Dying Well!—Issues For The Living?

Hospice and Palliative Care is a relatively new speciality in Medical Practice and is based on the premise that the family unit, not exclusively the patient, is the focus of care. This paper attempts to outline the development of Hospice and Palliative Care over the centuries and explores the relationship of current practice as the art of medicine rather than science. Through the narration and discussion of a family interaction, the paper draws a parallel to situations common in Family Therapy and poses the need for teamwork and a multidisciplinary approach in Hospice and Palliative Care and in Family Therapy.     

‘It's Not Fair!’—Voicing Pupils’ Criticisms of School Rules

Socialisation theories have traditionally focused on how children are socialised in a rather unidirectional manner, according to a transmission model. However, more recent research and theories show that children are not just passive recipients, but active agents in their socialisation process. At the same time, children are subordinated to adult control. In school, they are regimented and involuntarily subjected to mass routines, discipline and control. The aim of this study was to explore and give a voice to pupils’ critical thinking about school rules and their teachers’ behaviour in relation to these rules. Ethnographic fieldwork and group interviews with students were conducted in two Swedish primary schools. The findings show that pupils criticise some school rules, distrust teachers’ explanations of particular school rules, perceive some school rules and teachers’ interventions as unfair and inconsistent, perceive no power over the construction of school rules, and express false acceptance and hidden criticism. The findings are discussed in terms of hidden curriculum, power, mentality resistance, democracy, participation and democratic citizenship education.     

And yet they thrive!—Regaining the relevance of a transparency system

Over the past decade, a host of donor organizations implemented transparency systems to make international development aid more transparent to the public. These initiatives have met with little public interest, but their proliferation and development show no sign of diminishing. This article shows how internal importance to the political system, fueled by formal rankings and the exhibition of transparency systems as a flagship initiative, can replace relevance to the public as a driving force for sustainable development. The article concludes by discussing the possibility of a future development where transparency systems finally do connect with user groups, such as citizens of both donor and recipient countries, and gain a relevance even beyond original intentions.     

Research,ideology and practice—a discontinuity

SUMMARY. This paper is concerned essentially with the influence of professional ideology on practice in the field of public child care. In recent years I have become increasingly aware of a discontinuity in the developing theoretical basis for such practice arising from research, and the actual outcomes of such practice as demonstrated by the same research. Whilst acknowledging that there will be an inevitable time lag in implementing some of those research findings, I am concerned that those of us involved in the public care of children, and particularly in the training of the carers, have not yet adjusted our ideological base to take account of the evidence and of certain important principles. By identifying the changing nature of research and examining some of the findings as they relate to factors such as the social context of child care, and the nature of agency policy and practice, I attempt to demonstrate the centrality of concepts such as partnership, consumerism and power sharing. However, I conclude that professional ideologies appear to experience great difficulty in encompassing such concepts     

Now — and Now — and Now: Time,Space and the Material Entanglements of the Classroom

This study examines time and children in the classroom based on free‐flowing observations written in class by 10‐year‐old pupils. The concept of entanglement is activated to consider time together with space and matter and explore the dynamics in which these elements interact. The analysis unsettles the notion of time as a separate, ‘outside’ parameter: rather than examining children in time, this viewpoint enables us to see children as being or becoming of different times and entangling with material elements. On the other hand, entanglements also produce different moments of now, which are seen as multiple and hybrid. The author suggests an understanding of research with children as ‘lively entanglements’ in which special attention should be given to things that matter to children.