Moral Turbulence and the Infusion of Multimodal Character Education Strategies in American Elementary Schools

Pockets of American society are marked by increase in violent crime with concurrent decline in moral character. This phenomenon is infiltrating the nation’s school system as evidenced by growing numbers of aggressive incidents in the classroom. As a result, there is an increasingly accepted need for effective character education programs in the schools as a means to help change the décolleté trajectory of the behavior of the nation’s school children. While more money and growing numbers of legislation have been put forth to support such an endeavor, research is still lacking as to what activities, skills, goals, and approaches would be best incorporated for optimal outcomes. This article makes a case for assessing the effectiveness of a multimodal approach incorporating cognitive, social, and sociocultural learning elements is than a single approach using cognitive elements alone, and considers the complexity of a Christian perspective on character education in schools

Different views : including others in participatory health service innovation

We describe our experiences employing experience-based design (EBD) to improve an outpatients health service in the UK and discuss the impacts of incorporating the voices of those not directly using or working within the service. We suggest that such new perspectives, experiences and expertise may enable the development of service innovations outside patients’ and staffs’ conceptual space of problems/solutions, but can affect the ownership and agency within the change project. To conclude, we propose a balance between accomplishing change and creating the self-belief to achieve it

Keep Your Eyes on Ms. Clark: Two Mexican Immigrant Children Make the Transition to Kindergarten

Presented are case studies of two children as they make the transition from Mexican immigrant homes to kindergarten in an English-dominant school in the United States. In the first case, Victor adapts by keeping his attention focused on the teacher, which allows him to avoid disorientation and take on the role of exemplary student. In the second, Natalie adapts to kindergarten through her relationships with peers and the teacher. She often participates in class activities, however, without understanding the narrative or rationale behind them. Cross-case comparisons suggest that each student adapted in a way suited to his or her own needs and resources. The journey from disorientation to adaptation is described through the application of the holistic, systems-oriented, interactionalistic developmental approaches of Werner, Wapner, and Koizumi

A family affair: job loss and the mental health of spouses and adolescents

Examines the impact of involuntary job loss on the mental health of family members. Abstract This study examines the impact of involuntary job loss on the mental health of family members. Estimates from fixed-effects panel data models, using panel data for Australia, provide little evidence of any negative spillover effect on the mental health of husbands as a result of their wives\u27 job loss. The mental well-being of wives, however, declines following their husbands\u27 job loss, but only if that job loss results in a sustained period of non-employment or if the couple experienced financial hardship or relationship strain prior to the husband\u27s job loss. A negative effect of parental job loss on the mental health of co-resident adolescent children is also found, but appears to be restricted to girls

Participatory healthcare service design and innovation

This paper describes the use of Experience Based Design (EBD), a participatory methodology for healthcare service design, to improve the outpatient service for older people at Sheffield Teaching Hospitals. The challenges in moving from stories to designing improvements, co-designing for wicked problems, and the effects of participants' limited scopes of action are discussed. It concludes by proposing that such problems are common to participatory service design in large institutions and recommends that future versions of EBD incorporate more tools to promote divergent thinking

Pervasive healthcare in lived experience : thinking beyond the home : position paper for workshop on pervasive healthcare in the home.

The National Health Service (NHS) in the UK, like many other public heath services worldwide, is facing a number of key challenges. Among them are an ageing population and a rising incidence of chronic health conditions. This situation requires a radical re-examination of how people manage their health and their healthcare in ways that challenge the relationship between people and healthcare services. Combining this observation with the opportunities afforded by pervasive information and communication technologies, we argue that design research should reach beyond simply locating devices and services to offer healthcare ‘in the home’ and should examine this broader agenda. Rather than focussing design discourse on the specifics of one location, we should adopt a holistic view, beginning from people’s lived experience. In this position paper we describe the User-Centred Healthcare Design (UCHD) project, a 5-year collaboration between universities and NHS Trusts in South Yorkshire, UK. We suggest that new models of healthcare that re-define the institutional and social context of care are required if we are to meet the challenge of chronic illness. We describe our progress to date on the UCHD project, our commitment to placing patient experience at the centre of design, and our initial experiences of using an experience-based co-design method to improve outpatient services in a Sheffield hospital

Gait analysis in a <i>Mecp2</i> knockout mouse model of Rett syndrome reveals early-onset and progressive motor deficits

Rett syndrome (RTT) is a genetic disorder characterized by a range of features including cognitive impairment, gait abnormalities and a reduction in purposeful hand skills. Mice harbouring knockout mutations in the &lt;i&gt;Mecp2&lt;/i&gt; gene display many RTT-like characteristics and are central to efforts to find novel therapies for the disorder. As hand stereotypies and gait abnormalities constitute major diagnostic criteria in RTT, it is clear that motor and gait-related phenotypes will be of importance in assessing preclinical therapeutic outcomes. We therefore aimed to assess gait properties over the prodromal phase in a functional knockout mouse model of RTT. In male &lt;i&gt;Mecp2&lt;/i&gt; knockout mice, we observed alterations in stride, coordination and balance parameters at 4 weeks of age, before the onset of other overt phenotypic changes as revealed by observational scoring. These data suggest that gait measures may be used as a robust and early marker of &lt;i&gt;Mecp2&lt;/i&gt;-dysfunction in future preclinical therapeutic studies

Mental health and productivity at work: does what you do matter?

Much of the economic cost of mental illness stems from workers’ reduced productivity. Using nationally representative panel data we analyze the links between mental health and two alternative workplace productivity measures – absenteeism and presenteeism (i.e., lower productivity while attending work) – explicitly allowing these relationships to be moderated by the nature of the job itself. We find that absence rates are approximately five percent higher among workers who report being in poor mental health. Moreover, job conditions are related to both presenteeism and absenteeism even after accounting for workers’ self-reported mental health status. Job conditions are relatively more important in understanding diminished productivity at work if workers are in good rather than poor mental health. The effects of job complexity and stress on absenteeism do not depend on workers’ mental health, while job security and control moderate the effect of mental illness on absence days

Reduced axonal diameter of peripheral nerve fibres in a mouse model of Rett syndrome

Rett syndrome (RTT) is a neurological disorder characterized by motor and cognitive impairment, autonomic dysfunction and a loss of purposeful hand skills. In the majority of cases, typical RTT is caused by de novo mutations in the X-linked gene, MECP2. Alterations in the structure and function of neurons within the central nervous system of RTT patients and Mecp2-null mouse models are well established. In contrast, few studies have investigated the effects of MeCP2-deficiency on peripheral nerves. In this study, we conducted detailed morphometric as well as functional analysis of the sciatic nerves of symptomatic adult female Mecp2+/- mice. We observed a significant reduction in the mean diameter of myelinated nerve fibers in Mecp2+/- mice. In myelinated fibers, mitochondrial densities per unit area of axoplasm were significantly altered in Mecp2+/- mice. However, conduction properties of the sciatic nerve of Mecp2 knockout mice were not different from control. These subtle changes in myelinated peripheral nerve fibers in heterozygous Mecp2 knockout mice could potentially explain some RTT phenotypes