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Significant shifts in educational contextual factors occur as preschool children transition into kindergarten (Rimm-Kaufman & Pianta, 2000). The kindergarten environment has a greater emphasis on explicit goals for literacy, numeracy, and socialization as compared to preschool settings (Haines et al., 1989). Given this qualitative shift from preschool to formal schooling, understanding how varying educational context factors dynamically evolve alongside children’s emotional and cognitive skills warrants deeper exploration. Drawing upon the ecological systems approach allows for contextualizing developmental trajectories of these emotional and cognitive function within broader systems, such as the classroom environment. Specifically, the ecological systems approach provides a framework that positions an individual’s development within surrounding proximal (i.e., microsystem) and distal (i.e., exosystem, macrosystem, and chronosystem) contextual systems (Bronfenbrenner, 1979; Bronfenbrenner & Morris, 2006). Educational factors characterizing the child’s immediate environment, such as classroom quality and the teacher-student relationship, fit within the proximal microsystem given that the child directly and regularly engages with these classroom features. Furthermore, Rimm-Kaufman and Wanless (2012) proposed a conceptual model that adapts Bronfenbrenner’s bioecological approach to understand the direct and indirect influences of the systems surrounding the child (i.e., micro-, meso-, exo- & macrosystems) on their self-regulatory abilities, social and academic skills. This model provides a clear schematic to examine how the early childcare environment directly influences children’s self-regulation skills, which aligns with the goal of this study examining how classroom characteristics may shape children’s emotion regulation and inhibitory developmental trajectories. Past work has identified how classroom quality, as captured by emotion support, classroom organization, and instruction support (i.e., Teaching Through Interactions Framework; Hamre & Pianta, 2007), has been linked to children’s emotion regulation (Chuang et al., 2020) and inhibitory control (Ansari & Pianta, 2018; Jones et al., 2013; Pianta et al., 2017; Webster-Stratton et al., 2008). However, it is less clear how the development of emotion regulation and inhibitory control adapt when interacting with variability in classroom quality across the preschool to kindergarten transition. Going above and beyond classroom quality, children’s individualized engagement with teachers, peers, and tasks also have been linked to their school readiness and adjustment (Birch & Ladd, 1997). Furthermore, past research on children’s emotion regulation and inhibitory control have been conducted on predominantly White, affluent children (e.g., Carlson & Wang, 2007), posing the concern that these findings may not generalize to children from different ethnic, cultural, and socioeconomic backgrounds. The proposed study aims to identify how multiple levels of educational contextual factors (i.e., classroom quality and a child’s individualized engagement in the classroom) interact with children’s development of emotion regulation and inhibitory control across time within a racially/ethnically diverse sample from low-income households.

In design teaching ubiquitous technologies can offer new ways of situating learning within real world experiences. Yet they require new types of knowledge; both an understanding of how to work with the technology and also an understanding of how to use the technologies to respond to changing contexts such as the place and the people. We sought to understand the factors affecting how students work with the acquiring these broader knowledge bases and how this impacted on the learning outcomes in design-based learning. In this paper we discuss an approach to tertiary design teaching that involves the use of ubiquitous technologies to support fieldwork and in-situ learning and through this we evaluate the impact on teaching and learning. We will describe the methods of the study, which involved pre- and postinterviews and questionnaires completed by individual students, focus groups as well as analysis of the outcomes of the student projects. We will explore how a series of different contexts framed and affected the learning experience by exploring the context as location, technology and social setting. Since the projects required students to not only use ubiquitous technologies as tools for learning, but also as components of the design project outcomes we also highlight a series of short case studies of student project outcomes to analyse how the students integrated them into their learning environments. In the discussion of the results we will focus on how the context of the learning was understood by the students, and we will discuss an evaluation of how this changed during the course of the teaching project. [For the complete proceedings, see ED557171.]

CITATION Baird, Ian G. 2013. Shifting Contexts and Performances: The Brao-Kavet and Their Sacred Mountains in Northeast Cambodia.  Asian Highlands Perspectives  28:1-23. ABSTRACT  The Brao-Kavet are an indigenous ethnic group in northeastern Cambodia and southern Laos. Although in recent decades most have been forced to resettle in the lowlands, many maintain close livelihood and spiritual links with forested mountainous areas. I discuss the shifting Brao-Kavet understandings and performances associated with sacred spaces and, in particular, the Haling-Halang, a pair of high mountains located on the Laos-Cambodia border. The Brao-Kavet do not hunt for wildlife on these mountains, and dare not cut down trees. A particular kind of thin bamboo that grows there is, however, especially useful for sucking jar beer. People are allowed to harvest it in small quantities, provided appropriate offerings are made to the powerful mountain spirits prior to cutting. Brao-Kavet identity politics are closely linked to religious practices associated with these mountains, as demonstrated by Brao-Kavet claims that only Brao-Kavet should be spoken there because the spirits do not understand Lao, Khmer, French, English, or other languages, and would be offended if anything but their own tongue was uttered. I argue that the performative nature of Brao-Kavet sacred mountains has considerable political potential for facilitating indigenous-supported biodiversity conservation, and for supporting the recognition of Brao-Kavet indigenous rights over land and other resources in Virachey National Park, where the mountains are located.

CITATION Baird, Ian G. 2013. Shifting Contexts and Performances: The Brao-Kavet and Their Sacred Mountains in Northeast Cambodia.  Asian Highlands Perspectives  28:1-23. ABSTRACT  The Brao-Kavet are an indigenous ethnic group in northeastern Cambodia and southern Laos. Although in recent decades most have been forced to resettle in the lowlands, many maintain close livelihood and spiritual links with forested mountainous areas. I discuss the shifting Brao-Kavet understandings and performances associated with sacred spaces and, in particular, the Haling-Halang, a pair of high mountains located on the Laos-Cambodia border. The Brao-Kavet do not hunt for wildlife on these mountains, and dare not cut down trees. A particular kind of thin bamboo that grows there is, however, especially useful for sucking jar beer. People are allowed to harvest it in small quantities, provided appropriate offerings are made to the powerful mountain spirits prior to cutting. Brao-Kavet identity politics are closely linked to religious practices associated with these mountains, as demonstrated by Brao-Kavet claims that only Brao-Kavet should be spoken there because the spirits do not understand Lao, Khmer, French, English, or other languages, and would be offended if anything but their own tongue was uttered. I argue that the performative nature of Brao-Kavet sacred mountains has considerable political potential for facilitating indigenous-supported biodiversity conservation, and for supporting the recognition of Brao-Kavet indigenous rights over land and other resources in Virachey National Park, where the mountains are located.

This article is from BMC Health Services Research , volume 14 . Abstract Background: The shortage of health professionals in low income countries is recognized as a crisis. Community health workers are part of a “task-shift” strategy to address this crisis. Task shifting in this paper refers to the delegation of tasks from health professionals to lay, trained volunteers. In Kenya, there is a debate as to whether these volunteers should be compensated, and what motivation strategies would be effective in different socio-demographic contexts, based type of tasks shifted. The purpose of this study was to find out, from stakeholders’ perspectives, the type of tasks to be shifted to community health workers and the appropriate strategies to motivate and retain them. Methods: This was an analytical comparative study employing qualitative methods: key informant interviews with health policy makers, managers, and service providers, and focus group discussions with community health workers and service consumers, to explore their perspectives on tasks to be shifted and appropriate motivation strategies. Results: The study found that there were tasks to be shifted and motivation strategies that were common to all three contexts. Common tasks were promotive, preventive, and simple curative services. Common motivation strategies were supportive supervision, means of identification, equitable allocation of resources, training, compensation, recognition, and evidence based community dialogue.Further, in the nomadic and peri-urban sites, community health workers had assumed curative services beyond the range provided for in the Kenyan task shifting policy. This was explained to be influenced by lack of access to care due to distance to health facilities, population movement, and scarcity of health providers in the nomadic setting and the harsh economic realities in peri-urban set up. Therefore, their motivation strategies included training on curative skills, technical support, and resources for curative care. Data collection was viewed as an important task in the rural site, but was not recognized as priority in nomadic and peri-urban sites, where they sought monetary compensation for data collection. Conclusions: The study concluded that inclusion of curative tasks for community health workers, particularly in nomadic contexts, is inevitable but raises the need for accreditation of their training and regulation of their tasks.

This article is from BMC Health Services Research , volume 14 . Abstract Background: The shortage of health professionals in low income countries is recognized as a crisis. Community health workers are part of a “task-shift” strategy to address this crisis. Task shifting in this paper refers to the delegation of tasks from health professionals to lay, trained volunteers. In Kenya, there is a debate as to whether these volunteers should be compensated, and what motivation strategies would be effective in different socio-demographic contexts, based type of tasks shifted. The purpose of this study was to find out, from stakeholders’ perspectives, the type of tasks to be shifted to community health workers and the appropriate strategies to motivate and retain them. Methods: This was an analytical comparative study employing qualitative methods: key informant interviews with health policy makers, managers, and service providers, and focus group discussions with community health workers and service consumers, to explore their perspectives on tasks to be shifted and appropriate motivation strategies. Results: The study found that there were tasks to be shifted and motivation strategies that were common to all three contexts. Common tasks were promotive, preventive, and simple curative services. Common motivation strategies were supportive supervision, means of identification, equitable allocation of resources, training, compensation, recognition, and evidence based community dialogue.Further, in the nomadic and peri-urban sites, community health workers had assumed curative services beyond the range provided for in the Kenyan task shifting policy. This was explained to be influenced by lack of access to care due to distance to health facilities, population movement, and scarcity of health providers in the nomadic setting and the harsh economic realities in peri-urban set up. Therefore, their motivation strategies included training on curative skills, technical support, and resources for curative care. Data collection was viewed as an important task in the rural site, but was not recognized as priority in nomadic and peri-urban sites, where they sought monetary compensation for data collection. Conclusions: The study concluded that inclusion of curative tasks for community health workers, particularly in nomadic contexts, is inevitable but raises the need for accreditation of their training and regulation of their tasks.