Does reflective supervision have a future in English local authority child and family social work?

Purpose – (1) to discuss the underlying assumption that social workers need reflective supervision specifically, as opposed to managerial or any other form of supervision or support; and (2) to consider whether our focus on the provision of reflective supervision may be preventing us from thinking more broadly and creatively about what support local authority child and family social workers need and how best to provide it. Methodology/approach – Argument based on own research and selective review of the literature Findings – Reflective supervision has no future in local authority child and family social work because (1) there is no clear understanding of what reflective supervision is, (2) there is no clear evidence for is effectiveness, and (3) a sizeable proportion of local authority child and family social workers in England do not receive reflective supervision and many never have. Originality/value – Challenges the received wisdom about the value of reflective supervision and advocates exploring alternative models for supporting best practice in child and family social work

Impredicative Encodings of (Higher) Inductive Types

Postulating an impredicative universe in dependent type theory allows System F style encodings of finitary inductive types, but these fail to satisfy the relevant {\eta}-equalities and consequently do not admit dependent eliminators. To recover {\eta} and dependent elimination, we present a method to construct refinements of these impredicative encodings, using ideas from homotopy type theory. We then extend our method to construct impredicative encodings of some higher inductive types, such as 1-truncation and the unit circle S1

Social Media Responses To Self-Concept Threats

Several studies demonstrate that individuals carry out observable behaviors in order to achieve positive self-concepts. These behaviors can be related to engagements with social media. Thus, two studies tested whether the sharing of self-relevant symbols on user-heavy social media platforms is an engagement used to achieve positive self-concepts. In these studies, participants viewed resumes (Study 1) or Linkedin profiles (Study 2) intended to threaten their self-definition and then considered their own accomplishments in comparison. They were then asked to rate and choose one article, either relevant or irrelevant to their self-definition, to hypothetically share on their own social media page based on attractiveness. In Study 1, a high threat to participants’ self-definition led them to report goal-irrelevant articles as less attractive to share on social media. In Study 2, the data displayed varied results for relevant and irrelevant social media sharing, depending on the stimulus type. Participants\u27 self-definition goals moderated the effect in Study 2. Discrepancies in study findings are discussed in the context of the self-evaluation maintenance and symbolic self-completion theory

Difficult times, difficult students? Teaching students with learning difficulties to be teachers

The last decade of Australian higher education has witnessed significant expansion in the provision of student places, relative to the Australian population, with student enrolment figures for undergraduate award courses in 1993 totalling 453,926, compared with 287,713 in 1983. Such expansion has raised considerable speculation amongst academics about the quality of students now entering university and their ability to successfully negotiate academic learning environments, particularly since the mid 1990s when unmet demand for higher education began to diminish; the assumption often being that lower entry scores are indicative of future academic problems. This is a significant issue for Australian regional universities, which historically have struggled to attract students with high entry scores and which are likely to experience even greater competition from metropolitan universities given the prospect of \u27vouchers\u27, a possibility (re)floated by the West Review, which will enable students to be more selective in their university of choice. Moreover, these \u27problems\u27 seem compounded for teacher educators who are required to deliver greater numbers of graduates to satisfy a current shortage of teachers in many Australian States and also to \u27soak up\u27 government funded places within their institutions that other faculties have been unable to fill, while drawing from a diminishing pool of high entry-scoring applicants. Within this context, this paper addresses the possibility for teacher educators of facing classes with increasing numbers of students with learning difficulties and learning disabilities, estimated in the early 1980s by Sykes (1982) to be about 5% of university students. In raising these issues, the paper makes two broad contributions. First, it engages with the discussion within the literature concerning competing definitions of university students\u27 learning difficulties and learning disabilities, suggesting that the debate is unhelpful and that the differences are not that important when consideration is given to how they are experienced by students. Secondly, and flowing logically from this, the paper argues that rather than simply defining learning difficulty as intrinsic to students, academic learning environments, and those who construct them, are also implicated in the determination of how difficult (or otherwise) they are for students to access

Teaching Substantive Environmental Law and Practice Skills Through Interest Group Role-Playing

Most law students take their first introductory course in environmental law during their second year of law school. The traditional first-year curriculum does little to prepare students for the complex statutory and regulatory models for most environmental regulation. Law students at the end of their first year often have had little exposure to statutory interpretation. Further, they often have no exposure to administrative law and regulatory implementation. These students may expect statutes to provide clear statements of rules rather than guidelines for administrative rulemaking. They also tend to view the lawmaking and interpretive process through the traditional lens of congressional legislation and common-law-style judicial interpretation in a bipolar scheme of implementation--where the regulatory agencies and the regulated industries are the only players. In fact, environmental regulatory programs constantly evolve through a complex interaction of legislative amendment, administrative rulemaking, and judicial interpretation. Influencing these programs are the multipolar interaction of regulated industries, environmental groups, state agencies, and federal regulators. Law students accustomed to the bipolar model of common-law legal development and who expect statutory law to consist of a simple reading of clear statutory texts can find this interest group pluralist model of law development bewildering. One way to help give context to this complex interaction is to place students in the roles of the various advocates and decision-makers in the environmental law processes. Assigning students to adopt the perspective of various distinct players in the regulatory process, such as agency lawyer, industry lawyer, and environmental NGO lawyer, helps make this complex interaction more accessible to students. This also provides an introduction into the skills of statutory interpretation and regulatory implementation. At Pace Law School, we have had considerable success integrating this approach into an Environmental Law Skills course. This course combines a comprehensive study of the Clean Water Act (CWA) regulatory program with skills-based exercises in administrative rulemaking, judicial review, regulatory permitting, negotiation, and enforcement. The course was added to the curriculum in the 1990s in response to the growing recognition by the legal academy that the traditional case-oriented method of instruction failed to result in law graduates with basic competencies expected of lawyers. The course has been refined over the years to incorporate the Carnegie Report\u27s more recent critiques: the legal education\u27s failure to foster students\u27 development of their professional identities and their understanding of lawyers\u27 role in representing clients. By integrating role-playing, problem solving, and doctrinal instruction, the course seeks to engage students in active learning and professional identity development. The course also seeks to implement recommendations for the improvement of legal instruction contained in Professor Stuckey\u27s influential 2007 report, Best Practices for Legal Education. In particular, the course seeks to “teach doctrine, theory, and practice as part of a unified, coordinated program of instruction” as recommended in that report