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Workplaces and employees' health are closely connected. A healthy workforce would increase productivity, effectivity and efficiency which will benefit the employer in financial and moral terms as well. On the contrary, if employees experience stress, long working hours, bad managerial style, not safe working conditions that would lead to ill physical and mental health and poor lifestyle habits like lack of exercises, smoking, drinking and inadequate diets. Our research was carried out at faculties of the University of Szeged (n = 261). Data acquisition was online, with the help of a self-completed questionnaire distributed through e-mail. Apart from basic socio-demographic data the questionnaire contained questions referring to employees' nutrition-, exercising-, sporting-, and leisure habits, visiting the doctor and their smoking and alcohol consumption frequency. To sum all findings up, we can say that employees of the University of Szeged are concerned about their health and act for preserving and promoting it. They strive at creating a good well-being. Their health behaviour is acceptable and can mean a suitable example for the young adult generation.

This case tells the story of a new principal who wants to lead inclusively by including people of all religious and non-religious beliefs. When she questions some of the existing practices in her school, she faces resistance from school members and from the community, who question her identity, her intentions, and her authority. The case is intended for use in leadership courses and highlights some dilemmas of inclusive leadership around religion, as well as those found in the intersectionality of religion, race, and gender.

Walter Benjamin, cultural critic and philosopher, compiled "Berlin childhood around 1900" (trans. Howard Eiland, 2006) while in exile from Germany in the early 1930s, filtering impressions of a privileged childhood through a politicised adult consciousness. Erich Kästner, journalist, poet, satirist and author of the children's classic "Emil and the detectives" (1929), offered in his "When I was a little boy" (1957, trans. Isabel and Florence McHugh, 1959) a hymn to the lost city of Dresden, the expression of an enduring mother fixation, and a vision of the child's moral responsibility. Both sets of memoirs convey in engaging or poetic prose transcendent sensations of childhood, but are at odds in their underlying purposes. Indeed, Max Pensky has argued that the memories "Kästner wants to preserve as a nourishing light, Benjamin wishes to exploit as an arsenal". Both had a pedagogical purpose, addressed to children and adults respectively. A comparison of selected themes these texts share--anxiety at Christmas and perspectives on the social topography of the city--throws light on commonalities in the representation of the thought processes of two hyper-aware children, as well as on paradoxes inherent in adult reconfigurations of the past.

This philosophical study addresses the implications of the legal case "Stratechuk v. Board of Education" ruling that a policy prohibiting the performance of religious-themed holiday music did not violate the United States Constitution. Two questions are investigated: the differences between the classroom study and public performance of religious music, and the study of holiday music as a subgenre of religious music. Conclusions suggest that a school policy delineating between the rehearsal and performance of sacred music fails to appreciate the interrelationship of these musical practices. While this type of policy attempts to resolve controversy by moving sacred music out of public performance spaces it does not succeed in addressing the underlying philosophical tensions involved in the curricular use of sacred music. Further, a policy that allows the musical celebration of only secular aspects of particular holidays unnecessarily privileges secular over religious meanings and thus limits students' contextual understanding of the holiday. The academic performance of sacred music within the comprehensive study of a given holiday should not constitute an endorsement of particular religious beliefs, or violate an appropriate position of religious neutrality.

National Day, or Constitution Day, in Norway, May 17, is often referred to as Children's Day. On this day, thousands of young Norwegian students march in parades and participate in celebrations in schoolyards and similar meeting places. Some students are selected to give speeches, performed in front of family members, neighbors, classmates, and most often teachers and the school principal. We analyzed 30 speech manuscripts, 12 from 2011 and 18 from 2012, and examined how the Constitution is expressed by a selection of topoi. The present study is the first one to examine how students engage in the constitution by giving speeches. Thus, our paper provides new insights into contemporary conceptions about the Constitution, as well as how students act in terms of school, society, and democracy.

Children's books about the Thanksgiving holiday offer a superlative example of America's supposedly innocent interactions with "Indians." In this essay, we describe how representations of "Indians" in children's Thanksgiving books are often used to promote a Manifest Destiny ideology, we correct basic "facts" about the "first" Thanksgiving, and we urge educators to employ decolonizing and indigenizing pedagogical strategies when teaching about Thanksgiving in order to better explain America's historical relation to "Indians" in their classrooms.

For many teachers, trying to organize a Halloween celebration has become more of a trick than a treat. Some religious groups protest the observance of what they consider a pagan celebration and administrators fret about maintaining security during events that are, by definition, wild. Even educators complain that class time devoted to candy corn parties would be better spent on math and science. Some critics want to know why a school can have witches in October, but cannot have Jesus in December. No single approach to Halloween will succeed everywhere, as opinions on the holiday vary widely from one community to the next. Schools ought to look beyond Halloween and establish a comprehensive policy on all classroom holiday observance, so that the issue does not return throughout the year. In this article, the author suggests that schools should consider initiating the development of a holiday policy, if they do not have one, by involving parents, elected officials, and religious groups in the discussion.

Despite this generation's media savvy, they are often not particularly historically savvy: they do not always realize when they are being misled, nor do they have the critical thinking skills to uncover hidden messages or to challenge ideas that come to them through commemorative history. Yet their daily interactions with media not only increase the imperative that they develop this critical perspective, but also ensure that they have a foundation laid for such a critique. As young people navigating advertisements all the time through the media landscape, they can indeed be encouraged to apply that sensibility to the historical landscape as well. History teachers can create opportunities for students to develop historical consciousness through deliberately exploring questions about how history is being interpreted in the public realm; how it is being used for some social, political, or economic purpose; and how it is shaped to tell us our values as a community. To this cause, this article offers a sample lesson used by the author in a senior seminar that can be adjusted for nearly any level of history student.

This task-based study, designed with Helm and Guth's (2010) Telecollaboration 2.0 framework in mind, qualitatively investigated a telecollaborative exchange. Two second language (L2) Spanish participants and three L2 English participants carried out a six-week e-mail exchange that centered on specific holidays, giving researchers an opportunity to study participants' intercultural communicative competence (ICC) (Byram, 1997) and how participants critically analyzed and discussed cultural aspects of an L2 language (Klein & Solem, 2008). Participants' exchanges revealed the following: (1) each participant's thoughts on his/her partner's culture as was perceived through L2 instruction, (2) each partner's reaction to perceptions and insight to cultural reality, and (3) sharing of personal anecdotes. Patterns in exchanges were analyzed using NVivo 10 software with a data-driven, hybrid analytical approach. Thematic categories were created from the data and used to code the e-mail exchanges and subsequently correlated to Helm and Guth's (2010) framework. Results indicated that participants using a Web 1.0 resource experienced transformation through the telecollaboration. Researchers concluded that more nuanced categories were needed to assess ICC to understand the intricacies of online collaborative exchanges. Researchers believed that Web 1.0, in the absence of Web 2.0, remained a valuable venue for telecollaboration.

This article examines the socio-cultural significance of birthday cakes with the purpose of reflecting upon birthday cake practices enacted in four early childhood settings in England. I argue that birthday cakes occupy an ambiguous place in early childhood practice: seen to be both "risky"--a term I problematise--"and" important in terms of the rituals each setting had developed in relation to them. The research also highlights the way in which children appropriate the medium of birthday cakes in their pretend play, creating birthday cakes from a range of resources to initiate contact with practitioners and peers. Despite the positive framing of birthday cakes in early childhood settings adopted in this article, it is important to recognise the Othering of some families' food practices that takes place through the vehicle of foods such as birthday cakes brought from home. In addition, the rituals associated with birthday cakes might also be conceptualised as an enactment of "groupism" as opposed to a celebration of individual identity. Nevertheless, it is argued that birthday cakes should not be prohibited in early childhood settings. To do so would ignore the meanings that are attached to certain foods and the practices associated with them.

State and national initiatives have compelled significant change in English language arts and social studies/history curricula. English language arts teachers are required to balance fiction (or literature) and nonfiction (or informational texts), which is a considerable change for a content area formerly occupied by fiction (National Governors Association Center for Best Practices & Council of Chief State School Officers [NGA Center & CCSSO], 2010). Social studies/history teachers are expected to juxtapose primary and secondary accounts, a similarly sizable adjustment for a content area previously dominated by textbooks (National Council for the Social Studies, 2013; NGA Center & CCSSO, 2010). Beginning in elementary school, students are now assessed on their close readings of rich, complex, and (sometimes) competing primary and secondary accounts of the same event, era, or topic (Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers, 2012). Thus, the new emphases on diverse literature and discipline-specific literacies compel change in erstwhile patterns of fiction in English classrooms and textbooks in history classrooms (McMurrer, 2008; Wilton & Bickford, 2012). Trade books are relatively inexpensive and intended for young students and have engaging narratives; numerous trade books appear for most historical topics represented in school curricula (Schwebel, 2011). Trade books, in comparison with textbooks and primary source material, appear the logical choice for elementary teachers' restructuring of their curricula to meet the rigorous expectations of state and national initiatives. This article examines Thanksgiving, and the surrounding people and events, because of its prominence in elementary curricula. As an oft-included elementary social studies topic, authors and publishers have produced a vast pool of possible trade books about the Pilgrims, the "Mayflower," Plymouth Colony, and Thanksgiving for teachers' selection. Teachers, however, might be unaware of each book's historical representation of the people, events, and era. Knowing that children's authors cannot provide the detail that historians do, the authors of this article investigated the historical content that was included (and omitted) and how--focusing on two research questions: (1) How is Thanksgiving historically represented within children's books? and (2) What do intermediate elementary students learn that is new and different from what they learned in the primary grades?

The article examines not-so-evident influences of postmodernism on modern Russian education, its values and norms. At school, children have to face inadequate competitions and carry out projects, which are irrelevant to their experience and even age. During holiday festivities, the rejection and oblivion of traditional culture and core human values becomes even more blatant. In the meantime, schoolteachers are loaded with paperwork and have to conform to new educational standards, while parents are forced to find some out-of-school solutions to the existing learning environment. The author reveals that postmodernism is, in fact, deeply rooted in Russian everyday life, filling it with absurdities and simulacra. [This article was translated by Kenneth Cargill.]

Teachers' beliefs regarding civil sanctity were studied in the context of their pedagogical activities regarding two Israeli national memorial days--Yitzhak Rabin Memorial Day and Holocaust Remembrance Day. Interviews were conducted with 30 educators in six secular and six religious junior high schools with diverse populations and 12 memorial ceremonies were observed. Teachers' beliefs regarding civil sanctity were revealed. These include the relationship between civil and religious sanctity, how sanctity is represented pedagogically, the existence of hierarchies of sanctity in schools and processes of sanctification and desanctification in schools.

This article identifies historical and contemporary influences of religion in US public schooling. It provides analytical questions that social justice leaders can use to evaluate the practices embedded in their own schools, including an equity audit.

In Taiwan, English was only officially taught at the secondary and tertiary levels before 2001. Since 2001, English courses have been formally incorporated into the curriculum in primary schools. Research on teaching and assessing English in primary school education is relatively new compared with research on other levels of education in Taiwan. The present study investigated the degree to which games, songs, and stories helped increase primary school pupils' English vocabulary size and encouraged learning in an intensive English course. It also explored how different test techniques influenced pupils' performance on a vocabulary test. Seventy-two primary school pupils participated in the study. The results showed that games, songs, and stories had a positive effect on learning and increasing the pupils' English vocabulary. In the vocabulary test, the pupils in higher grades outperformed those in lower grades and performed differently in terms of test techniques.

While students of Islamic societies and cultures are aware of the influence of dynamics of honour and shame on behaviour, these factors are not always recognized by those who engage with Muslims in the UK. This paper will discuss the impact of concerns related to honour and shame on the behaviour of Muslim pupils in a Church of England primary school. It will first outline a scholarly understanding of honour and shame and how this relates to religious praxis. Second, three specific examples from the author's two years of fieldwork in a Church of England primary school will be used to illustrate the dynamics in the specific field site. These are responses to the celebration of Christmas in the school, responses to RE lessons, and negotiation of guitar lessons. These examples demonstrate how different pupils' concerns about honour and shame impacted behaviour, and also show that teaching staff in the school were not necessarily aware of the dynamics of honour and shame or of the different pupils' responses. The paper concludes with a discussion of how Christian teachers could respond to issues of honour and shame in order to be more able to cater for the needs of their Muslim pupils.

The increased diversity in pupils' cultural and ethnic backgrounds in schools creates urgent demands for the organization of school celebrations in many countries. Celebrations represent the cultural values of the society and it is important to find out how various traditions are expressed in them. This study examines teachers' and other educational staff members' perceptions of Finnish culture, Lutheran religiosity, and intercultural education relating to Christmas, Independence Day, and end-of-term celebrations in Finnish schools. The data of this paper consists of 12 thematic interviews, and participation in two school festivals. The interview data were analyzed qualitatively using content analysis. The analysis of this study shows that festivals are perceived as important parts of education and they can help to create a sense of national or cultural community. However, the intercultural potential of school celebrations is often not put to its full use. There exists an urgent need to create new ways of carrying out celebrations in multicultural school communities so that they would be meaningful for all students.

Formalized participation in professional service is not often part of the college experience, especially for first-year students in chemistry courses. When service opportunities are offered, they are most often through elective credit, upper-level courses, extracurricular clubs, and the rare service-learning courses. We have successfully incorporated a large science service-learning opportunity into the general chemistry laboratory that provides multidisciplinary educational experiences for children and the community. The experience for the college students involves several weeks of preparation for a two-week laboratory module and participation in the public event on the university campus. College students involved in the second year of the event were surveyed to determine the impact of formalized participation in professional service on their attitude toward science and participation in future professional service events. Highly positive responses on the surveys and public interest in the event suggest continuing and expanding on the science offerings in our geographic location. (Contains 3 tables and 2 figures.)

Teaching the Declaration of Independence can be a challenge. This article presents a lesson plan based on an explication of the title and the first three lines of the Declaration intended to make the American founding era relevant to today's college students. Assuming civic education is a major goal of teaching American Government, assuming founding documents are important to that goal, and assuming classical political philosophy is relevant to that goal, I present here 17 topics related to American Government derived from a line-by-line reading of the beginning of the Declaration: the American Revolution and classical political philosophy, Socrates, framing, the politics of holidays, consensus, state v. society, separation of church and state, standard of violence, unity, foreign policy, self-evident truths, equality, natural right, life, liberty, happiness, and self-government. Evidence reveals that this lesson plan challenges students to read the text closely and connects the founding era to current political issues.

This article explores the attitudes and experiences of key stage one and two children concerning the British autumn festival of Hallowe'en, and then compares the results with data on the attitudes and practices of British primary schools and their teachers towards the festival, showing that there is a discordance between the two. After outlining the historical and cultural background of Hallowe'en, the article proposes that if schools and teachers really wish to listen to the voices of children, and to comply with legal requirements that they promote the spiritual, moral, cultural, mental and physical development of pupils, then they should ensure that children are helped to make sense of the festival and the issues that it raises for contemporary society. The data for the study are based on a small-scale quantitative survey which used questionnaires with year two and six pupils in two contrasting geographical locations. (Contains 5 tables, 3 figures, and 1 note.)

The Thanksgiving Day holiday celebrated in the United States is generally traced to a first harvest celebration in the newly established Plymouth colony (present-day Massachusetts). Traditional storytelling describes the first Thanksgiving feast as having been attended by 53 Pilgrims (the European settlers) and 90 Native Americans. The holiday can bring up some very complex issues for discussion, however, when one considers the devastating effect of European colonization in North America on the indigenous societies. For teachers educated in the United States, "traditional" details of the Thanksgiving story frame our thinking from a very young age. This article presents discussions of Thanksgiving in a preschool class to show what becomes possible in early childhood classrooms when space is allowed for complexity, dialogue, multiple perspectives, and a divergence from the dominant, simple "happily ever afters" that are so often presented to young children. It represents a step in the direction of critical awareness and understanding from the perspectives of young children.

In Hawai'i's elementary schools, May Day programs feature children adorned with flower leis, singing and dancing hula about Hawaiian culture and performing traditions from major ethnic groups who settled the islands. Using the lens of geopathology, this research questions how various groups of residents long for belonging and struggle for emplacement through performances of culture on May Day. Following an ethnographic tradition, a collaborative research team attended May Day programs at elementary schools and interviewed a range of students, elders, teachers, administrators, parents, May Day coordinators, and arts specialists. The researchers processed themes in personal terms using auto-ethnographic reflections and original performances to bring multiple perspectives into dialogue. This critical discussion reveals four perceptions of May Day expressed by the study's participants: (a) American assimilation, (b) visitor attraction, (c) multicultural recognition, and (d) Hawaiian preservation. (Contains 1 note.)