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This paper examines whether participation in quality early child education (ECE) lessens special education needs and insulates children against requiring costly, intensive supports. Sixty years of longitudinal data coupled with new research in the United Kingdom and Canada were examined to demonstrate how quality ECE reduces special education needs and mitigates the intensity of later supports for children with special education needs. Research demonstrates that quality ECE strengthens children's language, literacy/numeracy, behavioural regulation, and enhances high-school completion. International longitudinal studies confirm that two years of quality ECE lowers special education placement by 40–60% for children with cognitive risk factors and 10–30% for social/behavioural risk factors. Explicit social-emotional learning outcomes also need to be embedded into ECE curricular frameworks, as maladaptive behaviours, once entrenched, are more difficult (and costly) to remediate. Children who do not have the benefit of attending quality ECE in the earliest years are more likely to encounter learning difficulties in school, in turn impacting the well-being and prosperity of their families and societies.

Shortly before the Second World War, a woman who had never accepted her orphan status, Gabrielle Bonheur Chanel, nicknamed ‘Little Coco’ by her father and known as ‘Coco’ to her relatives, became the first women in history to build a world-class industrial empire. By 1935, Coco, a fashion designer and industry captain, was employing more than 4,000 workers and had sold more than 28,000 dresses, tailored jackets and women's suits. Born into a poor family and raised in an orphanage, she enjoyed an intense social life in Paris in the 1920s, rubbing shoulders with artists, creators and the rising stars of her time.

Thanks to her entrepreneurial skills, she was able to innovate in her methods and in her trendsetting approach to fashion design and promotion. Coco Chanel was committed and creative, had the soul of an entrepreneur and went on to become a world leader in a brand new sector combining fashion, accessories and perfumes that she would help shape. By the end of her life, she had redefined French elegance and revolutionized the way people dressed.

The purpose of this study was to examine the impact of a sport-leadership program on minority incarcerated young adults’ health-related fitness markers.

This study occurred at an all-male juvenile detention center. A total of 41 participants in this study were obtained from a sample of 103 incarcerated young adults. Data collection entailed body mass index (BMI) evaluation, cardiovascular endurance tests and 1-min pushups and situps at two different time periods (before and after three months). A 2 × 2 mixed factorial analysis of variances was used to test for differences among the within subjects’ factors (time [pre × post]) and between subjects’ factors (groups [flex × control]) for the above-mentioned dependent variables.

Over the course of three consecutive months of engagement, preliminary indications demonstrated participants had a slight reduction in BMI and significant increases in cardiovascular endurance and muscle strength. Contrarily, during this same time period, non-participating young adults exhibited significant increases in BMI and decreases in cardiovascular endurance and muscle strength.

Integration of sport-leadership programs is generally not free but can be a low-cost alternative for combatting many issues surrounding physical activity, weight gain and recreational time for those incarcerated.

Health education still tends to be dominated by an approach designed to achieve individual behaviour change through the provision of knowledge to avoid risk. In contrast, a critical inquiry approach educates children and young people to develop their capacity to engage critically with knowledge, through reasoning, problem solving and challenging taken for granted assumptions, including the socially critical approach which investigates the impact of social and economic inequalities on, for example, health status and cultural understandings. The purpose of this paper is to explore the conditions of possibility for a socially critical approach to health education in schools. It examines the ways in which preservice health and physical education (HPE) teachers talked about their experiences of health education during their school-based practicum.

In total, 13 preservice HPE teachers who were about to graduate with a Bachelor of Health and Physical Education from a university in New South Wales, Australia were interviewed for the study. Five group interviews and one individual interview were conducted. The interviews were coded for themes and interpreted drawing on a biopedagogical theoretical framework as a way of understanding the salience of particular forms of knowledge in health education, how these are promoted and with what effects for how living healthily is understood.

The HPETE students talked with some certainty about the purpose of health education as a means to improve the health of young people – a certainty afforded by a medico-scientific view of health imbued with individualised, risk discourses. This purpose was seen as being achieved through using pedagogies, particularly those involving technology, that produced learning activities that were “engaging” and “relevant” for young people. Largely absent from their talk was evidence that they valued or practiced a socially critical approach to health education.

This paper has practical implications for designing health education teacher programmes that are responsive to expectations that contemporary school health education curricula employ a critical inquiry approach.

This paper addresses an empirical gap in the literature on the conditions of possibility for a socially critical approach to health education. It is proposed that rather than challenging HPE preservice teachers’ desires to improve the lives of young people, teacher educators need to work more explicitly within an educative approach that considers social contexts, health inequalities and the limitations of a behaviour change model.

In this paper we build upon previous research that examines how workers in devalued occupations transform structural conditions that threaten their dignity into resources with which to protect themselves. Through in-depth interviews and fieldwork with early childhood educators (ECE), we examine the work experiences of teachers in four distinct work contexts: daycare centers and within elementary schools, each in either the public or private sector. We find that these different school organizational contexts shape what kinds of identity challenges early childhood teachers experience. Different organizational contexts not only subject teachers to different threats to their work-related identity but also have different potential identity resources embedded within them that teachers can use on their own behalf. Thus, while all the early childhood educators in our sample struggle with being employed within a devalued occupation, the identity strategies they have developed to protect their self-worth vary across employment contexts. We show that the strategies these interactive service workers use to solve identity-related problems of dignity at work involve the creative conversion of constraints they face at work into resources that help them achieve valued work identities.

The purpose of this study is to assess the effect of a diet added with taro (Colocasia esculenta) flour on the body composition of rats.

Weanling male rats were divided into Control (n = 11) and experimental groups (Taro, n = 12); experimental rats were fed on taro for 90 days. Food intake, body mass and length were evaluated on a weekly basis. Body composition was assessed through dual-energy X-ray absorptiometry and intra abdominal fat mass was measured at the end of 90 days.

Taro group recorded protein intake (55.5 ± 14.1 vs 43.8 ± 12.8 kcal, P < 0.009), body mass (between 40 and 90 days, P < 0.05), fat mass (147.3 ± 7.7 vs 99 ± 6.1 g, P < 0.001), lean mass (282.8 ± 4 vs 253.5 ± 7 g, P < 0.001), trunk fat mass (97.1 ± 7.7 vs 71.5 ± 4.1 g, P < 0.010), as well as intra-abdominal (31.3 ± 1.9 vs 21.1 ± 1.7 g, P < 0.001), epididymal (9.2 ± 0.8 vs 4.7 ± 0.5 g, P < 0.001) and retroperitoneal (14.2 ± 0.9 vs 8.8 ± 1.2 g, P < 0.002) fat mass higher than that of the Control group.

Taro flour would show anabolic effects on body compartments of rats. The extrapolation of these findings herein recorded for rats to humans requires caution; however, it is necessary conducting further studies to investigate potentials anabolic effects of taro (Colocacia esculenta) flour on the body composition of physical training models.

The purpose is to explore experiences transitioning home from acute hospital care from perspectives of younger traumatic brain injury (TBI) patients, family caregivers and healthcare providers (HCPs).

The authors conducted 54 qualitative interviews (N = 36: 12 patients, 8 caregivers, 16 HCPs) and analyzed data using conventional content analysis.

The transition from hospital to home was described as a negotiation, finding a way through these obstacles: (1) preparing for discharge home during acute hospital care; (2) navigating transitions in healthcare and health; (3) addressing recovery concerns, and (4) setting goals to return to normal. Factors influencing the negotiation process included social support, health-related knowledge or training, coping mechanisms, financial stability, and home environment stability.

Younger TBI patients and caregivers have unique needs during the transition home from the hospital. Needed support from HCPs was inconsistently provided. Findings are foundational for integrated care research and practice with TBI.

Young people drinking to extreme drunkenness is a source of concern for policy makers and health promoters. There are a variety of community groups who appear to respond to the alcohol-related problems. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the working practices and relationships among local community groups as part of the pre-intervention context-assessment process.

Drawing on the narratives of nine community workers and ten venue managers the authors examine the community level approach to inform the choice of interventions to reduce risky drinking practices and community wide alcohol-related harm.

There was considerable agreement across the community workers and venue managers about the nature of risk for young people in the night time economy (NTE). Two central themes of “perceived risk” and “management of risk” emerged from the data. Further, the community workers and venue managers identified different high-risk locations and strategies to improve their ability meet the needs of young people experiencing risk in the NTE. The local authorities, community organisations and night time operators adopted a broad proactive and connected approach to develop a coherent strategy to achieve new measures of safety in the NTE.

Applying the social ecological model to provide a framework for the understanding of the social, environmental and political factors that influence alcohol use in young people.