Contextualised, Teacher-reported Emotional/Behavioural Difficulties in Junior and Senior Infant Children in Mainstream Primary Schools

Behaviour problems in the classroom present a real issue of concern for Irish primary school teachers (Martin, 1997); few matters have more direct and persistent impact on the teacher than managing overt behaviour (Cullinane, 1999a; Department of Education and Science, 1989). A central premise of this study was that the lived everyday experience of behavioural difficulties in the classroom environment is dependent on the interplay between person and context variable across time. Underpinned by the ecosystemic theories of Bronfenbrenner (1979 to 2005) and Molnar and Lindquist (1989) this study investigated the context of teacher-reported emotional/behavioural difficulties in junior and senior infant children. Three connected research questions orientated the study to provide information on children’s behaviour problems in the classroom environment by way of describing firstly, the difficulties ( as reported by and meaningful to teachers), secondly the context of these difficulties, and thirdly, the interaction between the two (impact of context on behaviour). The study was conducted in two phases. In Phase One a random sample of 273 primary school teachers was surveyed using a non-standardised, self-designed teacher-questionnaire that gathered, predominantly, quantitative data o9n children with teacher reported behavioural difficulties. In Phase Two a sub-sample of 18 dyads (18 children and ten teachers) for more qualitative investigation was drawn. Both structural and process classroom variables were measured. Teachers’ thinking about children with behavioural difficulties was elicited through interview; focal children’s behaviour and teachers’ interaction with these children were recorded through observation. In an effort to understand the school context at a macro level, nine principal teachers were interviewed and school documentation such as Codes of Discipline were analysed. Introducing an additional temporal element to data collection, teachers completed a Behaviour Incident Report Form in the weeks following classroom observation. Children’s behaviour was categorised using both quantitative and qualitative methods and its description was remarkably consistent despite the form of measurement used. In keeping with the literature, boys were found to be significantly more disruptive than girls. Children with preschool experience were less deviant from the norm but no different in ratings of disruption than those without this experience, and junior infant children were both more deviant and disruptive than senior infants. Children’s behaviour impacted on many teachers. In Phase Two, by way of affecting their emotional experience of classroom life. Al teachers gave more time to focal children than other children. They used a range of behaviour management strategies and their pattern of use was influenced by their perception of local children’s behaviour and the context. To support them in working with focal children, teachers used school supports/resources on a formal and informal basis. They attributed the cause of behavioural difficulties primarily to family and background factors but also to child-owned problems and desired environmental change at departmental level in terms of a reduction in pupil:teacher ratios and curriculum formality. The study concluded with recommendations for educational practice in terms of the construction of hopeful and positive perceptions of children with emotional/behavioural difficulties and the development of classroom environments that promote behavioural-characteristics reflective of ‘model’pupils. Increased awareness of the impact of the classroom environment, including activity organisation and social relationships, on behaviour, and, the importance of taking a planned approach to behaviour management- reflecting on and in practice-would contribute to more satisfying classroom lives for children with behavioural difficulties and the significant others in their classroom microsystems

Feeding our Identities:BuzzFeed Quizzes as a Tool for Personal Identification in the Social Digital Age

Specializing in “listicle” media and personality identification quizzes, BuzzFeed is enormously popular among college students. Audiences apply the identities they are ascribed through Buzzfeed quizzes to inform their communication within a discourse community, and as individual expression. This paper examines college students’ discourse that surrounds their use of BuzzFeed identity quizzes. The goal of this study is to understand how the consumption of these quizzes constructs personal identities and informs the communication of these identities

POLICY AND PRACTICE TARGETING THE LABOUR MARKET INTEGRATION OF NON-EU NATIONALS IN IRELAND. ESRI RESEARCH SERIES NUMBER 89 JUNE 2019

Increases in immigration inflows to both the European Union (EU) and Ireland between 2014 and 2016, due in part to the ‘refugee and migrant crisis’, have resulted in an increased focus on integration policies, outcomes and measures, including in the area of labour market integration. Employment is crucial for the integration of migrants into the economic and social life of their host country, so labour market integration is a very important part of integration policy (European Commission, 2016). In recent years, many Member States have updated existing labour market integration policies or have developed new ones. Ireland, like the majority of EU Member States (EMN, 2019), pursues a policy of mainstreaming service provision in the area of integration, with targeted initiatives to meet specific needs. This study first considers labour migration policy, which manages and shapes overall access of non-European Economic Area (EEA) nationals to the Irish labour market.1 Under the employment permits system administered by the Department of Business, Enterprise and Innovation (DBEI), non-EEA nationals may apply to access the Irish labour market. The report then looks at specific policies and measures which aim to improve labour market integration for non-EU nationals living in Ireland. The focus is on labour integration measures for regularly staying non-EU nationals with a right to work. Measures specifically targeting non-EEA students, graduates, asylum seekers and beneficiaries of international protection are beyond the study scope. The effect of general labour market and social policy provision in Ireland on labour market integration is also outside the scope. Examples of public and private sector practices are discussed together with examples of community sector practices that receive public funds

Spatializing Erasure: Counter-Histories on the Verge of Disappearance

Our thesis ambitions are centered around the investigation of memory and architecture as it relates to the narratives of erasure in urban space. Over the course of the academic year, we are seeking to use architecture as a lens to critique our current socio-political climate regarding gender inequity and political regression. Our site of speculation and research will be the city of Chicago, as it has a rich history of feminism and civil rights with many historic spaces of protest that accommodated intersectional identities and historic protests. In today’s political climate, where Roe v. Wade is facing reversal in the Supreme Court and LGBT protection laws are being contested, school districts are the most segregated they have been since before Brown v. Board, and there is a tendency to forget the progress that has been made, we must recall specifi c instances of memory of Second Wave Feminism and Civil rights when women made strides for LGBT legal protection, female bodily autonomy, opposition to sexual violence, and sexual liberation, and black Americans made strides against systemic oppression and segregation. Using this research, we aim to propose a spatial critique of our socio-political climate by employing Rossi’s interpretation of the “The Architecture of the City”, Edward Hollis’s “Memory Palace”, and Colson Whitehead’s “Underground Railroad”, re-imagining historical spatial narratives within the current urban fabric of Chicago, actively reinforcing the memories of trauma and activism onto an alternative network of counter-memorial-inspired spaces. Using the idea of the “Memory Palace”, in which the metaphorical recesses of the mind (the ‘loci’) were spatialized in an internal layout of a room to create a manifestation of personal memory, and the idea of the ‘Memory Theater’, we want to outwardly impose the collective memory of erased narratives onto the city’s existing infrastructure and create a network of ‘memory containers’-- interconnected spaces for consuming and imposing forgotten memories. Doing so will provide a lens into the past and demand that un-represented histories are not forgotten or reversed. We are identifying Chicago as a city with historic memory that is more related to a generic national identity that the actual intersectional local narratives that existed and continue to exist within it—or, at the most, a city committed to self-lobotomization, the erasure of its own memory. We understand Chicago as lacking a specifi c or intersectional, the local form of memory that represents the diverse narratives of social progress that it has actively housed for decades. We seek to identify and consolidate these memories. We want to pose the celebration of the collective memory of narratives that are otherwise underrepresented or erased within the urban fabric. The historic events which we hope to contain and memorialize are as follows: the history of the Jane Collective and their work that opposed the illegality of abortion and women’s bodily autonomy before the passing of Roe v. Wade in 1973, the 1968 Democratic National Convention protests which resulted in the ‘Chicago 8’ arrests and subsequent protests that were inspired by public opposition to the Vietnam War, and the 1953 school segregation protests that were endorsed by Martin Luther King Jr. that resulted in over 200,000 students and adults standing in solidarity to oppose unfair overcrowding and segregation of black public schools. We want to deploy memory containers and manipulated contextual architectural objects and spaces, rather than sculptures or monuments, as containers of collective, civic memory. Working in aggregate, the containers transform these 3 events into an urban fabric of memory. These interventions will behave as a narrative-network, where collective, civic memories become programmatic elements, forming a superimposed narrative on the historic city. The Containers are not individually-conceived objects or spaces, but in composite, they communicate encyclopedic imagery of Chicago as well as the erased narratives of the 3 events that we are seeking to remember. The assemblage of the Containers on a given site generates a new civic condition: using the Containers as acupunctural elements, the superimposed memory infrastructure weaves into Chicago’s existing urban conditions. The Containers layer, collage, and reinforce architectural, historical, and typological references onto the site. The Memory Containers exist as an alternate infrastructural network for consuming and re-imposing the erased memory of the city and the U.S. as a whole