Supporting Critical Multicultural Teacher Educators: Transformative teaching,social justice education,and perceptions of institutional support

ABSTRACT

In most teacher education programmes in Canada and the United States, educators’ opportunities to develop equity-related skills are concentrated into single ‘multicultural’ courses. These courses tend to have a conservative or liberal orientation, focused on appreciating diversity or cultural competence, rather than a critical orientation, focused on preparing teachers to address inequity. In this study, based on a survey of instructors of multicultural and intercultural teacher education courses in Canada and the US (N = 186), we examined the relationship between the criticality of their multicultural teacher education courses and their perceptions of institutional support for the values they teach. We found a negative relationship between the two – the more critical the instructors’ approaches, the less institutional support they perceived.     

Using Bayesian analysis in repeated preclinical in vivo studies for a more effective use of animals

Whilst innovative Bayesian approaches are increasingly used in clinical studies, in the preclinical area Bayesian methods appear to be rarely used in the reporting of pharmacology data. This is particularly surprising in the context of regularly repeated in vivo studies where there is a considerable amount of data from historical control groups, which has potential value. This paper describes our experience with introducing Bayesian analysis for such studies using a Bayesian meta‐analytic predictive approach. This leads naturally either to an informative prior for a control group as part of a full Bayesian analysis of the next study or using a predictive distribution to replace a control group entirely. We use quality control charts to illustrate study‐to‐study variation to the scientists and describe informative priors in terms of their approximate effective numbers of animals. We describe two case studies of animal models: the lipopolysaccharide‐induced cytokine release model used in inflammation and the novel object recognition model used to screen cognitive enhancers, both of which show the advantage of a Bayesian approach over the standard frequentist analysis. We conclude that using Bayesian methods in stable repeated in vivo studies can result in a more effective use of animals, either by reducing the total number of animals used or by increasing the precision of key treatment differences. This will lead to clearer results and supports the “3Rs initiative” to Refine, Reduce and Replace animals in research. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Physical environments and community reintegration post stroke: qualitative insights from stroke clubs

This study investigated the environment’s role in community reintegration amongst persons with experience of stroke. Focus group discussions with 29 individuals recruited from community stroke clubs in Scotland revealed that stroke influenced a person’s perceptions, experience, use and enjoyment of the environment. Multiple specific (e.g. theatres, cafes) and more general (out-of-the-home) environments appeared capable of supporting community reintegration, providing settings in which individuals were able and willing to interact with others and participate in various functional, social and recreational activities. The article reflects on the study’s implications for policy and practice.     

Children Starting to be Looked After by Local Authorities in England: An Analysis of Inter-authority Variation and Case-centred Decision Making

This paper presents findings from a study of children lookedafter by 24 local authorities in England. The study combinedanalysis of key statistical data with a questionnaire surveycompleted by the social workers for a sub-sample of the children.This paper focuses on children who started a period of beinglooked after in the participating authorities during the 6 monthsfrom October 2000 to March 2001. The study found considerablevariation between the authorities in their rates of childrenstarting to be looked after, and the paper explores reasonsfor these differences. It also highlights the variety of legalroutes and placement options used for children entering thelooked after system, and proposes a matrix that summarizes thevarious combinations that the authorities were found to be using.The matrix can assist social workers and their managers in identifyingthe most appropriate option for individual children.     

Moving Beyond Basic Emotions in Aging Research

There is consistent evidence that older adults have difficulties in perceiving emotions. However, emotion perception measures to date have focused on one particular type of assessment: using standard photographs of facial expressions posing six basic emotions. We argue that it is important in future research to explore adult age differences in understanding more complex, social and blended emotions. Using stimuli which are dynamic records of the emotions expressed by people of all ages, and the use of genuine rather than posed emotions, would also improve the ecological validity of future research into age differences in emotion perception. Important questions remain about possible links between difficulties in perceiving emotional signals and the implications that this has for the everyday interpersonal functioning of older adults.