Where Are the Children's Experiences? Analysing Social and Cultural Exclusion in 'Special' and 'Mainstream' Schools

In this paper we employ ethnographic data to illustrate that disabled children encounter discriminatory notions of 'normality' and 'difference' in both 'special' and 'mainstream' schools, and that these experiences relate to both the structural forces in schools, and the everyday individual and cultural practices of adults and children. In contrast to much of the literature in the field, this paper examines the everyday life experiences of adults and disabled children from their own perspective. We highlight disabled children's own criticisms of 'special' and 'mainstream' schools to illustrate the fluid nature of disabled children's lives within educational settings. We argue that schools will be prevented from becoming fully inclusive until adults who control schools take account of children's views of specific educational processes and until educational policy makers adopt a more nuanced multi-level approach to inclusion. Children should be enabled to challenge the structural, cultural and individual conditions which create disability.     

PROFESSIONAL AUTONOMY AND ORGANIZATIONAL CONSTRAINT

Recent discussions of the professions agree on the centrality of autonomy to professionalism but disagree whether organizational employment is consistent with the maintenance of professionals' traditional autonomy. This article analyzes autonomy in the engineering profession with a view to discovering both whether engineers are able to maintain high levels of autonomy in an organizational context and whether autonomy is as central to job satisfaction among engineers as the literature suggests. The data used are drawn from a survey questionnaire mailed to a sample of 800 engineers in the Rochester, New York area in 1986. Two major findings are discussed. First, although engineers are subject to certain constraints, they do appear to maintain relatively high levels of professional autonomy, especially concerning how their jobs are actually carried out. Second, despite the high value engineers place on autonomy, its relationship to job satisfaction is not a simple one. The strong effect on job satisfaction of one type of autonomy (the ability to choose the projects on which one works) may be the result not of autonomy per se but whether engineers find their work interesting.     

Listening Assessment: The Watson-Barker Listening Test

This article discusses the need for valid and reliable measures of listening behavior and how the Watson-Barker Listening Test was developed to measure the listening abilities of adults and mature college students. Sections of the article describe the nature and forms of the test, various validation procedures and research studies using the test. The claims of validity are partially supported by the data, and the Watson-Barker Listening Test has gained wide acceptance.     

ON QUANTILES OF SUMS

In this paper we investigate the relationship between the quantiles of a sum of independent continuous random variables and those of its components. Results concerning this relationship are given for the special cases of symmetric distributions, gamma distributions, and for the difference of identically distributed random variables.     

Permutation tests for the independence of a scalar and a unit vector

The problem of testing the independence of a scalar and a unit vector is re-examined in the context of a specific scientific problem which is described in Section 1. Several alternatives to the Jupp-Mardia (1980) statistic are suggested. The null distributions of all the statistics are discussed under permutations.     

THE CALCULATION OF CONFIDENCE REGIONS FOR EIGENVECTORS

An explicit algorithm is given for constructing a confidence region on the appropriate unit sphere for an eigenvector, given a large sample. It is assumed the eigenvector corresponds to the largest eigenvalue of Exx^T, a matrix with distinct eigenvalues, and that the estimation uses n^-1S?x_ix_ix^T. While the theory is generally applicable, the writer has in mind the special case where ∥x∥= 1 i.e. directional data.     

Pre-testing innovation: Methodology for testing the design of management systems

Many innovations, such as the introduction of a new fertilizer by a farmer, or the use of a new raw material by a manufacturer, or the adoption of a new hairstyle by a lady of fashion, can be tested on a try-before-buy basis. The user (or anyone) can experiment with the proposed innovation in almost precisely the same form and circumstances that it intends to be used, before a firm commitment. Some innovations do not have this happy property. Decisions to go into a new business venture or to overhaul a management system (or to change the length of a lady's nose or to enter the state of holy matrimony) cannot be conveniently replicated before a largely irreversible commitment is made. The methodology of pre-testing such innovations must inevitably depend on evaluation by analogy. It is not well developed, much less theoretically validated.The research on which this paper is based was sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and the Office of Naval Research, Contracts N00014-76-C-0074 and N00014-74-C-0263.     

The Cloth of Field of Gold: Material Culture and Civic Power in Colonial Ibadan

The article focuses on a political controversy which occurred in Ibadan, a city in south-western Nigeria, during 1939. At face value, the contentious issue was a particular design of damask cloth. Ruth Watson suggests that the controversy was actually far more complex and argues that it cannot be understood unless one develops an historical reading of political culture in the city. This reading explores the cultural/symbolic meanings of political practices and how, at certain times, these practices served to generate material forms of civic power.