Telling visual stories of loss and hope: body mapping with mothers about contact after child removal

Visual research methods reduce reliance on verbal communication and offer an avenue for non-verbal storytelling. Body mapping is a visual arts-based research method with its origins in art therapy and community development. It has been successfully used to explore embodied experiences of marginalised social groups. Participants engage in sensory and multimodal storytelling by tracing a life-size body outline and adorning it with fabrics, drawings and images to symbolise their views during a guided interview. This approach was used in research to explore birth family contact experiences in New South Wales, where children have ongoing direct contact with birth relatives in long-term care, guardianship and open adoption. Twelve mothers of children in permanent care took part in body mapping to explore their feelings about contact and the support they need to nurture a relationship with their children. Immersion in the artistic process of bringing a representational body to life granted these mothers access to hidden memories about their experience of child removal. They used evocative images to depict system violence and their fight against the erasure of their mother identity as well to envision a positive future relationship with their children. Body mapping potently revealed that traumatic loss resides in the body and resurfaces in encounters with child welfare systems. This has important policy and practice implications, highlighting a need for post-removal therapeutic services to process trauma and sensitive casework to rebuild parent trust and to help carers respond with empathy to their child’s mother at contact. This lends support to the usefulness of body mapping not only for research with vulnerable parents, but to its enormous potential as a creative engagement tool for child welfare practitioners.

Information and Trust in Parent-Teacher Cooperation – Connections with Educational Inequality

There is an ongoing debate on how parents and the cooperation between parents and teachers contribute to educational inequality. In this study, the assumption that information and trust in parent–teacher cooperation mediate the effects of parent socioeconomic status (SES) on student achievement in mathematics and instruction language (German) was examined. The effects of information and trust on achievement were assumed to be mediated by parent self-efficacy expectation in German. The hypotheses were tested using a sample with 1001 students from 4th to 6th grade and their parents in Swiss primary schools using questionnaires and achievement tests at the beginning and the end of a school year. Results from structural equation models with longitudinal data showed that parent trust and parent self-efficacy expectation fully mediated the effect of SES and student achievement in language instruction but not in mathematics. Information did not correlate with SES nor with student achievement, but with trust. Parental trust in the cooperation with teachers affected achievement in both mathematics and German. The model combines the research on parental involvement with the research on educational inequality in school. Teachers need to establish trust in cooperation with low-SES parents to reduce educational inequality in school.

Trust and Communication With a Caregiver Reduces Behavior Problems and Protects Against Stress Among Urban Adolescents

Youth, particularly urban minority youth, are exposed to high levels of stressful and potentially traumatic life events that have been linked to a wide array of negative outcomes including internalizing and externalizing problems. Youth perceptions of their interpersonal relationship quality with caregivers and friends were examined as potential promotive and protective factors counteracting the link between exposure to stressful and traumatic events and behavior problems. Participants were 85 urban, predominantly African American of age 13–17 years (60% girls). Results supported the hypothesis that youth report of parent trust and communication would serve as a promotive and protective factor, moderating the association between stressful life events and behavior problems. In contrast, peer trust and communication did not appear to counteract the association between stress and behavior problems. Instead, reports of trust and communication with friends appeared to increase the association between stress exposure and internalizing problems.

Perwujudan nilai-nilai strategis revolusi mental pendidikan pada kearifan lokal pesantren

This research was aimed at describing Pesantren Gunung Jati (SGJ) in internalizing the strategic value of mental revolution in Islamic Senior High School students SGJ through local wisdom as well as revealing the strategies implemented to manage the its supporting points and obstacles. This research was qualitative approach and classified into case study. The result shows the values of “Panca Jiwa Pondok” have been able to shape students’ personality with the B3K3N character. Various characteristics used as parameters the success of empowering students’ characteristics were: the advisors example, the student’s parent trust. The multicultural background of students was an obstacle of the implementation. Strategies implemented to success were became the role model and a happy friend as well as a motivator for students to be patterns of model in building emotional bond.

Empiric dimension of educational quality at preschool

The aim of this publication is to actualize the empirical experience of child upbringing problem solving within the context of teaching quality improvement in the preschool. Growing parent trust in preschool teachers raises family demands in the relation to child care and preschool education issues. Therefore, it is becoming more important to improve the indicators of teaching quality, focusing on work progress of the preschool educational institution. Quality of child education to a great extent is the key to child’s individual development and success.