Identity and Boundary Tensions When Educators and Mental Health Professionals Collaborate: Between Wish and Reality

Schools are centers of collaboration in promoting the development and learning of children and adolescents. They seek to develop cultures of collaboration not only within their walls but also among constituencies with similar interests. These efforts, unfortunately, all too often prove frustrating and disappointing to all concerned. Yet, the need for interdisciplinary inquiry is greater today than ever before. This is particularly true considering the complex, diverse, and multifaceted nature of today's schools. No one professional can address all of the problems confronting education, particularly those of urban schools. For decades mental health and education professionals have joined together around their similar interest in promoting children and adolescent development. One such initiative is a program that fosters educators' development. This program, named the Teacher Education Program, began under the auspices of the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis and evolved into the Human Development and Learning Program when a partnership was formed with DePaul University's School of Education. From the program's 34-year history, the authors highlight specific tensions they experienced as directors of this collaborative initiative, and how these challenges either were or were not anticipated and/or addressed. The aims are to put a human face on the challenges and struggles encountered in the relationship between education and mental health professionals, and to identify common ground between educational and psychoanalytic theories and practices.     

Developing and Maintaining Foster Family Identity Through Foster Parents’ Identity Work

There are hundreds of thousands of children in foster care in the United States, nearly a majority of whom are placed with nonrelative foster parents (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 2015). Few scholars (e.g., Nelson, 2014) have explored the communicative process through which a sense of family is created and maintained in foster families, despite the potential positive impact that developing a foster family identity may have on foster family functioning. The purpose of the present study was to understand the communicative strategies that foster parents use to create family identity. Data from interviews with 18 current and former foster parents revealed that through their talk inside and outside of the family, foster parents engaged in integrating biological and foster families, ritualizing, explaining, labeling family roles, and reframing. I discuss the importance of these findings for foster families.     

Recent Social Work Practitioners’ Understanding and Use of Evidence-Based Practice and Empirically Supported Treatments

The aim of this study was to evaluate how CSWE’s 2008 shift placing more emphasis on research have affected newly trained social workers’ use of evidence-based practice (EBP). This qualitative study examined the educational and practice experiences of newly trained social workers and how those experiences influence the use of EBP and empirically supported interventions/treatments in the field. Thirteen newly graduated social workers were interviewed using a semi-structured interview. Twenty-three codes emerged from the interviews, with the most prominent theme being a sense of overall confusion about EBP. Other themes included lack of educational preparation, lack of agency resources, and prohibitive agency culture. Implications for social work education and practice are discussed.     

Beyond ‘bikelash’: engaging with community opposition to cycle lanes

This article explores the phenomenon of ‘bikelash’, or organised community opposition to cycle lanes. Urban residents commonly cite bicycle lanes, a space on the road reserved for cyclists, as the infrastructure most likely to encourage them to cycle. Yet the introduction of cycle lanes is often controversial. This article explores the phenomenon of bikelash, asking: Why does it occur? And what are the best ways to respond to it? A critical review of the literature on ‘contested’ cycle lane projects is undertaken in order to explore how this phenomenon can best be conceptualised within a mobilities framework.     

Visual Sequence Learning in Infancy: Domain-General and Domain-Specific Associations with Language

Research suggests that non-linguistic sequence learning abilities are an important contributor to language development (Conway, Bauernschmidt, Huang, & Pisoni, 2010). The current study investigated visual sequence learning as a possible predictor of vocabulary development in infants. Fifty-eight 8.5-month-old infants were presented with a three-location spatiotemporal sequence of multi-colored geometric shapes. Early language skills were assessed using the MacArthur-Bates CDI. Analyses of children's reaction times to the stimuli suggest that the extent to which infants demonstrated learning was significantly correlated with their vocabulary comprehension at the time of test and with their gestural comprehension abilities 5 months later. These findings suggest that visual sequence learning may have both domain-general and domain-specific associations with language learning.     

Approach to normality of mean and M-estimators of location

The approach to normality of an estimate is displayed graphically by the nonlinearity in the derivative of the log density, and this nonlinearity is related to the accuracy of the normal approximation for the tail area. Using techniques from small-sample asymptotics, an alternate proof of the central limit theorem is given and same indices of tail behavior are examined.     

Katrina in historical context: environment and migration in the U.S.

The massive publicity surrounding the exodus of residents from New Orleans spurred by Hurricane Katrina has encouraged interest in the ways that past migration in the U.S. has been shaped by environmental factors. So has Timothy Egan’s exciting book, The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of those who survived the Great American Dust Bowl. This article places those dramatic stories into a much less exciting context, demonstrating that the kinds of environmental factors exemplified by Katrina and the Dust Bowl are dwarfed in importance and frequency by the other ways that environment has both impeded and assisted the forces of migration. We accomplish this goal by enumerating four types of environmental influence on migration in the U.S.: (1) environmental calamities, including floods, hurricanes, earthquakes, and tornadoes, (2) environmental hardships and their obverse, short-term environmental benefits, including both drought and short periods of favorable weather, (3) environmental amenities, including warmth, sun, and proximity to water or mountains, and (4) environmental barriers and their management, including heat, air conditioning, flood control, drainage, and irrigation. In U.S. history, all four of these have driven migration flows in one direction or another. Placing Katrina into this historical context is an important task, both because the environmental calamities of which Katrina is an example are relatively rare and have not had a wide impact, and because focusing on them defers interest from the other kinds of environmental impacts, whose effect on migration may have been stronger and more persistent, though less dramatic.     

Bootstrapping data with multiple levels of variation

The authors consider general estimators for the mean and variance parameters in the random effect model and in the transformation model for data with multiple levels of variation. They show that these estimators have different distributions under the two models unless all the variables have Gaussian distributions. They investigate the asymptotic properties of bootstrap procedures designed for the two models. They also report simulation results and illustrate the bootstraps using data on red spruce trees.