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Women's childbirth experiences are not widely researched in the social work literature. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to answer questions related to the child-birthing experience. One hundred and nineteen participants responded to a 26-item online questionnaire between April and June 2008, and their written narratives were analyzed using a grounded theory approach. Themes regarding the spiritual dimensions of childbirth emerged from the data and support current research demonstrating the importance of spirituality in women's lives and the meaningful and transformative nature of childbirth experiences. Implications for addressing spirituality in practice when working with childbearing women are explored. Future research that explores how spirituality may function as a protective factor for women with difficult pregnancies, births, and transitions to parenting is recommended.

This article explores the question of how human beings change, how change is constrained, and how change emerges out of and subsequently creates new forms of stability with adults. The emergence of Dynamic Systems Theories (DST) from developmental biology and neuroscience provide the tools to engage in such an understanding by attending to the issues of time, balance, influencing parameters (within person and sociocultural and material environments), and multiple adaptive and maladaptive pathways. DST provides the framework to understand the dynamic processes of bio-psychosocial factors that provide human beings with the stability and the flexibility to navigate the challenges and stressors of living. Complexity, the ability to experience inner continuity as one is changing, is a fluid balance that supports effective functioning. Findings: Key principles and concepts of DST describe multiple pathways of stability and change. A case example illustrates how DST helps social workers understand client experiences and responses to stressors, formulate initial and ongoing assessments, and monitor clients' participation in change activities. Application: Social workers seek to help people who experience an imbalance due to an inability to effectively respond to the negative impact of a stressor. By understanding the various pathways of balance and imbalance along the continuum of continuity to change, social workers can better understand how stressors are impacting specific clients, and subsequently the kinds of change that would best assist each client.

lessons learned from previous efforts with the goal of "getting it right" this time. In response to the common refrain that we know about and 'do' recovery already, the authors set the recovery movement within the conceptual framework of major thinkers and achievers in the history of psychiatry, such as Philippe Pinel, Dorothea Dix, Adolf Meyer, Harry Stack Sullivan, and Franco Basaglia. The book reaches beyond the usual boundaries of psychiatry to incorporate lessons from related fields, such as psychology, sociology, social welfare, philosophy, political economic theory, and civil rights. From Jane Addams and the Settlement House movement to Martin Luther King, Jr., and Gilles Deleuze, this book identifies the less well-known and less visible dimensions of the recovery concept and movement that underlie concrete clinical practice. In addition, the authors highlight the limitations of previous efforts to reform and transform mental health practice, such as the de-institutionalization movement begun in the 1950s, in the hope that the field will not have to repeat these same mistakes. Their thoughtful analysis and valuable advice will benefit people in recovery, their loved ones, the practitioners who serve them, and society at large. Foreword by Fred Frese, Founder of the Community and State Hospital Section of the American Psychological Association and past president of the National Mental Health Consumers' Association. © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Direct practice social workers today are challenged to address the requirements of the complex array of professional, organizational, institutional, and regulatory demands placed on them in the broader socioeconomic context of fewer resources and diminished public support for social welfare services in the United States. The common factors model provides an accessible, transtheoretical, empirically supported conceptual foundation for practice that may help to resolve this conundrum and support effective practice. Common factors are conditions and processes activated and facilitated by strategies and skills that positively influence practice outcomes across a range ofpractice theories. The model provides an expanded conceptualization of the "active ingredients" required for change to include a focus on conditions and processes as well as practice strategies and to focus on all who are involved in the work. The model is described and implications for practice are discussed.

Constructing mutual, spiritually focused psychotherapy goals is a practice activity fraught with numerous ethical and countertransferential challenges. This article seeks to inform the thinking and enhance the ability of clinical social workers to engage in collaborative and responsive dialogues with their clients regarding the goals of spiritually focused clinical practice by (1) identifying the multiple value frameworks that influence decisions regarding practice goals, (2) articulating some of the ethical complexities and common countertransferential reactions associated with goal setting, and (3) providing self-reflection questions and guides to help therapists navigate the complexities of this material.

Although research is beginning to capture the complex interactions of biopsychosocial variables operating within experiences of stressors and trauma, the bodies of research have remained largely separate and limited. This study describes a scaffold of factors and pathways based on principles from dynamic systems theories (DST) to organize the literatures on stress and coping and trauma and resilience. As a process model, DST provides the language to understand both impact and response to stressors and trauma: Not as a list of symptoms but as interactive processes within persons and between persons and their surroundings. © Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.

Jaspers’ views on communication and his approach to the question of listening, both underwent an evolution in which World War II and the first years thereafter played a crucial role. In this process, Jaspers journeyed from listening to the great minds of the past, through an inward dialogue with them, to one-sided lecturing while his audience was engaged in a straight-line listening, to an intimate dialogue with those he considered like-minded, to a multi-faceted dialogue, and finally to listening to his contemporaries and learning how to practice transactional listening-in-conversation in the process of a multi-layered communication he called a loving struggle. This evolution, paralleled by the transition of Japers’ philosophy from local-centered to world-centered makes his thinking attractive and useful today.

The main problem discussed in this chapter is the question of compatibility between knowledge management in the knowledge economy and democracy in the ICT-driven global society. The assumption is made that democracy is the dominant form of organizing the global society on a variety of levels; and that it is regarded as desirable and morally superior in comparison with other such forms. © 2011, IGI Global.

Patterns of reading difficulty provide an educationally useful way to think about different kinds of reading problems, whether those problems are mainly experiential in nature (e.g., those common among English learners) or associated with disabilities (e.g., those typical of children with dyslexia). This article reviews research on three common patterns of poor reading: specific word-reading difficulties, specific reading-comprehension difficulties, and mixed reading difficulties. The purpose of the article is to explain how teachers can use assessments to identify individual struggling readers' patterns of reading difficulties, and how this information is valuable in differentiating classroom instruction and planning interventions.

This study explored American and Portuguese elementary teachers' preferences in planning for literacy instruction using the Language Arts Activity Grid (LAAG; Cunningham, Zibulsky, Stanovich, & Stanovich, 2009), on which teachers described their preferred instructional activities for a hypothetical 2-h language arts block. Portuguese teachers (N = 186) completed Portuguese versions of a background questionnaire and LAAG electronically, in Survey Monkey; American teachers (N = 102) completed identical English measures using paper and pencil. Results showed that teachers in both groups usually addressed comprehension and reading fluency on their LAAGs and that they also allocated the most time to these two areas. However, American teachers were more likely to include teacher-directed fluency activities, whereas Portuguese teachers were more likely to include fluency activities that were not teacher directed. Significantly more American than Portuguese teachers addressed phonics in their planning, whereas significantly more Portuguese than American teachers addressed writing processes such as revision. Both groups of educators demonstrated large variability in planning, with many teachers omitting important components of literacy identified by researchers, for writing as well as reading. The study highlights the importance of providing teachers with comprehensive, research-based core literacy curricula as well as professional development on key components of literacy. Study findings also suggest significant relationships between orthographic transparency and teachers' instructional planning.