Developing Children’s Critical Response to Poetry

This account of an action research project describes how children in two schools became inspired to read poetry by developing their abilities to make critical response by offering them greater freedom of choice and providing opportunities to share ideas with each other. The children who participated in the study were mixed groups of years 4, 5 and 6. As a classroom practitioner I have always enjoyed sharing poetry with children and encouraging children to read and enjoy poetry for pleasure. I know, from personal experience, how much children enjoy the varied experiences of poetry but my own observations and NLT research indicate that reading poetry for pleasure has been falling steadily, from 30% of readers choosing this genre in 2005 to just below 15% in 2012. (Clark 2012

Youth and Crime: Centennial Reflections on the Children Act 1908

Guest Editoria

Local perceptions of sustainability indicators: issues of scale and implications for management

A key factor impacting upon sustainable development are the perceptions people hold of their local social, economic and ecological environment. These perceptions influence how communities fashion the local landscape and in turn help to condition the ways people adapt themselves to their local spatial realities. Implicit in these perceptions are indicators of sustainability that may or may not be integrated across the social, economic and ecological realms. Further, these local indicators may not accord with those adopted at the national or global scale. Accordingly, spatial scale presents a particular set of challenges in identifying appropriate indicators of sustainability. In the same way that aggregated changes at a local scale influence sustainability on a broad scale, national and global externalities profoundly affect perceptions relating to sustainable development at the finest of spatial scales. This paper focuses on one aspect of the issue of scale in sustainable indicator selection: local perceptions of sustainability. In this paper we report on a survey of perceptions of sustainability conducted across thirty-two sub-catchments in three major catchments in south west Victoria. We sought to uncover what people within each sub-catchment perceived as socially, economically and ecologically sustainable. Responses were compared across sub-catchments to determine whether perceptions at the sub-catchment scale were shared across the region. The results indicate that perceptions of sustainability varied between sub-catchments, which means that perceptions relating to sustainability at the regional scale may mask local trends. <br /

Cepheids and Long Period Variables in M33

We are conducting a long-term photometric survey of the nearby galaxy M33 to discover Cepheids, eclipsing binaries, and long-period variables. The dataset combines previously-obtained optical images from the DIRECT project with new observations acquired at the WIYN 3.5m telescope. The entire data set spans over 7 years with excellent synoptic coverage which will enable the discovery and characterization of stars displaying variability over a wide range of timescales (days, weeks, months, years). In this preliminary work we show representative light curves of different variables we found so far in two fields, color-magnitude diagrams, and optical Cepheid Period-Luminosity relations for M33. The ultimate goal of the project is to provide an absolute calibration of the Cepheid Period-Luminosity relation, and to study its metallicity dependence at optical wavelengths.Comment: 3 pages, 6 figures. To appear in "Stellar Pulsation: Challenges for Theory and Observation", Eds. J. Guzik and P. Bradle