group work

The most common goal of interventions that support youth from care in the transition to independent living is to help them to become relatively self-sufficient.

It was in this context that a project was created to implement and evaluate group work strategies for this population. Two sources of information were used: the youths who participated in the program (n=31) and all the facilitators. The intent behind this research was not only to monitor the trajectory of the youth participants through the group process, but also to expose the workers who intervened in the transition to adulthood to an alternative treatment paradigm and a different way to work with groups.

The results reveal that the implementation of new intervention approaches is a process that takes time, and must take the context of the work into account. This research raises issues in relation to the definition, the implementation and the evaluation of programs that support the transition to adulthood for vulnerable young people.

 

The aim of this paper is to analyse how textbooks deal with activities which ask students of primary school for working in groups. The sample comprised 24 Social Science, Natural Science and Technology books written for primary school children (6-12 years old). After coding the information it follows a twofold methodological process, in order to offer a qualitative description of groupwork´ activities, as well as a quantitative assessment of the frequency with which they appear and their continuity in primary education.

The results indicate that prevail individual activities, although there are remarkable efforts for introducing groupwork in the textbooks. The underlying educational approach of each publishing firm determines what frequency, treatment and continuity have group-activities. Nevertheless, there are also common denominators, such as the rare presence of groupwork out of school. On the other hand, textbooks give priority to guidelines of tasks, specifying "what to do" but, on the contrary, almost never give guidelines about "how to do" or "how to behave".

 

Key words: Textbooks, citizenship, activities, participation, groupwork, guidelines

The paper critically revises the proposal of shaping school centres as communities. Starting from international literature and from what has happened in the Spanish context, it especially analyzes the ambivalences and ideological tensions that result from fostering a relationship of school membership and collaboration among teachers. It consequently proposes a reconcep-tualization of collaboration as well as a guideline for future work.