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The purpose of this paper is to identify ways teachers might employ a robot to achieve learning objectives with pupils with intellectual disabilities and potential outcome measures.

A series of five case studies where teacher-pupil dyads were observed during five planned video-recorded sessions with a humanoid robot. Engagement was rated in a classroom setting and during the last session with the robot. Video recordings were analysed for duration of engagement, teacher assistance and number of goals achieved.

Teachers identified a wide range of learning objectives ranging from an appreciation of cause and effect to improving the pupil's sense of direction. The robot's role could be to reward behaviour, provide cues or provide an active element to learning. Rated engagement was significantly higher with the robot than in the classroom.

A robot with a range of functions that allowed it to be engaging and motivating for the wide range of pupils in special education would be expensive and require teachers to learn how to use it. The findings identify ways to provide evidence that this expenditure of time and money is worthwhile.

There is almost no research teachers can refer to on using robots to support learning in children with intellectual disabilities. This paper is therefore of value for researchers who wish to investigate using robots to educate children with intellectual disabilities, as it can provide vital information to aid study design.

‘Making it happen for everyone’ is the subtext of Valuing People Now: a new three‐year strategy for people with learning disabilities (Department of Health, 2009). It seems an appropriate time to take stock and learn from those for whom this strategy will be critical how they view the current services provided, what changes they have seen and where they see the future. This article reviews the experiences of a group of adults in an East Midlands city.

People with intellectual disabilities commonly come into contact with the criminal justice system as victims, witnesses or suspects. Their intellectual disabilities may make them disadvantaged in relation to all components of the criminal justice system, including police interviews, fitness to plead and stand trial, capacity to give evidence in court, and issues to do with criminal responsibility and sentencing. The focus in this paper is on police interviews and the capacity of adults with intellectual disabilities to give evidence in Court. Research into the types of vulnerability seen by people interviewed by police have focused on interviewees' understanding of the Oath and their legal rights, suggestibility, acquiescence, compliance and perceptions of the consequences of making self‐incriminating admissions. The essential components of any interview and testifying in court require that the person can communicate effectively and give reliable answers and accounts of events. Research into police interviews has highlighted the importance of taking into account the interviewee's vulnerabilities and providing appropriate support, and suggests a more humane approach to interviews and when vulnerable people testify in Court.

The memorial is an account of Smith's personality and work by a former and favored student. It is a sustained personal reminiscence backed by the reminiscences of others who admired Smith together with an account of Smith's working practices and of his main texts. It is in this sense subjective as well as objective. It is not a full-scale biography, rather a biographical sketch and it is necessarily limited by its very proximity to the subject. The principal and other informants knew Smith and liked him. However, given Stewart's own profession, the work is more than this. It was written in the context of the consequences for Smith's reputation in the light of the French Revolution. Stewart is anxious, given the sensitivities concerning the destructive radicalism in France and in the context of the conservative reaction in Britain, to distance Smith's ideas on liberty and on policy from those ideas as they were being expressed in revolutionary France. In this way, Stewart's biographical work is both an account of Smith's life and works and a politicized interpretation of his principle economic ideas.

I suggest that the search for Adam Smith’s theodicy is likely to be in vain. The paper begins with a brief history of approaches to evil, emphasizing the context in which they arose, and the questions authors were addressing. Approaches most relevant to Adam Smith include those of Augustine and Calvin, and the early modern theodicies of Leibniz, Samuel Clarke and William King, as well as the attacks on them by Bayle and Voltaire. Scottish Enlightenment writers were not terribly interested in theodicy, though Hutcheson and Kames did devote space to their versions of problems of evil. David Hume’s Dialogues on Natural Religion are often taken to be classic statement of the problem of theodicy and argument against religious belief, but his concern was to demolish rationalistic theodicies rather than religious belief or practice. The paper then turns to Smith’s writings, considering similarities and differences to these approaches to evil. Smith emphasizes the wisdom and beneficence of God, and that evils we observe are part of a larger providential plan. He makes no attempt to justify the God in the face of evil, and in this respect Smith shares more with Augustine and Calvin than he does with the early modern theodicists. Smith’s approach to evil is simple and ameliorative. Smith’s approach contrasts with early nineteenth century English political economists, from Malthus onwards, for whom theodicy was important. Whatever view we take of the theodicists project of justifying an all-powerful and good God in the face of evil may, we still struggle to make sense of economic suffering and evil.

Film provides an alternative medium for assessing our interpretations of cultural icons. This selective list looks at the film and video sources for information on and interpretations of the life of Woody Guthrie.

This chapter works to provide a space beyond the predictable discourses of early childhood education in order to interrogate the social practices of teachers and children. What is presented in this chapter is not a collection of dispassionately observed facts but one person's reconstruction of some important language ‘moments’, in the lived experience of a few Year One children. Through the use of pastiche and collage as the medium for ‘displaying’ the data, this work of interrogation involves pulling apart the tried and true, established mechanisms for reading the classroom. The result is a much untidier picture of the lived experience of Year One children than the traditional educational discourses have allowed.