“My Treasure Box” : Pedagogical documentation, digital portfolios and children’s agency in Finnish early years education

This chapter discusses the opportunities and challenges associated with the inclusive use of digital portfolios in pedagogical documentation in Finnish early childhood education (ECE), and examines children’s participation and agency in the process. The chapter draws upon empirical data from the research and development programme of three Finnish municipalities and their ECE centres. Altogether, the empirical data comprise the digital portfolios of 71 children from six ECE groups each comprising of children aged 3 to 5 years old. This writing demonstrates how the construction of digital portfolios in these ECE groups produced a dynamic tension between the adults’ and children’s agency; between digital archiving and narrative documentation of the children’s lived experiences; and between documentation and reflection. The results also indicate how digital portfolios created inequality among the children regarding the ways in which the children were seen and heard in their portfolios, and how they were able to participate and demonstrate agency in this process. The chapter concludes by considering the conditions of participatory work in ECE classrooms in which the child’s agency. matters.Peer reviewe

Ethical issues in autologous stem cell transplantation (ASCT) in advanced breast cancer: A systematic literature review

BACKGROUND: An effectiveness assessment on ASCT in locally advanced and metastatic breast cancer identified serious ethical issues associated with this intervention. Our objective was to systematically review these aspects by means of a literature analysis. METHODS: We chose the reflexive Socratic approach as the review method using Hofmann's question list, conducted a comprehensive literature search in biomedical, psychological and ethics bibliographic databases and screened the resulting hits in a 2-step selection process. Relevant arguments were assembled from the included articles, and were assessed and assigned to the question list. Hofmann's questions were addressed by synthesizing these arguments. RESULTS: Of the identified 879 documents 102 included arguments related to one or more questions from Hofmann's question list. The most important ethical issues were the implementation of ASCT in clinical practice on the basis of phase-II trials in the 1990s and the publication of falsified data in the first randomized controlled trials (Bezwoda fraud), which caused significant negative effects on recruiting patients for further clinical trials and the doctor-patient relationship. Recent meta-analyses report a marginal effect in prolonging disease-free survival, accompanied by severe harms, including death. ASCT in breast cancer remains a stigmatized technology. Reported health-related-quality-of-life data are often at high risk of bias in favor of the survivors. Furthermore little attention has been paid to those patients who were dying. CONCLUSIONS: The questions were addressed in different degrees of completeness. All arguments were assignable to the questions. The central ethical dimensions of ASCT could be discussed by reviewing the published literature