Learner discipline: An Australian perspective
Australian schools by and large are safe schools. Nonetheless discipline problems do exist – including bullying behaviour. For this kind of problem schools should have management policies in place. As traditional behaviour-management practices – including corporal punishment – are largely prohibited in Australian schools, contemporary practices centre on management through supportive school programmes, including appropriate curricula and school-support structures. This article supports the belief that measures such as the exclusion of misbehaving learners should be treated with caution. Measures such as this might not reflect accepted international principles and practices and should only be exercised in the most extreme circumstances. The article also supports the view that it is part of the school’s role to ensure that all learners are aware of the reality that while they have rights, they also have corresponding responsibilities. This awareness is more likely to be achieved in a supportive school culture where each learner is recognised as having unique qualities that can mature and grow in an appropriate learning environment.
Education as a Public Good: Justification and Avenues of Values Integration into Management of Ugandan School Discipline.
This qualitative study employs grounded theory and the Wilsonian concept analysis, as interpretative paradigms, to examine participants’ voices on the justification and avenues of values integration into management of school discipline in Uganda. By using John Dewey’s educational philosophy [pragmatism] as the theoretical lens for the study, we found out that participants in support of values integration emphasise the need for life-education so as to form respectable leaders, maintain brotherhood and peace education, have tolerance to diversity, have a rich and relevant curriculum, lessen aggressiveness and misconduct, and character formation. But those opposed to values integration argue that educators could use the values-education programme to impart secular influences whose aims are to provide disastrous knowledge, which are the foundation of a disruptive community of learners in any school. Regarding the avenues of values integration, Ugandan schools highly use physical punishment in values integration although it is too punitive. We further found out that restorative justice is important in managing Ugandan school discipline, and it could be in the form of counselling and guidance, school and social clubs. Restorative justice could also take on a collective participatory endeavour, where the school administrators, parents, educators, learners, the community and government are all important facets in the integration of values. The study recommends that promoting life-education, requires strengthening values integration into school discipline. But ensuring such life-education requires that the government of Uganda drafts a national philosophy of education on which all educational policies and actions should be pegged.
An updated look at depressive symptoms and job satisfaction in first-year women teachers
This report updates a longitudinal study (Schonfeld, 1992) of the effects of working conditions on newly appointed women teachers. The update included a later graduating cohort and additional outcome measures. Moreover, women who were not fully exposed to work stressors (e.g. part-time work, change of schools) were now excluded from the analyses. Among the 184 teachers, work environment measures were more highly correlated with future depressive symptoms, self-esteem, job satisfaction, and motivation to teach than with pre-employment counterparts of the outcomes. Regression analyses underlined the effects of the work environment on each outcome. Serious problems with depressive symptoms and job satisfaction among teachers exposed to the most adverse work environments were found.