Parts one and two of this volume present the theoretical lenses used to study the social contexts of education. These include long-established foundations disciplines such as sociology of education and philosophy of education as well as newer theoretical perspectives such as critical race theory, feminist educational theory, and cultural studies in education. Parts three, four, and five demonstrate how these theoretical lenses are used to examine such phenomena as globalization, media, popular culture, technology, youth culture, and schooling. This groundbreaking volume (...) helps readers understand the history, evolution, and significance of this wide-ranging, often misunderstood, and increasingly important field of study. This book is appropriate as a reference volume not only for scholars in the social foundations of education but also for scholars interested in the cultural contexts of teaching and learning. It is also appropriate as a textbook for graduate-level courses in Social Foundations of Education, School and Society, Educational Policy Studies, Cultural Studies in Education, and Curriculum and Instruction. (shrink)

El objetivo del estudio se orientó a analizar el desarrollo socioemocional de niños(as) con habilidades diferentes que participaron en actividades de equinoterapia en la ciudad de Lima. La muestra del estudio, realizado con diseño fenomenológico, estuvo constituida por los padres o madres de familia que participaron en la implementación de actividades de equinoterapia y ofrecieron información de sus hijos(as) con autismo, síndrome de Down o trastorno por déficit de atención con y sin hiperactividad. El recojo de datos se utilizó un (...) cuestionario de preguntas abiertas que se enfocaron en las áreas social y emocional del desarrollo de niños(as), el cual fue administrado a 25 informantes, número que se alcanzó por saturación. Se encontró como resultado que los(as) niños(as) que participan en actividades de equinoterapia con enfoque holístico se ve favorecido su desarrollo socioemocional, referente a la relación de apego y control de emociones en el área emocional, y las relaciones. (shrink)

Volume 20, Issue 5, June 2020, Page 72-74.

Researchers have documented negative physical and emotional consequences for both family caregivers of persons with cancer as well as caregivers of persons with a neurologic disorder. However, there is a unique subset of caregivers who must provide care for someone who may suffer from both a short, terminal trajectory of disease, as well as neurological and neuropsychiatric sequelae — the caregiver of a person with a primary malignant brain tumor. The purpose of this article was to describe a conceptual framework (...) for providing care for a person with a primary malignant brain tumor. The demands of this particular care situation are described, as well as potential resources available to the caregiver to meet those demands. Finally, the stress response that results from the balance between care demands and caregiver resources is illustrated. Development of a conceptual framework for this caregiving population is the first step in assisting nurses to identify factors that place caregivers of persons with a primary malignant brain tumor at risk for negative consequences, and to design interventions to improve caregiver health. (shrink)

During much of U.S. history, Black women had higher employment rates than white women. But by the late twentieth century, women in more privileged racial/ethnic, national origin, and education groups were more likely to work for pay. The authors compare the employment of white women to Blacks and three groups of Latinas—Mexicans, Cubans, and Puerto Ricans—and explain racial/ethnic group differences. White women work for pay more weeks per year than Latinas or Black women, although the gaps are small for all (...) groups but Mexicans. In all groups, education encourages and children reduce employment. Having a husband does not reduce employment, and husbands’ earnings have little effect. The higher fertility of Mexicans and the large number of recent immigrants among Mexican women reduce their employment relative to that of white women. The higher education of white women explains large shares of the employment gap with each group of women of color because, in today’s labor market, education strongly predicts employment. (shrink)

Packed with ideas designed to help children learn to sing, this booklet offers criteria for selecting songs, strategies to bring out the best in children's voices, and suggestions for games, ideas, and resources.

The prevention, treatment and management of disease are closely linked to how the causes of a particular disease are explained. For multi-factorial conditions, the causal explanations are inevitably complex and competing models may exist to explain the same condition. Selecting one particular causal explanation over another will carry practical and ethical consequences that are acutely relevant for health policy. In this paper our focus is two-fold; the different models of causal explanation that are put forward within current scientific literature for (...) the high and rising prevalence of the common complex conditions of coronary artery disease and type 2 diabetes mellitus ; and how these explanations are taken up within national health policy guidelines. We examine the causal explanations for these two conditions through a systematic database search of current scientific literature. By identifying different causal explanations we propose a three-tier taxonomy of the most prominent models of explanations: evolutionary, lifecourse, and lifestyle and environment. We elaborate this taxonomy with a micro-level thematic analysis to illustrate how some explanations are semantically and rhetorically foregrounded over others. We then investigate the uptake of the scientific causal explanations in health policy documents with regard to the prevention and management recommendations of current National Service Frameworks for CAD and T2D. Our findings indicate a lack of congruence between the complexity and frequent overlap of causal explanations evident in the scientific literature and the predominant focus on lifestyle recommendations found in the mainstream health policy documents. (shrink)

Although previous studies have found that video games induce stress, studies have not typically measured all salient indicators of stress responses including stress appraisals, cardiovascular indicators, and emotion outcomes. The current study used the Biopsychosocial Model of Challenge and Threat (Blascovich & Tomaka, 1996) to determine if video games induce a cardiovascular stress response by comparing the effects of threat and challenge appraisals across two types of video games that have shown different cardiovascular outcomes. Participants received challenge or threat appraisal (...) instructions, and played a fighting game (Mortal Kombat) or a puzzle game (Tetris). Study outcomes were heart rate variability, systolic and diastolic blood pressure, and positive and negative emotion ratings measured before, during and after gameplay. Results indicated that threat appraisal instructions increased negative emotion ratings and decreased heart rate variability, but not blood pressure, which is an essential marker for cardiovascular stress responses. Increased blood pressure and decreased heart rate variability was associated with fighting game players when compared with the puzzle game players, indicating a cardiovascular stress response; however, fighting game players also reported higher positive emotion ratings. Based on the study findings, video games do not induce stress responses like mental stressors used in previous research, demonstrating that the interactive player experience in video gaming may have more complex effects on stress outcomes. Future research should comprehensively measure biopsychosocial stress indicators and multiple emotional states over time to fully examine the relationship between video games and stress. (shrink)

O presente artigo consiste no registro de memórias de um diretor e de uma diretora que atuaram em escolas públicas de M inas Gerais, e na análise de suas narrativas. O objetivo foi captar suas representações sobre as práticas administrativas e pedagógicas rememoradas dos anos de exercício profissional. Com a metodologia da história oral, nossa investigação buscou construir uma interpretação a respeito de atitudes, posturas e práticas enraizadas nos rituais da escola contemporânea. Pudemos observar que no período estudado havia uma (...) política extremamente centralizada, cujas diretrizes eram difundidas pelos órgãos centrais da administração burocrática. O trabalho de gestão das unidades escolares era pautado, principalmente, pelo controle do cumprimento das normas estabelecidas pela política pública de educação. (shrink)

Abstract:Vulnerability is an important criterion to assess the ethical justification of the inclusion of participants in research trials. Currently, vulnerability is often understood as an attribute inherent to a participant by nature of a diagnosed condition. Accordingly, a common ethical concern relates to the participant’s decisionmaking capacity and ability to provide free and informed consent. We propose an expanded view of vulnerability that moves beyond a focus on consent and the intrinsic attributes of participants. We offer specific suggestions for how (...) relational aspects and the dynamic features of vulnerability could be more fully captured in current discussions and research practices. (shrink)

La violencia de género contra las mujeres está relacionada con la desigualdad de género y se entiende que es la interrupción de cualquier forma de integridad de las mujeres. Puede ser del tipo físico, sexual, psicológico, patrimonial, económica o moral y puede ocurrir tanto en el entorno privado-familiar, como en el trabajo y los espacios públicos. La violencia de género tiene un impacto en la salud y la calidad de vida de las mujeres y puede generalizarse en entornos universitarios, lo (...) que también implica el desarrollo académico de las mujeres. El presente estudio tuvo como objetivo analizar la evidencia sobre la prevalencia de la violencia de género en estudiantes universitarias y sus factores asociados. Esta es una revisión integral de la literatura realizada en las bases de datos LILACS, PubMed, CINAHL, ERIC y ASSIA, en la que 22 artículos cumplieron con los criterios de selección. La evidencia disponible en la literatura ha indicado diferentes formas de violencia de género en mujeres universitarias perpetradas por parejas íntimas y otros agresores. La prevalencia de la violencia de género en las estudiantes universitarias informadas en los estudios varió entre el 1,3% y el 85%, difiriendo según el tipo de violencia. La violencia está asociada a factores sociales y de comportamiento, ya que las estudiantes más jóvenes tuvieron tasas más altas de violencia, así como aquellos de raza/etnia no blanca, aquellos que se identificaron como homosexuales o bisexuales y los que tenían un historial de victimización Anterior. Las pruebas sobre el uso de alcohol y otras drogas por parte de las mujeres y la participación en hermandades sociales diferían según el tipo de violencia. Por lo tanto, se concluye que la prevalencia de la violencia de género en la población de estudiantes universitarias varía según su tipificación, en su mayoría es perpetrada por hombres cercanos a ellas y está asociada con marcadores sociales. (shrink)

For years, both psychologists and the general public have been fascinated with the notion that there are gender differences in cognitive abilities; even now, flashy cover stories exploiting this idea dominate major news magazines, while research focuses on differences in verbal, mathematical, spatial, and scientific abilities across gender. This new volume in the Counterpoints series not only summarizes and addresses the validity of such research, but also questions its ideology and consequences. Why do we search so intently for these differences? (...) And what are the social and cultural implications of this relentless emphasis? Do biological mechanisms, in fact, contribute to the male-female differences in cognition? These are just a few of the questions generated by this controversial topic as it is debated throughout the book. (shrink)

This paper provides a systematic description and analysis of the non-predictive use of the Italian future. Several authors claim that, on this use, the Italian future is an evidential (Squartini 2001, Mari 2010, Eckardt and Beltrama 2019, Frana and Menéndez-Benito 2019 ). Others argue that the non-predictive future does not directly contribute an evidential signal (e.g., Giannakidou and Mari 2018, Farkas and Ippolito 2022 ). We side with the evidential camp. From an empirical standpoint, we present the results of a (...) battery of tests that show that the non-predictive future patterns with evidentials cross-linguistically. From a theoretical standpoint, we put forward an analysis that combines a slightly modified version of the proposal for evidentials in Davis et al. ( 2007 ) with Schlenker’s ( 2007 ) view of expressive content. On this account, the Italian evidential future (i) lowers the quality threshold required to perform a successful speech act (Davis et al. 2007 ) and (ii) triggers an evidential presupposition relativized to the speaker’s beliefs (modeled after Schlenker’s analysis of expressives). Our treatment of the evidential component as an expressive presupposition opens up a new perspective on the study of evidentiality and highlights the need for further detailed empirical studies exploring the extent to which this perspective is applicable cross-linguistically. (shrink)

The article regards children’s literature as a certain cultural tool. This approach enables to reveal various characteristic aspects of the poetics of children’sliterature, while relating them to children’s cognitive and cultural development. Focusing on a book series Paula’s Life by Estonian author Aino Pervik, it can beseen how two different ways of understanding — the initial, so-called mythological type of thinking of preschoolers and the emerging conceptual thinking — arecombined.The article draws mostly on the concepts of cultural psychology and (...) the authors of Tartu–Moscow school of semiotics, who have elaborated the idea thatproper names form one of the central components of mythological consciousness, the latter being comparable to “the language of proper names”. The main attention is drawn on the functioning of names and the topic of naming and categorizing in these texts. (shrink)

The article regards children’s literature as a certain cultural tool. This approach enables to reveal various characteristic aspects of the poetics of children’s literature, while relating them to children’s cognitive and cultural development. Focusing on a book series Paula’s Life by Estonian author Aino Pervik, it can be seen how two different ways of understanding — the initial, so-called mythological type of thinking of preschoolers and the emerging conceptual thinking — are combined. The article draws mostly on the concepts (...) of cultural psychology and the authors of Tartu–Moscow school of semiotics, who have elaborated the idea that proper names form one of the central components of mythological consciousness, the latter being comparable to “the language of proper names”. The main attention is drawn on the functioning of names and the topic of naming and categorizing in these texts. (shrink)

The article regards children’s literature as a certain cultural tool. This approach enables to reveal various characteristic aspects of the poetics of children’sliterature, while relating them to children’s cognitive and cultural development. Focusing on a book series Paula’s Life by Estonian author Aino Pervik, it can beseen how two different ways of understanding — the initial, so-called mythological type of thinking of preschoolers and the emerging conceptual thinking — arecombined.The article draws mostly on the concepts of cultural psychology and (...) the authors of Tartu–Moscow school of semiotics, who have elaborated the idea thatproper names form one of the central components of mythological consciousness, the latter being comparable to “the language of proper names”. The main attention is drawn on the functioning of names and the topic of naming and categorizing in these texts. (shrink)

The article regards children’s literature as a certain cultural tool. This approach enables to reveal various characteristic aspects of the poetics of children’sliterature, while relating them to children’s cognitive and cultural development. Focusing on a book series Paula’s Life by Estonian author Aino Pervik, it can beseen how two different ways of understanding — the initial, so-called mythological type of thinking of preschoolers and the emerging conceptual thinking — arecombined.The article draws mostly on the concepts of cultural psychology and (...) the authors of Tartu–Moscow school of semiotics, who have elaborated the idea thatproper names form one of the central components of mythological consciousness, the latter being comparable to “the language of proper names”. The main attention is drawn on the functioning of names and the topic of naming and categorizing in these texts. (shrink)

El desafío científico-político de coproducir y proveer "servicios climáticos" en el sudeste de Sudamérica / Cecilia Hidalgo -- Coproducción, ciencia y activismo : empoderamiento epistémico y retórico de activistas seropositivos en la Argentina / Emiliano Marello -- Coproducción en lactancia materna y alimentación del niño pequeño / Pablo Duran -- Coproducción de conocimientos entre especialistas y docentes mediados por una plataforma virtual gubernamental / Marisa Álvarez, Verónica Xhardez y Marcela Pologna -- Conocimiento científico, performatividad e interacción social: compromisos filosófico-sociológicos / (...) María de los A. Martini -- Aportes para un lenguaje de la coproducción / María Laura Martínez -- Ciencia, retórica y semiótica / Robert C. Marafioti -- La cuestión de la agencia en el discurso coproduccionista / Sergio Russo -- Aprendices de brujos : interludios y variaciones en la antropología de la ciencia / Adriana A. Stagnaro -- Una teoría sociológica del conocimiento humano / Florencia Rimoldi -- El conocimiento en la comunicación : aportes pragmatikstas apra la disoluciónd e la imagen clásica del conocimiento científico / Paula Rossi. (shrink)

_Peter Greenaway's Postmodern/Poststructuralist Cinema_ Edited by Paula Willoquet-Maricondi and Mary Alemany-Galway Lanham, MD: The Scarecrow Press, 2001 ISBN 0-8108-3892-3 xxviii + 360 pp.

In The Women of Grub Street (1998), Paula McDowell highlighted the fact that the overwhelming majority of women’s texts in early modern England were polemical or religio-political in nature rather than literary in content. Since that time, the study of early modern women’s political ideas has dramatically increased, and there have been a number of recent anthologies, modern editions, and critical analyses of female political writings. As a result of Patricia Springborg’s research, Mary Astell (1668-1731) has risen to prominence (...) as one of the most astute female political commentators of her day. Springborg argues for Astell’s importance as one of the first systematic critics of the philosopher John Locke, and she interprets Astell’s political thought as a reaction to Lockean Whig politics in the early reign of Queen Anne. But some scholars claim that it is a mistake to think that Astell was chiefly preoccupied with Locke, and others suggest that reading Astell in relation to Locke alone can distort our understanding of her larger political theory. In this chapter, I argue that a more accurate picture of Astell’s political outlook emerges by examining a little studied essay, ‘A Prefatory Discourse to Dr D’Aveanant’ in her 1704 work Moderation Truly Stated. In this critique of Charles Davenant’s Essays upon Peace at Home, and War Abroad (1704), Astell provides a commentary on the political ruthlessness of Niccolo Machiavelli in his Discourses on Livy. Astell’s comments reveal that, in an age in which the political vocabulary was turning to the language of rights, property, and liberty, she still subscribed to the ancient world view, and the ethical-political language of virtue and the good. My intention is to show that these ethical dimensions of Astell’s political thought are consonant with her wider philosophy. (shrink)

The core of the problem discussed in this paper is the following: the Church-Turing Thesis states that Turing Machines formally explicate the intuitive concept of computability. The description of Turing Machines requires description of the notation used for the input and for the output. Providing a general definition of notations acceptable in the process of computations causes problems. This is because a notation, or an encoding suitable for a computation, has to be computable. Yet, using the concept of computation, in (...) a definition of a notation, which will be further used in a definition of the concept of computation yields an obvious vicious circle. The circularity of this definition causes trouble in distinguishing on the theoretical level, what is an acceptable notation from what is not an acceptable notation, or as it is usually referred to in the literature, “deviant encodings”. Deviant encodings appear explicitly in discussions about what is an adequate or correct conceptual analysis of the concept of computation. In this paper, I focus on philosophical examples where the phenomenon appears implicitly, in a “disguised” version. In particular, I present its use in the analysis of the concept of natural number. I also point at additional phenomena related to deviant encodings: conceptual fixed points and apparent “computability” of uncomputable functions. In parallel, I develop the idea that Carnapian explications provide a much more adequate framework for understanding the concept of computation, than the classical philosophical analysis. (shrink)

In this chapter, I argue that the insurrectionist ethics initially articulated by Leonard Harris, and further developed by other scholars such as Lee McBride III, Jacoby Carter, and Kristie Dotson, can fruitfully be deployed to understand how resistance movements and liberatory struggles have been framed in Mexico by some prominent intellectuals. To be more precise, I argue that one can read the historical work México a través de los siglos. El Virreinato from the nineteenth century Mexican historian and novelist Vicente (...) Riva Palacio as articulating a form of insurrectionist ethics adapted to the Mexican context to the extent that it exemplifies the core features that Harris identifies in insurrectionist ethics. (shrink)

El objetivo del artículo es operacionalizar teóricamente la complementariedad significativa, de tres niveles de significación social (representaciones sociales, imaginarios y mitologías), a través de la construcción discursiva en la prensa alternativa digital chilena. A nivel metodológico, se aplica el análisis de contenido cualitativo, analizando dos notas de prensa pertenecientes a El Desconcierto y El Mostrador, haciendo alusión a la temática de la Marcha más Grande de Chile acaecida durante el Estallido Social de 2019. En términos de hallazgos y conclusiones se (...) evidencia a nivel teórico y operativo la estrecha dialéctica y complementariedad entre las tres nociones teóricas de significación mencionadas. (shrink)

Though it is held that some models in science have explanatory value, there is no conclusive agreement on what provides them with this value. One common view is that models have explanatory value vis-à-vis some target systems because they are developed using an abstraction process. Though I think this is correct, I believe it is not the whole picture. In this paper, I argue that, in addition to the well-known process of abstraction understood as an omission of features or information, (...) there is also a family of abstraction processes that involve aggregation of features or information and that these processes play an important role in endowing the models they are used to build with explanatory value. After offering a taxonomy of abstraction processes involving aggregation, I show by considering in detail several models drawn from different sciences that the abstraction processes involving aggregation that are used to build these models are responsible for their having explanatory value. (shrink)

Mixing methods is a well-known innovative meth- odologic proposal for research in the second half of the 20th century social sciences. Reading literature about it, I observed the aspect that justifies this paper: Authors of theoretical contributions on mixing methods recognized that this was known to be a practice already in use many centuries ago. Some of them even have re-examined the whole history of the scientific method to search precedents. They are however individual and theoretical precedents. I add in (...) this paper the practical projection of these and other methodological theories on people’s training from Greek classical times. My hypothesis is that liberal arts was the basic syllabus in Western -and westernized- educaion for more than a millennium in such a way that results of their training precisely involved to mixing methods. In return, to understand the liberal arts in the light of mixing methods shows new aspects of their historical interest. I study the theoretical basis of this syllabus from Cicero to Alcuin. More important for future research, I conclude that Alcuin’s thesis about the correspondence between the gifts of the Holy Spiritu and the seven liberal arts can be extended to the Aristotelian dianoethics habits and to Dilthey’s 20th-century sciences of mind. (shrink)

Though Indigenous women in Mexico have traditionally exhibited some of the highest levels of maternal mortality in the country—a fact that some authors have argued was an important reason to explain the EZLN uprising in 1994—there is some evidence that the rate of maternal mortality has fallen in Zapatista communities in the Chiapas Highlands in the last two decades, and that other health indicators have improved. In this article, we offer an account of the modest success that Zapatista communities have (...) achieved in improving their health levels. In particular, we argue that Zapatista women have implicitly used a form of feminist standpoint theory to diagnose the epistemic (and economic) injustice to which they have been traditionally subjected and to develop an epistemology of resistance that is manifested in actions such as becoming health promoters in their communities. We also argue that this epistemology of resistance is partially responsible for the improvement of health levels in their communities. Finally, on the basis of our discussion of the Zapatista case, we suggest that standpoint theory could play an important role in other healthcare settings involving oppressed minorities. (shrink)

Some commentators have condemned Kant’s moral project from a feminist perspective based on Kant’s apparently dim view of women as being innately morally deficient. Here I will argue that although his remarks concerning women are unsettling at first glance, a more detailed and closer examination shows that Kant’s view of women is actually far more complex and less unsettling than that attributed to him by various feminist critics. My argument, then, undercuts the justification for the severe feminist critique of Kant’s (...) moral project. (shrink)

El artículo pretende evidenciar la dimensión política –en un sentido amplio– de la confesión y la inquisición en su emergencia como procedimientos para sentenciar el pecado oculto. Lo hace al insertar ambos en las formas duales, pastorales y jurídicas, que desarrolla el gobierno eclesiástico plenomedieval para la condena de la inobediencia a la nueva ortodoxia y ortopraxis romana. A este respecto, los dispositivos confesional e inquisitorial se comprenden en relación con la emergencia de lo herético como impugnación obstinada al gobierno (...) romano –en la tensión entre el gobierno de sí y de los otros–. (shrink)

La literatura especializada ha solido reproducir la distinción scheleriana entre “actos” y “funciones” sin aventurar, por lo general, una justificación teórica satisfactoria de la misma; la cual tampoco es ofrecida con claridad por el fenomenólogo muniqués. En este artículo propongo una interpretación de dichos conceptos que ayude a clarificarlos y que haga comprensible su diferenciación. Se comprobará que la distinción entre acto y función es de importancia decisiva para la antropología filosófica y, en particular, para el contraste entre el “mundo” (...) (Welt) de la persona humana y el “entorno” (Umwelt) del animal. Como contribución al tratamiento de tales cuestiones, plenamente vigentes un siglo después de la muerte de Scheler, me permito introducir el concepto adicional de “mera función”. (shrink)

Classical logic has proved inadequate in various areas of computer science, artificial intelligence, mathematics, philosopy and linguistics. This is an introduction to extensions of first-order logic, based on the principle that many-sorted logic (MSL) provides a unifying framework in which to place, for example, second-order logic, type theory, modal and dynamic logics and MSL itself. The aim is two fold: only one theorem-prover is needed; proofs of the metaproperties of the different existing calculi can be avoided by borrowing them from (...) MSL. To make the book accessible to readers from different disciplines, whilst maintaining precision, the author has supplied detailed step-by-step proofs, avoiding difficult arguments, and continually motivating the material with examples. Consequently this can be used as a reference, for self-teaching or for first-year graduate courses. (shrink)

In this paper, we explore the connections between the culinary art and the poetic work by Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. In particular, following a detailed study of the analogies between, on the one hand, food and culinary preparation, and on the other hand, poetry and composition, we show that culinary art functions as cause and catalyst of Sor Juana’s poetic creation. Also, we show that, for the hieronymite nun, there is an intimate and profound relation between good seasoning, (...) beauty and moral good. (shrink)

The author asks whether there was a “scientific ‘68”, and focuses on aspects of two specific methodological proposals defined in the 1940s and 50s by the terms “action research” and “mixing methods”, applied particularly to social sciences. In the first, the climate surrounding the events of 1968 contributed to heightening the participative element to be found –by definition– in “action research”; that is: the importance of making the research subjects themselves participants in the design, execution and application of the study (...) of which they are the focus. This approach captured the democratic and anti-authoritarian spirit at the heart of the proposal, which was part of the prevailing climate in those days. The repercussions of 1968 on “mixing methods” focused on studying what had actually occurred, especially between the youth and workers, and therefore, particularly from the point of view of sociology and social psychology, using a “mixed methods” approach. The author explores the proposal of Norman Denzin; but traces the recent origins of both “mixing methods” and “action research” back to the proposals of mainly Kurt Lewin and the Chicago School. (shrink)

The study identified the level of competencies and the extent of professional development needs of kindergarten teachers in the Sultan Kudarat Division, during the school year 2019 - 2020. The study employed a descriptive method. The study involved 54 kindergarten teachers in the division in accomplishing the 12-item self-assessment instrument. Data were analyzed using descriptive statistics. The results revealed that kindergarten teachers have a high level of competencies in content knowledge and pedagogy, learning environment and diversity of learners, curriculum and (...) planning, and assessment and reporting. These indicate that they possess almost all of the competencies of efficient teachers. Results further revealed a very high extent of professional needs in content knowledge and pedagogy and the learning environment and diversity of learners, while they had a high extent of professional needs in the remaining domains. Since they reported very high priorities in content knowledge and pedagogy and the learning environment and diversity of learners, these areas would be the main considerations in the crafting of a professional development plan. (shrink)