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This article offers an update on key developments in research related visual literacy, children's reading and children's literature. Beginning with an overview of the field, we chart several distinctive 'turns' or research trajectories: the aesthetic, the intercultural or empathic, and the ethical. We then consider how questions of power, authenticity and representation are visible in three important areas of the field: research with marginalised groups; research that focuses on mediation within the visual reading process; advances in the types of visual texts being used in research. Key emergent ideas include the challenges of adult mediators' expectations on children's visual reading, the potential of texts' material affordances, and new directions in open, more inclusive opportunities to respond to, and with, visual texts. We conclude with a hopeful look forward at emerging directions in policy and research.

Both in the United States and the United Kingdom there has been a recent resurgence of interest and support for "new localism" in response to the need to provide local solutions to national complex problems. In this paper, the authors begin by exploring the contextual framework in the U.S. and the UK, explaining recent policy reform and development in the two countries. The authors then provide a framework based upon the UK experience for bringing localism together as a coherent strategy for education reform. (Contains 2 figures, 3 tables and 3 notes.)

This study attempts to further our understanding of how expertise is acquired in a specific vocational context. Using unstructured interviews with both individuals and groups, carried out whilst engaged in practice, it examines what happens when dry stone wallers are developing their skills, how they gain expertise and how they communicate their learning. It was concluded that learning a craft such as dry stone walling is complex and individual. Learning was clearly contextualised and did not take place in linear stages. The use of maxims or "rules of thumb" was a key element in the learning process, and the use of tacit knowledge and intuition were much in evidence as expertise developed. By questioning whether expertise can be achieved by following a set of rules, or that it progresses in a specific, set direction, the study also highlights the reflective and emotional aspects of becoming an "expert" that are likely to be relevant to other vocational areas.

The article discusses the American influence on the movement for a national system of elementary education in England and Wales during 1830-1870. In 1826 it was enacted in Massachusetts that the school committee shall never direct to be purchased or used, in any of the town schools, any school books which are calculated to favour the tenets of any particular sect of Christians. It was legally permissible until 1855 for there to be no religious teaching whatever and this freedom was very similar to that permitted to Board schools under the Cowper-Temple clause of the Elementary Education Act of 1870. However, until a Board of Education was established in Massachusetts in 1837 there were serious defects in the common school system arising from the lack of any supervising Board. Until 1867 political controversy centred about the extension of the franchise, and when a Liberal government came into power with a large majority in November 1868 the main task confronting the government was the pacification of Ireland. The question of national education did not come to the front of the political stage until the autumn of 1867.

The article discusses role of the Birds Directives in wildlife conservation of Thames Estuary river in Great Britain, including surveys organized by National Wildfowl Counts (NWC) and Convention of Wetlands of International Importance, a contract signed in Ramasar, Iran.