Talking to your child about psychoactive drugs is crucial, preferably before they are exposed to drugs or people who use them.

• As a parent, what you say matters.

• Check with the school to see what your child is being taught about drugs.

• Having the drug conversation can be difficult, but using the checklist provided will make it easier and more successful.

This chapter focuses on the litigation that followed the tsunami, which hit the Okawa Elementary School. The tsunami resulted in the death of the children visiting the school. The following litigation concerned the question of whether appropriate safety measures had been put in place at the school before the tsunami occurred. The two lawyers leading the litigation for the parents of the children report on how they used innovative approaches in the litigation proceedings. The legal innovation employed concerns the composition of the litigation team, the involvement of the children’s parents, the creation of witness statements addressing the emotional aspects of the disaster, the identification of the entity that should be liable, the doctrine determining liability, digitalisation of litigation and the distribution of risk in modern societies.

This chapter will show you how traversing the overlapping identities of self (micro), organisation (meso) and system (macro) is an essential skill for educators to be culturally responsive. This includes making decisions informed by broader contexts, organisation/learning environment interpretations of those cultures and, crucially for educators at all stages, what this then looks like in their own educational setting. For pre-service teachers, this calls for a consideration of multiple layers in the development of teacher identity. For all educators, it demands reflection and scrutiny throughout one’s career recognising that some aspects of identity may remain a continuity, while others may change. By examining practitioner examples, research literature, national and global contexts, this chapter will equip you with practical and theoretical examples. We hope this will help you identify and negotiate micro, meso and macro levels of teacher identity as a way to better identify, empathise and implement effective culturally responsive pedagogies for the contexts you work in.

The didactic poems of Niketas of Herakleia chiefly concern grammar and are written in various metres, all of them accentual, even including hymnographic metres. Rather than being mere reformulations of existing grammatical knowledge, the poems urge us to consider questions related to contemporary teaching practices. How does verse help to transmit knowledge, and which roles do accentual rhythm and musical heirmos play in this process? Issues of performance, audience and patronage are of undeniable importance for this question. The poems reflect a lively (sometimes unruly) classroom situation and an equally lively competition between teachers in Constantinople. Especially Niketas’ remarks on schedography reflect this competitive teaching field. Thus, the poems of this versatile author may explain why grammar became in the twelfth century an object to be reflected upon, reformulated, debated and even aestheticized. The chapter also situates Niketas in the literary tradition of didactic poetry. How does he, as a poet, at the same time represent himself as an able teacher and expert? And how does he combine poetic form and avowedly dry subject matter?

Supportive educators can aid young people in channelling negative emotions about climate change in healthy, adaptive ways. However, globally only a small minority (13 percent) of young people in school have been asked to consider their feelings about climate change and most teachers lack training and confidence to deliver climate change education. The first portion of this chapter provides an overview of climate change education and explores young people’s climate distress in educational settings, with an emphasis on institutional betrayal. The second portion presents case studies and qualitative data from semi-structured interviews conducted with four leading practitioners whose approaches to climate change education acknowledge and support the mental health implications for young people. Finally, themes identified from thematic analysis of the interviews are presented, and key insights for good practice in climate change education are provided.

This chapter samples signs from educational institutions at various levels and a few school and government offices.

Theories of change propose how intervention resources and activities might lead to the generation of outcomes. They are sometimes presented diagrammatically as logic models. Realist evaluators and others have suggested that interventions should be theorised in terms of how intervention mechanisms interact with context to generate outcomes. Our own trial of the Learning Together whole-school intervention to prevent bullying set out to define, refine and test such theories in the form of context–mechanism–outcome configurations (CMOCs). We drew on several sources to define our starting CMOCs. These included existing middle range theory. This is scientific theory about the general mechanisms (i.e. not necessarily concerning an intervention) that generate outcomes. This should be analytically general enough to apply to a range of settings, populations and/or outcomes, but specific enough to be useful in a given application. We also used previous research and public consultation to inform our CMOCs.

Ælfric of Eynsham wrote a number of important educational works which are excerpted here: his Grammar, Glossary and amusing Colloquy with Old English gloss, showing the schoolboys lively interaction with their teacher and their desire to learn Latin. Ælfric Bata also wrote a series of Latin colloquies, one of which is given here, with an account of the cheeky schoolboys pretending to their teacher that they have been working hard in his absence.

Each developmental period can be associated with the activity that plays a leading role in children’s lives during this period. The model of leading activities is culturally specific – leading activities are shaped by a given culture and subculture and reflect both the children’s abilities and the expectations of their parents and other mentors. Socioculturally constructed leading activities serve as a motor of child development. Within each of the developmental periods, activity-dependent cognitive and interpersonal skills lead to the formation of a new motive that corresponds to the new leading activity that becomes dominant during the next developmental period. The relationships between children and their sociocultural environment are reciprocal – the leading activities offered to children interact with children’s emerging abilities and motives, while these abilities and motives are shaped and developed by the leading activities. The following leading activities typical for industrial and post-industrial societies are examined: infancy – direct emotional contact with the caregiver; early childhood – joint object-centered activity; preschool age – sociodramatic play; elementary school age – formal learning; middle and high school age – peer interaction; adulthood – work activity.

This chapter offers a different take on the standard teleological story of Christianization in the Lushai Hills by focusing on what the missionaries themselves deemed an utter failure: their first decade of mission work. It views the earliest foreign missionaries to the Lushai Hills as uplanders did: first, as ‘sap vakvai’ - strange and insignificant wanderers; and, later, as ‘zosap’ - usable and incorporable newcomers, asking not what foreign missionaries wanted from highland people, but what highland people wanted from missionaries. The weakness and vulnerabilities of foreign missionaries opened up space for a first generation of young people with sensibilities spanning the Lushai Hills District and the globe. Upland populations became interested in Christianity - a new yet combinable spiritual power - as well as the knowledge dispensed on the mission compound because they were completely and inherently involved in its interpretation and dissemination. Everyday technologies, the studies and movements of students, regional meetings of nascent Christian groups, and ‘celebrations’ of empire began synchronizing time and both connecting and circumscribing space, all with profoundly far-reaching and unpredictable effects. Maps, schools, and the harmonization of space and time would help spark ideas about a wider, more integrated ‘Mizo’ identity. Children, adolescents, and youth were not only critical partners but also often operated in networks completely unmediated by the white missionaries, in channels of circulations that generated important redefinitions of space, time, and ethnicity in the uplands.

This chapter presents a self-contained ethnography of twenty-seven girls at a high school in Bolton, in the north-west of England. The setting of the school, Midlan High, is contextualised socially and geographically and the social groups within the school are described. The ethnography identifies four communities of practice in the school and these are described in detail. The communities of practice include the elitist and trendy pro-school Eden Village clique; the sensible, pragmatic and pro-school Geeks; the independent, cool, and somewhat anti-school Populars; and the most rebellious and anti-school group, the Townies. In articulating the process of ethnography, the chapter also reflects upon the fieldwork process, providing a frank and honest account of the intricacies of doing ethnography within an educational context.

This essay examines W.G. Sebald’s relationship to the region of his birth, the Allgäu and explores its significance for his literary work. In his stories, he refers several times to his region of origin, to places and memories there, making his Allgäu past on the one hand a point of repulsion and on the other a reservoir of themes and images from which he draws for his prose. In this way, his “Heimat” (homeland) becomes literarily charged in a way that makes Sebald’s literary writings both fascinating and revelatory in terms of their poetics.

Schooling transforms child development yet fades into the background in research on prosocial behavior. Mass education, however, was central to the concerns of founding theorists such as Durkheim, Dewey, and Piaget. Putting on a sociological lens makes it easier to see how schools continue to play an active role in prosocial development, and how the concerns of these founding researchers resonate today. To situate the active role of school contexts in prosocial behavior, this chapter first examines schools as social systems, structuring children’s social networks, imposing roles and norms of behavior, and impacting the timing of development. The chapter then examines classroom, pedagogical, and peer prosocial behaviors, and their connection to classic theoretical work in the field. After reviewing these forms of prosocial behavior, the chapter closes by examining the links between prosocial behavior and student outcomes and implications and future directions for theory, research, and practice.