Group items tagged

This article is concerned with what it may mean to individuals to engage in practices that are physically challenging and risky. The article questions the assumptions that psychological health is commensurate with maintaining physical safety, and that risking one's health and physical safety is necessarily a sign of psychopathology. The research was based upon semi-structured interviews with eight extreme sport practitioners. The interviews were analysed using Colaizzi's version of the phenomenological method. The article explicates the themes identified in the analysis, and discusses their implications for health psychology theory and practice.

This article is concerned with what it may mean to individuals to engage in practices that are physically challenging and risky. The article questions the assumptions that psychological health is commensurate with maintaining physical safety, and that risking one's health and physical safety is necessarily a sign of psychopathology. The research was based upon semi-structured interviews with eight extreme sport practitioners. The interviews were analysed using Colaizzi's version of the phenomenological method. The article explicates the themes identified in the analysis, and discusses their implications for health psychology theory and practice.

This study examined the roles of sensation seeking and self-efficacy in explaining extreme and high physical risk taking behavior. Study participants were 20 extreme risk takers chosen from participants in skiing, rock climbing, kayaking, and stunt flying. One control group was comprised of 20 high, but not extreme, risk takers from each of these activities, matched to the participants in skill and experience. A second control group consisted of 20 trained athletes involved in moderate risk sports. Percepts of self-efficacy emerged as the principle variable differentiating the groups. A social cognitive explanation for desire for mastery was used to understand what enables risk takers to overcome the potentially inhibiting influences of anxiety, fear, and the recognition of danger. This conclusion is further reinforced by converging results from interviews with the participants.

In this article, the relationship between literacy practices and spatiality is explored in the context of family literacy. The article draws on fieldwork in family literacy classrooms as part of two evaluations in Croydon and Derbyshire of family learning provision. Methods of evaluation included classroom observations in rural and suburban locations. In addition, teachers and parents were interviewed. In this instance, family learning included literacy and language activities with parents and children in school and nursery settings. These were learning spaces where parents and children collaborated on joint projects including book making, storytelling, the making of visual artefacts and reading and writing activities. The research revealed how family literacy classrooms could be understood as 'third spaces', between home and school, offering parents and children discursive opportunities drawing on both domains.

A study to be released today by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum [cites] improvements in a range of literacy skills among students who took part in a program in which the Guggenheim sends artists into schools. The study, now in its second year, interviewed hundreds of New York City third graders, some of whom had participated in the Guggenheim program, called Learning Through Art, and others who did not.

Freakonomics is well-worth checking out. Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt, authors of Freakonomics, keep the conversation going from their best-selling book that explores the hidden side of everything.

Michael Cunningham, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of "The Hours" and other works, was artist-in-residence recently at the University of Maryland at College Park. This is part of a conversation he had with reporter Valerie Strauss about young people and literature.