Inclusive Education: Related Services Providers\u27 Perceptions of their Roles and Responsibilities

Studies that expressly define the roles of related service providers in inclusive schools are limited. The purpose of this phenomenological study was to examine the lived experiences of related service providers, specifically occupational therapists, physical therapists, and speech and language pathologists, who practice in an inclusive education setting. An objective was to examine their attitudes and beliefs toward inclusion. This study used role theory as the theoretical framework. Tenets of role theory were used to explain how related service providers have come to understand their roles and responsibilities in the inclusion setting. Purposeful and snowball sampling yielded 10 participants who participated in semi-structured interviews. Data were analyzed using a multistep, phenomenological analysis method. The participants\u27 descriptions of their involvement in inclusion revealed 7 themes: Expert/consultant, evaluator, direct service provider, mainstreaming, methods of collaboration, member of a multidisciplinary team, and documentation. Findings suggest a strong correlation between the perceived roles of the participants and the generic roles reported in the literature. Three themes emerged from their descriptions of their attitudes toward inclusion: general definition of inclusion, social/behavioral effects on inclusion, and barriers to inclusive education. The participants\u27 views on the behavioral and social impact of inclusive education were mixed. Findings inform stakeholders about the day to day experiences of related service providers in an inclusion setting. This study represents a steppingstone toward increasing awareness of school-based professionals\u27 contributions to the educational experience of special education students

Gender tragedy in George Eliot\u27s Mill on the Floss

This thesis centers around the gender roles present during the Victorian era and how George Eliot examined these roles in Mill on the Floss. She did so through her representations of Tom and Maggie Tulliver and by examining how each of these characters deal with the respective roles for his or her gender while living during the Victorian age. Tom strictly follows the imposed roles for his gender, while Maggie refuses to live within the social boundaries set for her own. The societal restrictions and how each deals with them is symbolically represented in their physical descriptions as well. Each character is eventually destroyed by the roles imposed upon them by Victorian society, which is symbolically represented when they drown at the end of the novel

Gendered Ideas in Women\u27s Publications: West German Women, 1945-1950

The postwar period in West Germany offered women a unique opportunity to extend their traditionally limited sphere. German women accepted new roles as providers in the home and laborers in the work force in the crisis period that followed after the zero hour. These new roles have peaked gender historians interest. Historians\u27 descriptions of postwar German women lead one to assume women\u27s new roles would make them feminists, as women would realize the significance of their postwar contribution. However, German women continued to cling to traditional roles and ideas that had existed since the turn of the century. This work examines a variety of postwar women\u27s publications to hear women\u27s traditional and feminist arguments and discern their expectations for life in the new Germany. Ultimately, the interplay of West Germany\u27s historical experiences and West German women\u27s expectations for social, economic, and political acceptance, reflected in their writings, illustrates their conservative expectations for equality after World War II

Ethical dilemmas in clinical social work practice : how are social workers affected and how do we respond?

This mixed-methods exploratory research was undertaken to gain insight into how social workers perceive, are affected by, and respond to situations in which they are not able to enact social work ethics, or are asked to facilitate perceived injustice because of workplace restrictions. Seventy-four social workers responded to my online mixed methods survey. In quantitative responses, Likert scaled responses rated participants’ frequency and level of distress when encountering ethical dilemmas involving structural racism, classism, cultural insensitivity, sexism, heterosexism, protocols prioritizing funding over client care, protocols interfering with the treatment relationship, and protocols interfering with client self-determination. Participants also rated their sense of burnout related to structurally imposed ethical dilemmas. Both descriptive statistics were derived, and correlations were obtained between demographic information and quantitative response re: frequency and distress. Qualitative text boxes allowed descriptions of experiences with ethical dilemmas in more detail – e.g., information about roles and social work settings in which dilemmas took place, and descriptions of participants’ suffering and action in relation to dilemmas. The study opens new avenues for social work as a profession to explore in the interest of preserving its loyalty to the social work code of ethics, and the individual social workers’ well-being and professional satisfaction

The Effects of Sex-Role Attitudes and Group Composition on Men and Women in Groups

The dual impact of group gender composition and sex-role attitudes on self-perceptions and social behavior was explored. Androgynous and stereotyped men and women were placed in groups of skewed sex composition. Subjects\u27 self-descriptions of masculine attributes shifted significantly in the group environment. In some instances, sex role-stereotyped subjects responded most stereotypically when their gender was in the minority in the group. Differences between men and women and between androgynous and stereotyped subjects in sex role-related preferences for group roles and discussion topics were also found

Responding to non-stereotypical material: a case study in Egypt

Examining the effect of exposing young children to non-stereotypical material has received an increasing amount of attention. Researchers investigated how the different sources of media that young children are exposed to affect their perceptions of gender roles and gender-related characteristics. Researchers in the Arab countries have started calling for enhancing females’ representation in children’s fiction. However, little research has been conducted with the aim of investigating how young children in the Arab countries would respond to non-stereotypical material The study examines how eight-year-old Egyptian children perceive gender roles and what kind of characteristics they employ when describing males and females. Sixteen eight-year-old Egyptian children (nine boys and seven girls) responded to pictures of men and women working in non-stereotypical jobs as well as to the non-stereotypical story book entitled The Paper Bag Princess by Robert Munsch. In this study, students discussed gender roles in a whole class discussion as they responded to pictures of men and women in non-stereotypical jobs. They also reflected on the non-stereotypical story book in group discussions in which they expressed how they perceived each character, and how a typical prince and princess would act differently. The students then created princes and princesses through writing. In their written discourse, the students had the freedom to reveal how they actually perceive females and males. Students’ writings presented vivid descriptions of princesses and princes. These descriptions not only included their physical appearance, but also their actions, the activities they engaged in and the roles they undertook. The researcher adopted Fairclough’s (1995) Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) model to analyze the students’ spoken and written discourse in relation to the social context of the Egyptian society. The researcher thoroughly analyzed students’ discourses, examined the framing and discussed how students’ perceptions of gender roles and gender-related characteristics relate to the social context of the Egyptian society. An important finding is that the change of the mean of representation from oral discussions to written descriptions resulted in different gender representations. In the whole class discussions and non-stereotypical story book group discussions, 11 students (six boys and five girls) reflected some stereotypical representations of gender roles and gender-related characteristics through speaking and writing. In the writing activity, students had more freedom to express their perceptions of gender. Six out of seven girls only presented traditional representations of the females that resembled to a great extent the typical Disney princesses. Unlike the girls, five out of nine boys presented unconventional representations of females in which princesses were engaged in non-stereotypical activities including fighting, scheming, exercising, rescuing people and working as firefighters and mechanics. There could be many possibilities to explain why boys were influenced by the non-stereotypical material they received in the study more than girls. One possibility relates to the type of the writing task that is writing about a fairytale prince and princess. This writing task may have led six girls and four boys to present stereotypical representations that match typical princes and princesses in classical Disney movies. While boys preferred to do their writing task individually, girls discussed their descriptions of their self-created princes and princesses as they write, which led six of them to have very similar writings. This act of collaboration, which is part of the discourse of femininity (Wohlwend, 2012) could present another explanation to why more boys presented their self-created princesses non-stereotypically. Exposing young children to non-stereotypical material challenges the gender stereotypes they may grow up with, and lets them understand that females and males are equally competent

Teacher Role Breadth and its Relationship to Student-Reported Teacher Support

This study capitalizes on a unique, nested data set comprised of students ( n = 531) and teachers ( n = 45) in three high schools that explicitly incorporated student support roles into teachers\u27 job descriptions. Drawing from research on student-teacher relationships, teacher effects on student outcomes, and role theory, this study explored correlates of teachers\u27 role definition. In particular, it considered role breadth, or the degree to which teachers defined their roles to include the provision of various forms of social and emotional support to students. We hypothesized that teachers\u27 role breadth would relate to student perceptions of teacher support and high academic expectations (also known as academic press). Multi-level modeling of the relationship between teacher role breadth and student outcomes accounted for the data\u27s nested quality and showed a positive relationship between teachers\u27 sense of efficacy about providing student support and their reported role breadth. In addition, teacher role breadth was positively related to student perceptions of teacher support and academic press, controlling for student-reported background and school performance characteristics. Implications for student-teacher relationships, teacher education, and teacher roles are discussed

Using System Analysis and Personas for e-Health Interaction Design

Today, designers obtain more central roles in product and service development (Perks, Cooper, & Jones, 2005). They have to deal with increasingly complicated problems, like integrating the needs of various stakeholders while taking care about social, ethical and ecological consequences of their designs. To deal with this demanding design situation, they need to apply new methods to organize the available information and to negotiate the stakeholder’s perspectives. This paper describes how systems analysis supports the design process in a complex environment. In a case study, we demonstrate how this method enables designers to describe user requirements for complex design environments while considering the perspectives of various stakeholders. We present a design research project applying cybernetic systems analysis using the software ''System-Tools'' (Vester, 2002). Results from the analysis were taken to inform the design of an electronic patient record (EPR), considering the particularities of the German health care system. Based on the analysis, we developed a set of requirements for every stakeholder group, detailing the patients' perspective with persona descriptions. We then picked a main persona as reference for the EPR design. We describe the resulting design sketch and discuss the value of cybernetic systems analysis as a tool to deal with complex social environments. The result shows how the method helps designers to structure and organize information about the context and identify fruitful intervention opportunities for design. Keywords: E-Health; System Analysis, Cybernetics; Personas.</p

Multiple role transitions

Previous research has not addressed multiple role transitions for women; this is the purpose of this study. Women spend their days juggling multiple roles trying to do it all. Historically women’s roles have been that of housewife and mother. No longer is the women’s place only in the home. This research builds on the author’s earlier semi-structured qualitative research inquiry, finding that many women try to do it all even when they know they are suffering physically, mentally and spiritually (Addendum A). My present work, which is heuristic in nature, discusses what I discovered during a year of journaling. The expectation is that the journal illustrates rich and robust descriptions of multiple role transitions. The most significant difference between my research study on multiple role transitions and the present study is the depth and quantity of information available for analysis from my journal entries. The study implies that self-preservation, attitude, and social support, were coping means I utilized with multiple role transitions when adding a new role as full-time student to my existing roles