Search results

The purpose of this paper is to derive from an on-going, innovative, project to explore the concept, and application, of “recovery” in the care and clinical management of patients detained in one UK high-security hospital.

Utilising a qualitative, action research, methodology the aim was to involve forensic mental health nurses in a collaborative, client-centred approach to identification and resolution of dilemmas in the process of planning care for offender-patients.

In this context the authors identify constraints and contradictions involved in employing recovery principles in institutions critics refer to as part of the disciplinary apparatus of psychiatric and social control; where the taken for granted lives, and relations, of an incarcerated population are measured by the calendar, not the clock.

Protective practices remain highly relevant in high-secure practice. Safety, an important value for all can by and large be achieved through recovery approaches. The humanistic elements of recovery can offer up safe and useful methods of deploying the mental health nurse on the ward. Many nurses have the prerequisite approach but there remains a wide scope to enhance those skills. Many see the approach as axiomatic though nurse education often prepares nurses with a biomedical view of the ward.

Currently, philosophical tenets of recovery are enshrined in contemporary health policy and professional directives but, as yet, have not been translated into high-secure settings. Drawing on preliminary findings, attention is given to the value of socially situated approaches in challenging historic dominance of a medical model.

It is concluded that recovery could be a forerunner of reforms necessary for the continued relevance of high-secure care into the twenty-first century.

This research is located in high-secure setting. The social situation is marked by the extent of the isolation involved. A value is in this situation. First it is akin to the isolation of the tribe utilised by many anthropologists for their ability to adopt the “social laboratory” status to test out theories of behaviour in industrial society. The authors urge others to utilise this research in this way. Second, the situation represents the locus of so many of societies dilemmas, paradoxes and fears that moral issues morph from what is the mundane in wider society. In this way humanistic approaches are tested via action research with nurses in some rigouous ways.

Analyses focusing on the intersecting forces of race, class, and gender have been around much longer than theorists in the traditions of social science and the humanities have acknowledged. As early as the 19th century, Sojourner Truth and Anna Julia Cooper began to voice many of the sentiments that continue to shape the discourse around race, gender, and class that is occurring in this new millennium. They anticipated today's debate over the inadequacy of reliance on single categories of race, gender, or even class, to capture the complexities of lived experience (Lemert & Bahn, 1998; Painter, 1990). Their awareness of the importance of the intersection between race, gender, and class made their spoken perspectives on gender inequality unique at a time when the “cult of true womanhood” reigned supreme. Despite this fact, much of the literature utilizing this intersectional framework of analysis emerged just after the Civil Rights and Women's Liberation movements of the 1960s. Memorable pioneers of this paradigm of analysis are Angela Davis’ Women, Race & Class (1981), Audre Lorde's Sister-Outsider (1984), and Paula Giddings’ When and Where I Enter (1984). These crucial texts and speeches call for us to be mindful of the intersections of experience that are instrumental in the formation and maintenance of families and that are so often ignored in discursive theory and research, which treats race, gender, and class, sexuality, etc. as mutually exclusive social forces.

Drawing from the inclusive pedagogical approach in action framework and Pierre Bourdieu’s social theory concepts of habitus, field and capital, this chapter positions literacy and numeracy learning as core components of further learning, and living successfully in the world. It addresses learner diversity in early childhood settings and recognises the uniqueness of every child within the context of a broad range of cultural knowledge. The chapter concludes with two sample lessons and reflective questions, which early childhood teachers can use as models to expand children’s literacy and numeracy concepts, enabling creative and critical interactions across a range of modes in the context of everyday life across families and cultures.

This paper is a thinking piece that examines, from the viewpoint of a Canadian pracademic, working through two definitions of pracademic, a collaborative relationship between academics and practitioners and a person engaged as a practitioner and researcher. Two aspects of a pracademics scholarship is discussed, wide awakeness and praxis. The purpose of the paper is to make the case that it is pracademics who are well suited and attuned to questioning, challenging, and disrupting the ordinariness of the everyday, to envision new possibilities, and who take responsibility for mobilizing the educational community to undertake meaningful social change within an education system. A case is provided to illustrate wide-awakeness and praxis in practice. A case is provide to illustrate how wide-awakeness and praxis present themselves in practice.

This paper considers the work of pracademics from Galileo Educational Network, located within a research-intensive university, who research and lead design-based professional learning. Drawing upon a design-based approach to guide design-based professional learning and design-based research, I highlight the ways in which wide-awakeness and praxis work themselves out in practice.

Drawing upon the two aspects of wide-awakeness and praxis, creates a liminal space for pracademics to engage with practitioners to undertake stubborn and persistent problems of practice to create important educational improvements. A key to engaging in transformational change through collaborative professionalism is to engage in sustained design-based professional learning led by pracademics.

This thinking piece offers the perspective of one Canadian pracademic who shows how pracademics are uniquely positioned to take on the work of transformation, agency, and social change.

In this chapter, the authors analyze current pre-service teachers’ reflections on the journals written by teachers from the nineteenth century and early twentieth century. They explore what the interchange reveals about pre-service teachers’ conceptions of teaching and the learning-to-teach process. The analysis focuses on the commonalities and differences between these groups of teachers. Findings are presented in a readers’ theater format in which recurring themes and meaning-making are expressed by voices from the past and by those who would be teachers.