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Compulsory distance education has always sought to be inclusive, providing educational opportunities for K-12 students unable to attend mainstream, face-to-face schools for medical, geographical, or personal reasons. However, how to effectively engage these diverse learners has remained a perpetual challenge, with a need for further investigation into the nature of student engagement with compulsory school distance contexts and how teachers can best support it. This qualitative study used focus groups (n = 2 groups, n = 16 participants) to examine teacher definitions and student engagement strategies within eKindy-12 distance education in Queensland, Australia. Categorical analysis was conducted using a priori codes for definitions, focusing on four previously established engagement types (i.e. behavioural, emotional, cognitive, and agentic engagement), and in vivo codes for strategies. Teacher definitions focused strongly on behavioural engagement, but most also contained elements of emotional and cognitive engagement; agentic engagement was only occasionally evidenced via practice descriptions. Teachers described engaging students by: building relationships, creating a safe classroom environment through differentiation, using inclusive technological tools to facilitate interaction and monitor progress, making learning fun and relevant, drawing on school-wide pedagogical frameworks and teaching strategies, and encourage self-regulation. Findings suggest distance education teachers face unique challenges around evidencing engagement and supporting student agency.

In December 1890, a 22-year-old woman named Gabrielle Bompard was accused of complicity in the brutal murder and robbery of a Parisian bailiff. The audacious view that Bompard had been completely unconscious of her acts was advanced by Jules Liegeois, Professor of Administrative Law at Nancy and the most outspoken disciple of the psychiatrist Hippolyte Bernheim. Liegeois expounded most volubly on the extra-medical realm of hypnosis as early as 1884 when he presented a memoir on its medico-legal implications to the Academie des Sciences Morales et Politiques before an audience of philosophers, publicists, social reformers, and medical men. The fact that the Parisians laboured to have the defendant condemned with a vehemence which matched the prosecution’s tends to suggest that moral and social issues outside the realm of medical doctrine alone influenced the position they upheld so rigidly in the courtroom.

Tests and assessments are valued in society, especially when the cost of getting it right matters, for example, when they are used to certify people we need to trust in order to assure public safety and well-being (e.g., engineers, doctors, pilots, train drivers, electricians, teachers, etc.). Without such formal assessments, we would need to rely solely on the attestation of some individual who may well be subject to the influences of collusion, corruption, and cheating (which is why tests were devised in the first place). Alternatively, we might have to rely on free market processes which would take time to weed out incompetents; we know that deficient practitioners (e.g., peddlers of quackery, pseudo-medicine, or health fraud) may well harm unsuspecting and naive citizens (e.g., Gerald Shirtcliff ’s engineering work, produced under false engineering credentials, may have contributed to a building collapse in the 2011 Christchurch earthquake with significant loss of life; Howe, 2014). Hence, society needs confidence that learners and professionals can perform satisfactorily the responsibilities we assign them and we rely on validated evidence of those competencies before opportunities are given.

This study utilised role theory to investigate teacher aide roles within regional schools in Queensland, Australia. Twenty primary schoolteacher aides were interviewed; data were triangulated with 27 teacher aides' responses to a follow-up questionnaire and interviews with 6 administrative staff. Data suggest that classroom instructional support roles and small group instruction dominate teacher aide work; they also perform many non-instructional roles and work individually with students with diverse needs. School leaders must reconsider the roles expected of these professionals given their position, professional training and remuneration, better supporting teacher aides through improved communication, collaboration and sustained professional learning opportunities.

Originally published in 1991 as part of the Tavistock Classics in the History of Psychiatry series, this re-edition of J-M. Charcot’s Clinical Lectures on Diseases of the Nervous System provides a unique opportunity to examine the work of one of the last century’s most controversial and admired physicians. Widely esteemed for his work in neuropathology, Charcot was also an innovator in the study of hysteria, making important contributions to its study in both women and men. The Clinical Lectures reproduced here are especially important for two key reasons. First, they provide insight into Charcot’s often neglected study of male hysteria, especially traumatic shock, as well as, hysteria among children. Secondly, they give an opportunity to examine his clinical method and style. His presentations and scholarly compilations greatly influenced an entire generation of French and other physicians interested in the study of the ‘unconscious’ during the turn of the century. The introduction, which precedes the work, places the volume in its social, political and historical context. It highlights the key features of the historiographical debate surrounding Charcot, which ranges in scope from the social and intellectual history of the Third Republic through that of early psychoanalysis. It then proceeds with an examination of the key themes – both substantive and methodological – underlying Charcot’s researches, providing both a general entree into the history of medicine and society in this period, as well as an explication du texte which carefully analyses the lectures themselves.