Stories of children moving in and out of refugee camps are not uncommon yet are often overshadowed by the dominant narratives of oppression, political failure, and war -- the stories "told of" rather than "told by" refugees. Dominant narratives on refugees largely shape perceptions about children and youth in displacement as…

Observational learning is a successful method for improving writing skills in various genres. We explore effects of a five lesson intervention series based on peer observation. Fifty-five Swedish 5th-grade students aged 10-12 years followed this intervention programme. The students watched short film clips with peers working with texts. Each…

Background: This study aimed to be the first to assess the effectiveness of teaching a particular peer revision strategy (POW + WWW, What = 2, How = 2 + RPRS), on the story-writing abilities of students with intellectual disabilities (ID) and their non-disabled peers. Method: A multiple-probe technique was used. Participants included three…

Learners living in impoverished communities and subjected to the kind of disadvantage in operation in their home environment are at risk of receiving education of an inferior quality. The situation is worse for orphans, especially those residing in poor communities in that they bring to school peculiar attributes which poses challenges for the…

Changes in family structures, such as the increase in the number of cohabiting couples, divorces, and blended families pose new challenges for fatherhood and research on fatherhood has been mainly adult-centred. This research studied how Finnish children perceive good fatherhood and what expectations they set for fathers. The following research…

This article is based on a pedagogical action research initiative carried out in a Finnish primary school. Twenty-four 5th grade pupils and their teacher participated in the study. The research initiative was guided by two questions: (1) How do pupils experience their classroom practices? (2) How can pupils participate in the process of developing…

In this paper, I use critical discourse analysis to analyze a student's narrative about the arrest, incarceration, and deportation of her mother to Mexico. The student, Gisela, was a fifth grader in my classroom during the 2008/2009 school year, and I encouraged the students to collect family stories from their relatives. Gisela created this…

The article explores how male primary school teachers view and relate to other people's expectations of them as teachers. The empirical data consists of interviews with seven teachers working in compulsory school grades three to five in a large-sized town in Sweden. The theoretical work on relations among masculinities developed by Connell and the…

Recent work examining the content and organization of attachment representations suggests that 1 way in which we represent the attachment relationship is in the form of a cognitive script. This work has largely focused on early childhood or adolescence/adulthood, leaving a large gap in our understanding of script-like attachment representations in…

This paper argues that narratives, specifically literature and memoir, offer a way to build empathy and understanding by moving readers to deeper levels of text interpretation and critique. The paper examines a new literacy framework, Life Histories, that uses talk, collaboration, writing, and performance to understand the complex relationships…

Maternal support is known as a protective factor during infancy, childhood, and adolescence. However, less is known about the conditions leading to support-seeking behaviors toward mothers in early adolescence. In comparison with younger children, it is assumed that the specific nature of these conditions changes with continuing cognitive…

We studied the performance in three genres of Chinese written composition (narration, exposition, and argumentation) of 158 grade 4, 5, and 6 poor Chinese text comprehenders compared with 156 good Chinese text comprehenders. We examined text comprehension and written composition relationship. Verbal working memory (verbal span working memory and…

This article discusses the risks and possibilities of communicating and educating the child's emotional self in a formal classroom environment. Through designing and implementing an expressive arts curricular intervention in a Scottish primary school classroom, my research produces an example of how therapeutic notions focused upon health and…

A visual research project addressed school children's concepts of ideal learning environments. Drawings and accompanying narratives were collected from Year 5 and Year 6 children in nine Queensland primary schools. The 133 submissions were analysed and coded to develop themes, identify key features and consider the uses of imagination. The…

One sign of a good task is that it will work just as well with Year 7 as with Year 13. The author asks learners to use graph-drawing software to draw a picture with graphs. He uses his imagination to suggest what a particular curve might resemble and helps learners to adjust their drawings to achieve what they are trying to make. Sometimes, one…