unusual omission given his interest in multicultural religious education. This gap…

Developmental psychologists have been interested in the cognitive ability of perspective-taking for a number of years due to the apparent link between perspective-taking deficits and Autistic Spectrum Disorder. Most of the research in this area has employed the concepts and techniques of the approach commonly referred to as "Theory of Mind." The…

This article presents 7 simple models of the relationship between cognitive empathy (mental perspective taking) and emotional empathy (the vicarious sharing of emotion). I consider behavioral outcomes of the models, arguing that, during human evolution, natural selection may have acted on variation in the relationship between cognitive empathy and…

While the use of ethnographic and qualitative research methods has spread across many fields of educational inquiry, until recently this has had little impact on research in science education. However, there is currently a methodological shift taking place in this area, prompted by the rise of a sociocultural perspective on cognition, which sees…

This paper comments on issues of quality in early child care and education from an international perspective, asserting that questions about how to determine quality are as complex for early childhood programs as for all other professional services. The paper's introduction discusses the world wide trend of expansion in the amount of out-of-home…

This National Council for the Social Studies (NCSS) board of directors substantive issue session initiated the process of developing a position statement for the educational observance of the Quincentenary of Columbus' landing in the Americas. The meeting consisted of proposal statements by panelists and advocated the development of a united…

This paper focuses on the technique of role-switching as a workable field relationship tactic in the observer's work site. It describes the nature of subject use of the observer's dual status during the research activity, and conceptualizes the relationship between this type of researcher-role management and the premise of role reciprocity in…

The paper examines the joint interactive process of top-level administrative leadership teams of colleges or universities, with emphasis on the team's collective thinking. It focuses on how individual team members, who report directly to the president, make sense of their own and each other's activities on the team (for example, by constructing…

A total of 33 kindergarten children and 33 third grade students were shown videotapes of children in commonly distressing situations, in order to elicit affective and cognitive responses. The children indicated how the stories made them feel (empathy), why the story characters felt as they did (perspective taking), their desire for the characters…

The "sense making" process structures humans' categorization, perceptual, and expressive processes. These "sense making" references are ultimately derived from four distinct "root metaphors": mechanism or mechanistic thinking (machine), formism or formistic thinking (similarity), organicism or organistic thinking (organic process), and…