Report to Carnegie UK Trust and CILIP on a two-stage study of the Carnegie and Kate Greenaway Shadowing Scheme

The Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals (CILIP) organises the CILIP Carnegie and Kate Greenaway (CKG) Children’s Book Awards. CILIP also manages the accompanying CKG Shadowing Scheme and its associated website, which librarians and other group leaders and group members can use to support reading and foster young people’s enjoyment of reading. In order to explore the potential of this scheme, build on previous evaluations and make recommendations regarding development, two studies were commissioned in 2011 and 2012, funded by Carnegie UK Trust. The 2012 study built substantially on the research carried out in 2011 and is therefore better regarded as the second phase of a continuing project. The combined results of both phases are presented in this report

Evaluation Report of Prospero’s Island: an Immersive Approach to Literacy at Key Stage 3.

Prospero's Island is an immersive theatre project created by Punchdrunk Enrichment and sponsored by Learning Partner, London Borough of Hackney (Hackney Learning Trust). The project sought to inspire and motivate students’ engagement with the English curriculum, and to develop an immersive approach to teaching literacy that would improve students’ learning. Prospero’s Island took place in a secondary academy in Hackney, London over two school terms (autumn 2014-spring 2015). The project was embedded in existing schemes of work, and included the following elements: • An immersive theatre installation for Year 7-8 students (aged 11-13 years); this took the form of an interactive game based on The Tempest; over a two-week period groups of students participated in this experience for a morning or afternoon (autumn term); • A Teaching and Learning Day (TALD) and eight twilight CPD sessions on immersive learning techniques for school staff and teachers across London (autumn term); • A return to the installation for one lesson, led by English teachers (autumn term); • Follow-on work by teachers to develop immersive learning in English lessons (spring term); • An independent evaluation of the project (autumn and spring terms)

Storytelling and story-acting: co-construction in action

In the light of sustained interest in the potential value of young children’s narrative play, this paper examines Vivian Gussin Paley’s (1990) approach to storytelling and story-acting, in this case with three to five year-olds. It scrutinizes how children’s narratives are co-constructed during adult-child and peer interactions through spoken and embodied modes, as their stories are scribed by an adult and later dramatised by their peers. Data are drawn from an evaluation of an eight-week training programme, based on Paley’s approach, designed for early years professionals and undertaken in different geographic and demographic locations in England. Naturalistic data collection techniques including video and field notes were used to record the storytelling and story-acting of 18 case study children. The resultant data were subject to close discursive and multimodal analysis of storytelling and story-acting interactions. Findings reveal discursive co-construction ‘in action’ and illustrate how the child story-tellers, story actors and practitioners co-construct narratives through complex combinations of gaze, body posture and speech in responsive and finely-tuned interactional patterns. The study contributes significantly to knowledge about how young children’s narratives are co-constructed through multiple modes in the classroom

Evaluation Report of MakeBelieve Arts Helicopter Technique of Storytelling and Storyacting

This research, commissioned by MakeBelieve Arts, a London-based theatre and education company, evaluated their educational programme for enhancing young children’s storytelling and story acting. The programme, called the ‘Helicopter Technique’, is based on the work of Gussin Paley’s work. Whilst this has received widespread recognition in the field of children’s play and narrative engagement , ther has been little empirical research into its benefits. The work encompassed examination of archival material and classroom based observations and documentation, as well as scrutiny of the children’s stories scribed in class story books,and interviews with staff involved in the pre prgramme taaining and in class coaching. The work aimed to investigate the value of this approach for children and early years practitioners, and to consider how programme could be improved and made more sustainable in early years classrooms. Overall, the Helicopter Technique was found to provide a rich framework for supporting young children’s learning across diverse curriculum areas, and was a motivating and valuable pedagogical tool for developing creative and reflective teaching. Diverse recommendatiosn were made regarding the future development of the technique

Association of Physical Activity with Hormone Receptor Status: The Shanghai Breast Cancer Study

Evidence exists that breast tumors differing by estrogen receptor (ER) and progesterone receptor (PR) status may be phenotypically distinct diseases resulting from dissimilar etiologic processes. Few studies have attempted to examine the association of physical activity with breast cancer subtype. Such research may prove instructive into the biological mechanisms of activity. Consequently, this investigation was designed to assess the relationship between physical activity and hormone receptor-defined breast cancers in a population of Asian women in which the distribution of receptor types differed from traditional Western populations. Participants, ages 25 to 64 years, were recruited into this population-based, case-control study of breast cancer conducted in Shanghai, China from August 1996 to March 1998. Histologically confirmed breast cancer cases with available receptor status information (n = 1001) and age frequency-matched controls (n = 1,556) completed in-person interviews. Polytomous logistic regression was used to model the association between measures of activity with each breast cancer subtype (ER+/PR+, ER−/PR−, ER+/PR−, and ER−/PR+) using the control population as the reference group. Exercise in both adolescence and the last 10 years was associated with a decreased risk of both receptor-positive (ER+/PR+) and receptor-negative (ER−/PR−) breast cancers in both premenopausal and postmenopausal women (odds ratios, 0.44 and 0.51 and 0.43 and 0.21, respectively). Sweating during exercise within the last 10 years was also associated with decreased risk for receptor-positive and receptor-negative breast cancers among post-menopausal women (odds ratios, 0.58 and 0.28, respectively). These findings suggest that physical activity may reduce breast cancer risk through both hormonal and nonhormonal pathways

"The daily grunt": middle class bias and vested interests in the 'Getting in Early' and 'Why Can't They Read?' reports.

It is a long-standing and commonly held belief in the UK and elsewhere that the use of elite forms of language reflects superior intellect and education. Expert opinion from sociolinguistics, however, contends that such a view is the result of middle-class bias and cannot be scientifically justified. In the 1960s and 1970s,such luminaries as Labov (1969) and Trudgill (1975) were at pains to point out to educationalists, with some success, that this 'deficit 'view of working-class children's communicative competence is not a helpful one. However, a close reading of recent think-tank reports and policy papers on language and literacy teaching in schools reveals that the linguistic deficit hypothesis has resurfaced and is likely to influence present-day educational policy and practice. In this paper I examine in detail the findings, claims and recommendations of the reports and I argue that they are biased, poorly researched and reflect the vested interests of certain specialist groups, such as speech and language therapists and companies who sell literacy materials to schools. I further argue that we need to, once again, inject the debate with the social dimensions of educational failure, and we need to move away from the pathologisation of working-class children's language patterns

Evaluation of Hackney Learning Trust's Reading Programmes

The Open University were commissioned to evaluation Hackney Learning Trust's reading programmes: Destination Reader (for KS2) and Daily Supported Reading (for KS1). The reading programmes provide detailed pedagogies for teaching reading for schools in areas characterised by low social mobility and higher levels of poverty. Fifteen schools though south eastern England were included in the evaluation during the time period January 2018 - June 2019. The aim of the evaluation was to understand: the impact of the programmes on reading attainment and progress; teachers' knowledge and skills in teaching reading; children's reading skill, engagement and independent problem solving; changes in reading culture in the schools. The methodology consisted of in-depth case studies of 5 schools over 1.5 years; analysis of pupil reading test data; a pre-programme survey and a follow up survey 1.5 years later. The evaluation found that reading cultures in the schools were transformed to prioritise and value reading to a greater degree than before. Teachers felt more confident and knowledgeable about teaching reading and teachers and children were highly engaged with the programmes which were firmly embedded in all five case study schools. However, there was no evidence of a consistent increase in reading attainment across the 15 schools. Also, there was no evidence of an increase in children's enjoyment of reading or engagement with the new reading skills they learnt as part of the programmes. The former finding may be due to the short timeframe of the evaluation and the latter finding may be because children very quickly became fully engaged with the programmes

Non-sexist Language Policy and the Rise (and Fall?) of Combined Pronouns in British and American Written English

This paper focuses on the use of combined pronouns (s/he, his or her, him/her, etc.) as an example of late twentieth-century non-sexist language reform which had an overt democratizing aim. Within the scope of second-wave feminism, the use of combined pronouns increased the visibility of women in discourse by encouraging the use of feminine pronouns (she, her, hers) alongside masculine pronouns (he, him, his). Despite their promotion, however, the use of combined pronouns is relatively rare. This paper uses the LOB and Brown families of corpora to diachronically and synchronically study patterns in the use of combined pronouns in written American (AmE) and British English (BrE) from the 1930s to the early 2000s. The analysis not only determines what forms these patterns take, but questions whether combined pronouns are influenced by (a combination of) syntax and/or semantics, and questions whether combined pronouns are really democratic at all

Supervision and Culture Meetings at Thresholds

Abstract Counsellors are required to engage in supervision in order to reflect on, reflexively review, and extend their practice. Supervision, then, might be understood as a partnership in which the focus of practitioners and supervisors is on ethical and effective practice with all clients. In Aotearoa/New Zealand, there has recently been interest in the implications for supervision of cultural difference, particularly in terms of the Treaty of Waitangi as a practice metaphor, and when non-Mäori practitioners counsel Mäori clients. This article offers an account of a qualitative investigation by a group of counsellors/supervisors into their experiences of supervision as cultural partnership. Based on interviews and then using writing-as-research, the article explores the playing out of supervision's contribution to practitioners' effective and ethical practice in the context of Aotearoa/New Zealand, showing a range of possible accounts and strategies and discussing their effects. Employing the metaphor of threshold, the article includes a series of reflections and considerations for supervision practice when attention is drawn to difference