How do care experienced adults who were also excluded from school make sense of belonging?

The voices of adults who have been in care as a child and were also excluded from school are almost absent in the academic literature about care, education and exclusion. More than that, children who are excluded from their home, in whatever way that has come about, and are also excluded from school face a double challenge in relation to making sense of the fundamental need to belong, that is, to feel safe, to feel accepted, to be connected and to have access to relational wealth. This research seeks to fill that gap in the literature and carve out further opportunities for research on the intersection of school exclusion and being in care as a child, from the lens of the adult that the child became. The research explores this group of adults’ accounts of their childhood experiences of exclusion, of what supported and hindered growth from these experiences, and of their sense of belonging. It also considers what it means to be asking these research questions while having shared lived experiences with the participants, and intends to support those working with children to use and engage with the knowledge of those who have lived through these experiences. The methodological approach takes the view that knowledge acquired through lived experiences should be considered as more than simply ‘data’ and chooses Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) to build an understanding of what it is like to be an adult with both care and school exclusion experiences. IPA provides a clear framework for gathering knowledge from participants regarding their lived experiences and sense of belonging, and for a narrative, idiographic interpretation of participants’ sense-making of significant experiences, and of convergence and divergence in participants’ accounts. The ten participants self-identified as care-experienced and also as having been permanently excluded from an education setting. They were invited to take part in this research through contact made with two organisations, one working with adults who are care experienced, and the other working with care-experienced adults within and on the edge of the criminal justice system, alongside a request made via the author’s Twitter account. Ten participants submitted a biographical writing task and took part in individual semi-structured interviews. The methodological rigour is demonstrated by close listening and attention to participants’ unfolding individual narratives (Personal Experiential Themes), a thorough analysis and interpretation with idiographic depth, and through attending to convergence and divergence across the different Personal Experiential Themes in order to build a coherent experiential account of the knowledge gathered across the group, as Group Experiential Themes. Through the analysis of the knowledge shared by the participants, nine themes were identified: Movement, Trauma, Power, Stigma, Survival & Resilience, Relationships, Rejection of Stigma, Searching for Belonging, and Finding Belonging. The research findings call attention to the interrelationship between Movement, Trauma, Power and Stigma at the intersection of the experience of care and the experience of school exclusion. Then Survival & Resilience, Relationships and the Rejection of Stigma form the basis by which overcoming disadvantage is explored. Finally, Searching for Belonging and Finding Belonging demonstrate the strategies the participants employed in order to find belonging, regardless of how successful or not those strategies were. Conclusions suggest that understanding our need to belong, and how belonging is cultivated, needs centralising into practice in education settings and in settings where children in care live. Challenging professional and societal stigmatisation of the experiences of being in care and of being excluded from school also needs active attention in order to reduce the self-stigma that can be carried into adulthood. Finally, strategies employed to find belonging often result in more abuses of power, further stigmatisation and often, system trauma. A deeper understanding of the lengths undertaken by those searching for belonging having experienced being in care and school exclusion could result in more compassionate responses to distress and a desire for settings, services and systems to work in ways that understand the impact of movement and then centralise the need to belong into practice, policy and legislation

What impact on education and employment has school exclusion had on care experienced adults who left care in the 1970’s and 1980’s?

The aim of this research is to advance the understanding of the impact on school exclusion upon employment and education across the life course for care experienced adults who left care in the 1970’s and 1980’s. With only a handful of pieces of research on the care experienced community post 25 years old, knowledge across the life course of this group of people is decidedly lacking. Participants are a purposeful sample of five care experienced adults who identify as leaving care in the 1970’s and 1980’s and self-assess as having been excluded from school. This is a mixed methods study using semi structured interviews and structured questionnaires for quantitative data such as age, geography and type of ‘care’ experienced. Unravelling the impact of “excluding the excluded” across the life course is motivated in part by my professional career in working with vulnerable children and their families in a multitude of settings over the past few decades but also from my personal experience of being a looked after child in the 1980’s who was excluded from two Secondary Schools. I make this explicit for transparency about my motivations, my desire and my attachment to wanting the subject to receive far more attention than I believe it has. Possible conclusions from this research will present a different narrative than the one that exists about poor outcomes for looked after children within education and employment and will likely offer knowledge about what missing protective factors there may have been that promote resilience to being excluded

Pakistan : working cross-culturally using an ACEs and trauma framework. Is it possible?

This article sets out to explore cross cultural potential for using the framework of ACE's and Trauma Informed Practice through the learning encountered by the author on two trips to Lahore in 2017 and 2018. The author explores the complex layers that facilitate some of the challenges to this but also how they may lead the way in providing some of the answers. The author concludes that it is possible but only in the context of curiosity, shared conversations and humility about the diversity of human experience

Computational Study Of Molecular Hydrogen In Zeolite Na-A. I. Potential Energy Surfaces And Thermodynamic Separation Factors For Ortho And Para Hydrogen

We simulate H-2 adsorbed within zeolite Na-A. We use a block Lanczos procedure to generate the first several (9) rotational eigenstates of the molecule, which is modeled as a rigid, quantum rotor with an anisotropic polarizability and quadrupole moment. The rotor interacts with Na cations and O anions; interaction parameters are chosen semiempirically and the truncation of electrostatic fields is handled with a switching function. A Monte Carlo proceedure is used to sample a set of states based on the canonical distribution. Potential energy surfaces, favorable adsorbtion sites, and distributions of barriers to rotation are analyzed. Separation factors for ortho-parahydrogen are calculated; at low temperatures, these are controlled by the ease of rotational tunneling through barriers. (C) 1999 American Institute of Physics

Stories & symbols

A Contemporary Art Show curated by Professor Norman Cherry. Featuring the work of three European Artists. April 18 - May 8, 2013

Zephyr: The Second Issue

This is the second issue of Zephyr, the University of New England\u27s journal of creative expression. Since 2000, Zephyr has published original drawings, paintings, photography, prose, and verse created by current and former members of the University community. Zephyr\u27s Editorial Board is made up exclusively of matriculating students.https://dune.une.edu/zephyr/1001/thumbnail.jp

The Strategic Shuffle: Ethnic Geography, the Internal Security Apparatus, and Elections in Kenya

For autocrats facing elections, officers in the internal security apparatus play a crucial role by engaging in coercion on behalf of the incumbent. Yet reliance on these officers introduces a principal‐agent problem: Officers can shirk from the autocrat’s demands. To solve this problem, autocrats strategically post officers to different areas based on an area’s importance to the election and the expected loyalty of an individual officer, which is a function of the officer’s expected benefits from the president winning reelection. Using a data set of 8,000 local security appointments within Kenya in the 1990s, one of the first of its kind for any autocracy, I find that the president’s coethnic officers were sent to, and the opposition’s coethnic officers were kept away from, swing areas. This article demonstrates how state institutions from a country’s previous authoritarian regime can persist despite the introduction of multi‐party elections and thus prevent full democratization.Peer Reviewedhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/136510/1/ajps12279_am.pdfhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/136510/2/ajps12279.pd

Zephyr: The Fourth Issue

This is the fourth issue of Zephyr, the University of New England\u27s journal of creative expression. Since 2000, Zephyr has published original drawings, paintings, photography, prose, and verse created by current and former members of the University community. Zephyr\u27s Editorial Board is made up exclusively of matriculating students.https://dune.une.edu/zephyr/1003/thumbnail.jp