This article assesses David Ng's contribution to religious education with children. Ng offered practical strategies for full inclusion of children in faith communities. One limitation in Ng's work on children is its lack of attention to the role of culture, an unusual omission given his interest in multicultural religious education. This gap…

Developmental psychologists have been interested in the cognitive ability of perspective-taking for a number of years due to the apparent link between perspective-taking deficits and Autistic Spectrum Disorder. Most of the research in this area has employed the concepts and techniques of the approach commonly referred to as "Theory of Mind." The…

This article revisits the debate between cultural and critical literacy through ethnography challenging popular academic views in education and literacy. Set in a preschool classroom at the inception of the "No Child Left Behind" initiative, this essay focuses on teaching assistant Marylou Anderson. Her experiences growing up in…

Survey data from 174 university students are presented, on a scale designed to measure preference for absolute knowledge and perspective in instruction, including online discussions. Results demonstrate a strong effect of class level such that students in lower grade levels reported a greater preference for instruction involving unambiguous…

This article describes psychodrama action techniques that were effectively implemented in a university-level race relations course. Essential elements of these techniques included acting out and critical self-examination of the individual's personal beliefs. In a semi-structured class format in which uncensored spontaneity was stressed, students…

The relationship between empathy and forgiveness is explored through the painful experience of divorce and relationship loss. Authors propose a literary exercise, the Novel Approach, to help clients discover the power of empathy and find resolution to past pains. Included is a case study used to describe the Novel Approach and to highlight its…

This paper comments on issues of quality in early child care and education from an international perspective, asserting that questions about how to determine quality are as complex for early childhood programs as for all other professional services. The paper's introduction discusses the world wide trend of expansion in the amount of out-of-home…

This National Council for the Social Studies (NCSS) board of directors substantive issue session initiated the process of developing a position statement for the educational observance of the Quincentenary of Columbus' landing in the Americas. The meeting consisted of proposal statements by panelists and advocated the development of a united…

This paper focuses on the technique of role-switching as a workable field relationship tactic in the observer's work site. It describes the nature of subject use of the observer's dual status during the research activity, and conceptualizes the relationship between this type of researcher-role management and the premise of role reciprocity in…

The paper examines the joint interactive process of top-level administrative leadership teams of colleges or universities, with emphasis on the team's collective thinking. It focuses on how individual team members, who report directly to the president, make sense of their own and each other's activities on the team (for example, by constructing…

A total of 33 kindergarten children and 33 third grade students were shown videotapes of children in commonly distressing situations, in order to elicit affective and cognitive responses. The children indicated how the stories made them feel (empathy), why the story characters felt as they did (perspective taking), their desire for the characters…

The "sense making" process structures humans' categorization, perceptual, and expressive processes. These "sense making" references are ultimately derived from four distinct "root metaphors": mechanism or mechanistic thinking (machine), formism or formistic thinking (similarity), organicism or organistic thinking (organic process), and…

To determine whether or not disabled persons see communication between themselves and able-bodied persons as different from communication with other disabled persons, telephone interviews were conducted with 27 orthopedically disabled persons. Aside from answering demographic questions, subjects were asked questions regarding when the subject…

A developmental interactionist model for promoting social competence is proposed. It is argued that personal and social resources present in infancy are expanded, refined, and hierarchically reorganized continuously throughout the life-span as a function of development and experience. Social competence is seen as the result of integrating and…

The effects of age, task, and egocentric responding on visual-spatial perspective taking were studied among 41 preschool children between 3.0 and 5.9 years of age. Children were individually administered three perspective-taking measures: the upside-down/right-side-up task, a block task, and a picture box task, all previously described in the…