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Teachers play a vital role in the structure of their classrooms. Part of this structure is having a clear understanding of the importance of not only supporting their students, but also the teacher assistants/support staff with whom they collaborate. Providing teacher assistants/support staff with guidance, information on student needs and classroom structures, team-building strategies, training, and supervision sets the stage for a positive climate for collaboration, teamwork, and learning. Consequently, teachers should be proactive and diligent to ensure high-quality training and supervision for teacher assistants/support staff, as this will have a direct impact on the services and learning opportunities being provided to the students.

This chapter offers a critical examination of children and young people’s participation in Australia’s official celebrations of the International Year of the Child (IYC) in 1979. While the global objectives of IYC strongly reflected ‘protectionist’ or ‘welfarist’ approaches to children’s rights, the chapter shows that, at a local level, the year was also shaped by alternative notions of children’s liberation that had emerged in the preceding decade and a new emphasis on children’s voices by policymakers, advocates and researchers. The chapter explores how these ideas were incorporated at a national level before closely examining three initiatives in New South Wales (NSW), the Australian state where the emphasis on children’s voices was taken furthest. The initiatives examined are: (1) the establishment of a Kids Council to provide input into the state’s response to IYC; (2) the organisation of a Youth Forum for high school students; and (3) the provision of funding for the ‘Speakout’ camp for children in out-of-home ‘care’. None of these initiatives approached the radical forms of democratic participation envisioned by liberationists. Nonetheless, they attest to the wider credence given to ideas of children’s self-determination in this period, well before the formalisation of children’s ‘participation’ rights in the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC, 1989). The selected case studies also provide context to more recent debates over the inclusion of children and young people’s voices in decision-making processes, demonstrating how concerns around tokenism, exclusivity and adult-centricism manifested and were navigated at a time when the concepts of participation and voice remained relatively novel.

Purpose: This chapter explores the current hybridization between true crime and nonfiction investigative documentaries on Video on Demand (VOD) platforms. It would seem necessary to distinguish true crime productions from long-form journalistic documentaries in order to avoid confusion between different products that do not pursue the same ends, such as audiovisual products with highly emotive and engaging components versus a journalistic approach to the truth about what happened. Methodology/approach: The analysis is based on the specific theory of true crime developed by Punnett, who provides genuine narrative codes (Justice, Subversive, Geographic, Forensic, Vocative, and Folkloric) for true crime to distinguish it from the formal conventions and social objectives of journalistic documentaries. The case study (El crimen de Alcàsser) was selected because of its potential to drive a detailed and in-depth study on one of the most traumatic crimes in the country’s recent history: the kidnapping, rape, torture, and killing of three teenagers in 1992. Findings: Several scholars have identified journalistic elements in true crime productions in the digital context, adopted in an attempt to distance them from the true crime tradition of appealing to primitive instincts. Although it has been perceived also as a renewed formula for journalism to reach a wide audience and mainstream success, it banishes journalism from its origin and goals: to guarantee the citizenship’s right to be truly informed about crime. In this way, journalistic documentaries inspired by real crimes may play a crucial role in a democratic society, while true crime only exploits the empathy of viewers and places them in the active participation of determining the suspect-protagonist’s guilt as a mode of “clickable” entertainment in the digital culture. Research limitations: This is the first in a series of studies within a broader research project on true crime documentaries released on the VOD platforms in Spain. The findings are, in this case, preliminary. The analysis needs additional testing before its utility can be reasonably determined and a theory about true crime made in Spain could be developed. Originality: First, there is no specific research in the field of true crime in Spain, although crime stories already enjoyed a prominent place in Spain’s conventional TV programming. Second, the Punnett analysis model introduces an interesting way to complement existing theoretical references about the connections between true crime and journalism.