THE CULTURAL WORLD OF PROFESSIONAL PRACTICE WITH FAMILIES OF CHILDREN WITH A DISABILITY: A NEW UNDERSTANDING OF FAMILY-CENTRED PRACTICE

Human service professionals provide a range of services to support the health and development of children with a disability and to assist their families. Over the past two decades, family-centred approaches have become widely acclaimed as a means of providing quality services. To date, research has focused predominately on identifying or measuring discrete elements of professionals’ practice with families, such as parent–professional partnerships, family-centred practice and family empowerment, often neglecting to consider the broader practice context. What is missing is an empirical and contextually grounded understanding of how professionals interpret and enact the multiple concepts informing practice. This study addresses this gap by exploring how professionals think, feel and act when working with families and by examining more broadly, the multi-dimensional and contextual concept of ‘professional practice’. In this study, professional practice with families is conceptualised as a cultural activity. The study sought to identify and describe the culture of professional practice with families and how this culture is instantiated in daily work practice. The theoretical framework underpinning this study comes from Jerome Bruner’s cultural psychology, and specifically his writings on situated action, culture and narrative. Accordingly, narrative was considered a means to identify, describe and understand the daily work practices of professionals ‘situated’ in their cultural setting and their own intentions when working with families. One hundred and sixty three stories about professional practice were collected in focus groups and individual interviews with human service professionals in New South Wales, Australia. These narratives were analysed deductively to identify the culture of professional practice. This culture comprised of ten components reflecting professionals’ understanding of the culturally acceptable ways of working with families. The cultural components reflected principles underlying family-centred practices as well as traditional medically framed and emerging business-like principles associated with managerialism and economic rationalism. Narrative analysis was employed to inductively develop four cultural core narratives grounded V in participants’ stories: Making it work, having to fight, hopeless struggle and making the best of it. Professionals potentially have all of these narratives available to them to explain their actions in each practice situation. The results of this study provide a description and analysis of the cultural world of professional practice with families. For family-centred approaches to become a reality, these findings emphasise the critical importance of education, policy and staff development for professionals working with families that addresses the broader practice context. Suggestions are made regarding further exploration of the crosscultural validity and the application and implications of these narratives for professionals and families. By exposing the culture of professional practice and the four cultural narratives, this study challenges professionals, managers, academics and policymakers alike to critically examine the practice culture and their contribution to creating and sustaining it

THE CULTURAL WORLD OF PROFESSIONAL PRACTICE WITH FAMILIES OF CHILDREN WITH A DISABILITY: A NEW UNDERSTANDING OF FAMILY-CENTRED PRACTICE

Human service professionals provide a range of services to support the health and development of children with a disability and to assist their families. Over the past two decades, family-centred approaches have become widely acclaimed as a means of providing quality services. To date, research has focused predominately on identifying or measuring discrete elements of professionals’ practice with families, such as parent–professional partnerships, family-centred practice and family empowerment, often neglecting to consider the broader practice context. What is missing is an empirical and contextually grounded understanding of how professionals interpret and enact the multiple concepts informing practice. This study addresses this gap by exploring how professionals think, feel and act when working with families and by examining more broadly, the multi-dimensional and contextual concept of ‘professional practice’. In this study, professional practice with families is conceptualised as a cultural activity. The study sought to identify and describe the culture of professional practice with families and how this culture is instantiated in daily work practice. The theoretical framework underpinning this study comes from Jerome Bruner’s cultural psychology, and specifically his writings on situated action, culture and narrative. Accordingly, narrative was considered a means to identify, describe and understand the daily work practices of professionals ‘situated’ in their cultural setting and their own intentions when working with families. One hundred and sixty three stories about professional practice were collected in focus groups and individual interviews with human service professionals in New South Wales, Australia. These narratives were analysed deductively to identify the culture of professional practice. This culture comprised of ten components reflecting professionals’ understanding of the culturally acceptable ways of working with families. The cultural components reflected principles underlying family-centred practices as well as traditional medically framed and emerging business-like principles associated with managerialism and economic rationalism. Narrative analysis was employed to inductively develop four cultural core narratives grounded V in participants’ stories: Making it work, having to fight, hopeless struggle and making the best of it. Professionals potentially have all of these narratives available to them to explain their actions in each practice situation. The results of this study provide a description and analysis of the cultural world of professional practice with families. For family-centred approaches to become a reality, these findings emphasise the critical importance of education, policy and staff development for professionals working with families that addresses the broader practice context. Suggestions are made regarding further exploration of the crosscultural validity and the application and implications of these narratives for professionals and families. By exposing the culture of professional practice and the four cultural narratives, this study challenges professionals, managers, academics and policymakers alike to critically examine the practice culture and their contribution to creating and sustaining it

The Dynamics of Dignity at Work

Randy Hodson's categories offer an ambitious, comprehensive framework for analysing the objective and subjective conditions that shape dignity and resistance at work. In this chapter, we engage with Hodson and his collaborators work through exploring its potential usefulness in helping understand the experience of low skill and low paid factory workers at the end of supermarket supply chains in the UK. In emphasising the purposeful and strategic actions of workers to attain and maintain dignity within work, and management-influenced conditions that destroy or deny it, Hodson's perspectives overlap with themes in more recent labour process theory that elaborate expanded notions of labour agency. While we share such concerns, we also identify some limitations to the framework and its explanatory powers, particularly where threats to dignity are associated with concepts of abuse and mismanagement. Our investigations of the supermarket supply chain reveal that management, authority and work organisation in these plants is not, by and large, ‘abusive', chaotic', or ‘anomic'. Such terminology creates the unavoidable impression of pre-rational workplaces based on arbitrary, personal power. In our cases, the plants are not much ‘mis-managed' as managed rationally according direct and indirect pressures exerted through supply chain power dynamics. Hodson's framework for addressing issues of dignity and to a lesser extent resistance, remain an indispensable but incomplete entry point for understanding its dynamics

Walter Scott at 250

This essay marking the 250th anniversary of Walter Scott\u27s birth reflects on the current state of Scott studies, the scholarly directions in which it might develop, and ways in which the relevance of Scott’s work may be re-discovered and re-invigorated for contemporary audiences. In particular, it examines scholarly and critical attitudes to Scott\u27s work over the past 50 years through papers given at the triennial international Scott conferences initiated in Edinburgh in 1971, alongside developments in public engagement at Abbotsford House and elsewhere during the 250th anniversary year

Walter Scott at 250

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Cereal and Pulse Crops with Improved Resistance to Pratylenchus thornei Are Needed to Maximize Wheat Production and Expand Crop Sequence Options

n the subtropical grain region of eastern Australia, two experiments were conducted, one initially with 2490 P. thornei/kg soil, the other with 8150 P. thornei/kg soil at 0–0.9 m soil depth. We determined the effect of P. thornei, residual from a weed-free fallow and pre-cropping with several cultivars each of barley (Hordeum vulgare), faba bean (Vicia faba), chickpea (Cicer arietinum), and wheat (Triticum aestivum) (Phase 1), on the growth of wheat cultivars with intolerance or tolerance to P. thornei (Phase 2). Pratylenchus thornei substantially increased after growing all cultivars of the Phase 1 faba bean, barley, and most cultivars of chickpea and wheat, and decreased after two moderately resistant wheat cultivars and the fallow treatment. The biomass of the Phase 2 tolerant cultivar ranged from 5070 to 6780 kg/ha and the intolerant cultivar 1020 to 4740 kg/ha. There was a negative linear relationship between P. thornei population densities and biomass of the Phase 2 intolerant cultivar but not of the tolerant cultivar. Growers are at risk of financial loss because they are restricted in their choice of crops to reduce damaging population densities of P. thornei. The development of resistant and tolerant crop genotypes can maximize production in P. thornei-affected farming systems

Latest nematode summer and winter crop rotation results

[Introduction]: Root-lesion nematodes are microscopic thread-like animals that live in soil and plant roots. Plant roots that are damaged by the nematodes are inefficient at taking-up water and nutrients, causing up to 65% yield loss in intolerant wheat varieties. Pratylenchus thornei is found in approximately 70% of fields in the northern grain region. Management of the root-lesion nematode Pratylenchus thornei requires: Growing tolerant wheat varieties so that yields are maximised Rotating with two or more successive resistant crops so that populations of the nematodes decrease

School-based intervention study examining approaches for well-being and mental health literacy of pupils in Year 9 in England: study protocol for a multischool, parallel group cluster randomised controlled trial (AWARE) (vol 12, artne029044corr1, 20022)

The authors would like to notify that the co-authors Sara Evans-Lacko, Bettina Moltrecht, Kirsty Nisbet, Emma Thornton, Aurelie Lange, Paul Stallard, Abigail Thompson were missed including in the authorship list of the paper. The supplementary file has been also updated