Search results

The research on the positive effects of children’s learning in and with nature is persuasive yet a deeper examination of the contemporary and historical discourses suggests that the school garden has been neither welcoming nor accessible to all children. Its detrimental effects on groups of children have been masked within the discourses of urban children’s health and wellbeing, environmental stewardship, and children’s connection with nature. The school garden has been used historically to enact adult agendas to contain and protect urban children from the social ills of modernity; civilise and assimilate marginalised, impoverished, and immigrant groups; and make future industrial and agricultural labourers who would in turn, entrench the white affluent society’s economic and social positions. In this sense, the school garden was used to reinforce patriarchal, colonial, white supremacist, and eugenic aspirations. We consider the school garden movement in North America through a discourse analysis of historical school garden texts to explore how childhoods were culturally constructed and how these discourses have influenced children both in the past and present.

The purpose of this research was to investigate the nature of the coverage of health issues in magazines, and specifically to compare the coverage in men's and women's magazines Content analysis was used to examine the health information in the six upmarket magazines (Cosmopolitan, Elle, Esquire, GQ, Marie‐Claire, and Maxim) selected for the study, with a wide range of criteria used to analyse the health information contained in them. Interviews with four of the health editors from the sample were conducted in order to elucidate some of the main findings. Unexpectedly, the differences in health information coverage are greater between the individual magazines than between the total women's and men's groups. Overall, men's magazines appear to treat health information in a more informative manner than women's, although both groups provide unusually high levels of information required to change their readers health behaviour. With this level of information provision it is noteworthy that many of these magazines have no clear health information policy, and that their editors have no qualifications or training in either health or science.

THE new library building has been open for six months now. It is pleasantly situated in an area of new buildings, and occupies a prominent island site just on the edge of the shopping centre. The old library was in the middle of a shopping area, and it has been interesting to note that our removal from that site has had a more considerable effect on the traffic pattern than one would have thought.

In recent years, a number of historians have examined the reasons for differences in the height and health of men and women in nineteenth-century Britain, often drawing on economic studies which link excess female mortality in the developing world to restrictions in women's employment opportunities. This paper re-examines this literature and summarises the existing literature on sex-specific differences in height, weight and mortality in England and Wales before 1850. It then uses two electronic datasets to examine changes in cause-specific mortality rates between 1851 and 1995. Although there is little evidence to support the view that the systematic neglect of female children was responsible for high rates of female mortality in childhood, there is rather more evidence to show that gender inequalities contributed to excess female mortality in adulthood.

CLEARLY, I should have kept my trap shut last December, instead of expressing a hope for some snow over the Christmas holidays—in the month since then there has been little else descend from the skies, and my dear wife is already querying why we should spend vast sums of money on travelling to Austria in February for conditions readily available, as I write, on Hampstead Heath.