No abstract

The primary purpose of this study was to explore parents' perceptions of their involvement in their children's education. This study was conducted in secondary schools in a rural area of Bangladesh. People from this area mostly have low literacy and income rates. A qualitative case study research design was used. Five parents from five different schools in the rural context were interviewed. The findings from this study show that parents are not comfortable approaching the school and many parents do not consider their role as encompassing parental involvement in their children's education. The study concluded that parental attitudes and beliefs about involvement are the result of a lack of information about how they could be involved. This study recommends that policymakers and school administrators address parents' perceptions and not only make them aware of how they can become involved in schooling, but also create opportunities for them to do so.

No abstract

This paper reports on the development and validation of the COVID Psychosocial Impacts Scale (CPIS), a self-report measure that comprehensively examines both positive and negative psychosocial impacts from the COVID-19 pandemic. This is the first part of the program of work in which the CPIS was administered and compared with a measure of psychological distress (Kessler Psychological Distress Scale, K-10) and wellbeing (World Health Organization Well-Being Index, WHO-5). The data were obtained online in 2020 and 2022 at two distinct time points to capture different exposures to the pandemic in the New Zealand population to a non-representative sample of 663 and 687 adults, respectively. Two hundred seventy-one participants took part in both surveys. Findings indicate a unidimensional structure within CPIS subscales and inter-relatedness among CPIS stress-related subscales. The scatter plots and correlation matrix indicate CPIS having a positive moderate correlation with K10 and a negative moderate correlation with WHO-5, indicative of construct validity. The paper outlines contextual factors surrounding CPIS development and makes suggestions for future iterations of CPIS. Further work will examine its psychometric properties across cultures.

This paper, by a Bangladeshi and a New Zealander, brings together narrative inquiry studies of the leadership initiatives in two quite different rural schools, in Bangladesh and New Zealand respectively. The schools are in communities that might be considered as significantly underprivileged, and generationally alienated from education, within their own countries. Those communities, however, have richness of different kinds. The schools have explored and found ways of connecting with that richness and their experiences can offer ideas to others in diverse locations, including the urban. Both cases are sites of an adventurous approach to meeting the needs of their students. Both illustrate how a rich learning environment can be created when the needs, aspirations and resources of the local environment and community are investigated, attended to and utilised. The paper reports the context and innovations in both schools. In doing so it highlights the dangers of homogenising national curricular concepts that ignore the importance of place and the emplaced identity of communities. It questions where a deficit lies: is it in the local rural community and its school or in national,and global systems thinking that ignores the significance of the local and particular? It also suggests that the place-based approaches in these two schools offer useful contributions to some of the challenges of education – in urban as much as rural settings - in a world that faces possibly extreme change.