Keeping violent offender rehabilitation on track:How the diffusion and redirecting of attentional focus/mood work in the GRIP program

There is an urgent need to understand how programming inside prisons can facilitate rehabilitation and reentry processes, especially among men convicted of violent offenses. GRIP (Guiding Rage into Power) is a year-long “Offender Accountability” program presently spreading through the California prison system. GRIP is a group-therapy and trauma-healing program that follows a somatic-awareness-centered model. We use audiovisual data to investigate the sequenced, second-to-second inner workings of what actually constitutes operational excellence in this evidence-based in-prison rehabilitation program. Making use of interaction ritual theory and conversation analysis, we demonstrate how two processes—the diffusion and the redirecting of attentional focus/mood—transpire in GRIP classrooms. The conclusion argues that these two processes may be the “hidden” building blocks, or what is lacking, in countless rehabilitation programs and other social work interventions—both inside and outside of correctional facilities

Inclusive Education in the diversifying environments of Finland, Iceland, and the Netherlands : A multilingual systematic review

This review investigates how the scholarly fields, themes and concepts of 'inclusive education' are applied in the research and educational contexts of Finland, Iceland and the Netherlands. It identifies and outlines which thematic areas of research and sub-fields of study are referenced in each country by applying a systematic, multilingual approach. We reviewed literature in the local languages of each of these countries over the past decade, from 2007 to 2018, paying particular attention to (a) micro-level, in-depth, classroom interactions; (b) social and political contexts; and (c) social categories. Results of this review emphasise that across all three countries (a) there are similar conceptualisations of inclusive education dominated by categories of disability and special needs, and (b) there is a similar lack of attention to modes of exclusion based on social class, gender, ethnicity and geography as well as to how these can be addressed by more advanced research on inclusive education in these local spheres.Peer reviewe

The Burden of Acting Wise: Sanctioned School Success and Ambivalence about Hard Work at an Elite School in the Netherlands

Sam and his classmates despise ‘nerds’: they say working hard in school makes a student unpopular, and that they purposefully do only the minimum to pass. Research suggests that such ‘oppositional’ attitudes are prevalent among working class students and/or ethnoracial minorities. Like most of his classmates, however, Sam is white, hails from a privileged background, and attends a selective school in the Netherlands. Deeply ambivalent about working hard and ‘acting wise’, Sam and the others constituting his adolescent society are thoroughly caught up in peer dynamics which sanction success and promote mediocrity. We link these anti-school peer dynamics to the institutional configuration of education in the Netherlands, characterized by rigid tracking at the end of primary school and non-selective universities: state structures and policies contribute to these privileged students’ rationale for ‘taking it easy’ and doing poorly in school

Rekenen op je ouders: High Dosage Tutoring als middel om ouderbetrokkenheid te stimuleren in Rotterdam-Zuid

Parental involvement is especially urgent for youngsters in disadvantaged situations because it can mediate negative consequences of growing up poor. Via a randomized controlled trial 120 students (grade 6 and 7) attending three primary schools in a deprived neighbourhood (Pendrecht) were either assigned to a group receiving ‘High Dosage Tutoring’ (HDT) or to a control group. In pairs, for four hours per week, members of the treatment group received a year of personalized math-instruction during regular school hours from a tutor communicating every week with their parents. In this mixed-method cross-sectional study, surveys with parents (n = 84), home-interviews with parents of tutor-children (n = 7), a focus-group with tutors (n = 7) and an analysis of their contact-registration (203 notes) were conducted to research influences of HDT on parental involvement in the school and home environment. The sociological work of Lareau (2003) and Bourdieu (1984) implies that little should be expected from such an intervention. Indeed, we didn’t find quantitative differences in parental involvement between tutor and non-tutor parents. However, the qualitative data suggest that via different possible mechanisms HDT had positive effects on parental involvement at home. This article sheds light on the broader discussion about how school systems contribute to the reproduction of inequalities and how these inequalities can be mitigated

Rekenen op je ouders : High Dosage Tutoring als middel om ouderbetrokkenheid te stimuleren in Rotterdam-Zuid

Parental involvement is especially urgent for youngsters in disadvantaged situations because it can mediate negative consequences of growing up poor. Via a randomized controlled trial 120 students (grade 6 and 7) attending three primary schools in a deprived neighbourhood (Pendrecht) were either assigned to a group receiving ‘High Dosage Tutoring’ (HDT) or to a control group. In pairs, for four hours per week, members of the treatment group received a year of personalized math-instruction during regular school hours from a tutor communicating every week with their parents. In this mixed-method cross-sectional study, surveys with parents (n = 84), home-interviews with parents of tutor-children (n = 7), a focus-group with tutors (n = 7) and an analysis of their contact-registration (203 notes) were conducted to research influences of HDT on parental involvement in the school and home environment. The sociological work of Lareau (2003) and Bourdieu (1984) implies that little should be expected from such an intervention. Indeed, we didn’t find quantitative differences in parental involvement between tutor and non-tutor parents. However, the qualitative data suggest that via different possible mechanisms HDT had positive effects on parental involvement at home. This article sheds light on the broader discussion about how school systems contribute to the reproduction of inequalities and how these inequalities can be mitigated

Closing the income-achievement gap? Experimental evidence from high-dosage tutoring in Dutch primary education

We present experimental evidence on a high-dosage math tutoring (HDT) program implemented in three primary schools in a low-income neighborhood in the Netherlands. We find treatment effects on math scores of 0.28 national population standard deviations after one school year (p<0.01). These effects can account for 40% of the math achievement gap between low-income and high-income students in the Netherlands. As most of the evidence on intensive tutoring programs draws on research from the United States, we conclude that (i.) HDT programs can be successfully built from the ground up and exported to different institutional settings while maintaining substantial effect sizes, and, (ii.) existing income-achievement gaps can be substantially reduced by targeting low-income communities with scalable interventions like HDT