Search results

How classrooms are formed and managed sets the foundation for emotional and intellectual well-being. A person-centred learning environment balances the needs of both the teacher and the learner, utilizing shared responsibility, cooperative leadership and caring. Built on humanistic principles, this chapter examines the effects of a person-centred classroom management programme, Consistency Management & Cooperative Discipline® (CMCD®), on the school climate of two large secondary schools in England, the use of which represented a shift in philosophy and practice from primarily behaviouristic to instructional and person-centred approaches to classroom management. The changes in school climate over multiple years demonstrate both the problems schools can create and the potential solutions, when students and their teachers receive the care they need to flourish.

Douwe Beijaard, PhD, is full professor and director of the Eindhoven School of Education, Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands. His current research themes are the professional identity, quality and development of (beginning) teachers, as well as teachers’ roles in educational innovations.

The literature on non-traditional classroom environments claims that the changed emphasis in higher education teaching from the lecturer to students has intensified the global focus on student-centred learning, prompting colleges and universities globally to introspect, re-examine, and re-structure their pedagogical approaches in an attempt to align with national educational policies, and to position themselves favourably with potential students in an increasingly competitive higher education environment. This is an environment that now relies heavily on digital learning technologies, which has provoked scholars such as Heick (2012) to perceive the change to the virtual as one that makes higher education institutions accessible from anywhere – in the cloud, at home, in the workplace, or restaurant. The COVID-19 crisis has reinforced the need for this flexibility. These forces have put universities and colleges under pressure to implement new teaching approaches in non-traditional classroom settings that are appropriate for, and responsive to, the COVID-19 crisis and students in terms of learning and social support. This chapter identified and appraised key teaching approaches. It is evident that there are three key teaching approaches that higher education institutions have adopted for delivering learning in an emergency and in a student-centred fashion. The three approaches, which include the time and place dispersion, transactional distance, and collaborative learning approaches, embrace social support because they are grounded in social constructivism. Academics need to be fully committed to the role of social support giving – that is, emotional, instrumental, informational, and appraisal support – in order to foster student wellbeing and cognitive development as students learn together but apart in non-traditional classrooms. The hurried manner in which teaching and learning practices in many higher education institutions have been moved to the online format has led academics to violate many key principles of the approaches they have adopted. And this situation is borne out in the case study discussed in Chapter 8 of this volume. A review of current remote teaching and learning practices is required if academics are to embrace the full principles of the approaches that are appropriate for teaching and learning in non-traditional classroom contexts.

Alcohol misuse and mental health problems in parents are both known to contribute to impaired outcomes in children, although little is known about the specific parenting behaviours that might be affected. Mental health problems in parents who misuse alcohol may impact parenting in specific ways, and these may be different for mothers and for fathers. The purpose of this paper is to make a preliminary investigation of alcohol misuse and mental health problems in mothers, and explore ways in which these might affect their parenting.

Semi-structured interviews were carried out with professionals involved in services for mothers who misuse alcohol, including those working in addiction psychiatry, in primary care, and in the provision of parenting services. These interviews were then examined using thematic analysis.

Themes emerged including specific mental health problems (depression, anxiety and personality disorders), and related issues, such as self-medication. Particularly relevant for mothers were post-natal depression, the effect on maternal alcohol misuse and mental health when children are removed, the role of domestic violence, and the importance for identification of home visits by services. Different types of alcohol misuse were linked to different mental states and different parenting behaviours in parents. Findings in the general parenting and substance misuse literature were confirmed, and a new addition was that expressed emotion may play a role in families where mothers misuse alcohol.

The findings increased the understanding of the relationships between maternal alcohol misuse, mental health issues and parenting, raising several new points for consideration.

The purpose of this article is to provide an integrated framework including knowledge management (KM), organizational learning (OL), and information and communication technologies (ICT).

A synthesis of the existing literature with preliminary supporting empirical evidence reported is presented in the article.

A theoretical framework is developed.

The results of the article can be used to guide ongoing research in the area of KM, OL, and ICT.

The paper makes a contribution to understanding in the fields of KM and OL in particular and ICT secondarily.

This paper seeks to suggest that effective leadership can be achieved by, and can drive, an integral spiritual connectedness between governments, organisations and society as a whole.

A literature search to map the history and the underlying philosophies that have led to the current popular concept of leadership, and to suggest a different worldview to bring about a change to these underlying philosophies in order to enhance leadership effectiveness.

Effective leadership is multi‐disciplinary, involving not only those disciplines of sociology, psychology and technology, but that of spirituality as well. This new approach is effective because of the different ways it offers of gaining deeper insights into a leader's own spiritual self, but also beyond this to others with whom the leader interacts, and others who are affected by the results of their leadership.

The paper is not an exhaustive literature search and is primarily limited to selected authors of futures studies, psychology, psychotherapy, economics and business.

The paper proposes steps to guide how organizational leadership can lead to more effective workplaces as well as benefiting the global society as a whole.

The paper is current in today's environment and offers a practical epistemological explorative approach into what effective spiritual leadership could mean and to consider the impact of leadership decisions and actions as a result.

During the 1980s, market research practitioners and academic marketing researchers witnessed a growing interest in qualitative research. A review of the practitioner and academic literature on qualitative market(ing) research reveals the commonalities and the differences in the ways each group represents, thinks about and practices qualitative research. Areas where both groups might benefit from sharing ideas and information and from closer links generally are discussed.

The pupose of this paper is twofold. First, to consider the cultural reception of recent developments in genetic technology and human reproduction, particularly in relation to the prospect of human cloning and the advent of the “designer human”; and second, to explore the ways in which public discussion of these developments presuppose and recast issues of diversity, difference and (in)equality.

The research draws upon UK print media sources (broadsheet and tabloid newspapers) over the past two decades to examine the ways in which cultural expectations concerning developments in reproductive technology are commonly expressed. It does not aim at a quantitative examination of the content of what was said; rather it seeks to explore how it was said and thus the discursive resources that were employed in doing so.

The paper suggests that images of “technology” function simultaneously as “mirrors of society”, providing a means for articulating and rhetorically rehearsing the various philosophical antinomies and moral conflicts that characterize social organization.

The paper adopts a novel approach to the question of diversity, difference and (in)equality by considering the “monsters” discursively associated with recent developments in genetic and reproductive technology as well as the “monstrous” forms of social organization that they foreshadow.