This article offers an overview of the life and work of Eileen Egan, a contemporary and passionate Christian leader whose values can inform religious education today. It argues that her critical questioning of the traditions, assumptions, and premises of Catholic teaching on war and peace is a sign of the emancipatory, transformative learning that…

Describes the use of group dynamics in a junior high school science classroom as a means of dealing with problems associated with the heterogeneous nature of the student population. (JR)

A study focusing on the development and maintenance of peer groups was undertaken at South High School in the San Joaquin Valley (California). The central purpose of the study was to determine if a school culture existed at this school. Ethnographic and field observation methods were employed to examine the phenomenon of the "cowboys," a…

This study assesses the effect of visual versus audio observation/recording on both client and therapist verbal and non-verbal behavior in ongoing therapy. Three co-led, therapy groups were studied over six weekly sessions under counterbalanced observation conditions. Measures of verbal behavior, verbal productivity, and non-verbal behavior were…

A study investigated ways that adult educators might introduce educational activity into a community problem-solving situation and attempted to determine the influence of this activity on growth of the community-problem-solving group. Adult educators by definition included cooperative extension agents, social workers, community mental health…

The effectiveness of boards of education depends on many factors. Significant among these are maintenance of the board's group identity, proper conduct of meetings, development of community respect through dignified and courteous behavior, establishment of good listening habits by board members, united follow-through on majority decisions, and…

The inservice program and materials described here focus on behaviors as they occur in groups, isolating them for purposes of identification and definition. Three group roles are identified in the program: task roles, unifying roles, and anti-group roles. A description is provided of program purposes, content, activites, resources, and history of…

Descriptive data were collected over a two-month period on two middle elementary classrooms to which student teachers had been assigned. From this data typical patterns of teaching/learning behavior were identified for each classroom. The student teachers were then interchanged, and the data collection continued for another two months. Comparison…

The impact of a school desegregation plan on the social class structure of elementary classrooms (Grades 1-6) was studied within a large midwestern school system. Sociograms administered on a pre/post basis, over a two year period, to all classrooms with at least four minority students per room served as the data base. Initial analyses reveal…

The paper analyzes the failure of the ecology/environmental movement to develop into a social movement and to generate a mass following. The movement has had difficulty not only in organizing collective behavior but also in maintaining the necessary momentum to change into a full-fledged social movement. Obvious reasons are that ecologists…

The purpose of this research was to determine how interactive style influences effectiveness and interpersonal attraction in groups. After college student volunteers completed the Communicator Style Measure (CSM), 72 subjects were selected from three style profiles and assigned to triads that contained high, mid, and low communication style…

A great need exists for increased attention to standards of rigor in collecting sequential interaction data. As in any other research strategy, powerful statistics are not sufficient to organize data meaningfully. A knowledge of individuals, their relational histories, and communication are all necessary to insure proper conclusions about the…

Consensus is important in the making of a policy decision. If a decision is reached without consensus, morale and unit satisfaction may both suffer. With genuine consensus, a unit tends to willingly support and implement the new policy. After analyzing how observed small groups had actually reached consensus, the following ten techniques were…

The established unit for reporting sociolinguistic data has been the sociologically determined group. Characteristically, only the mean rate of nonstandard usage for the group is reported for any linguistic feature. Such reporting obscures the possibility of linguistic heterogeneity within the group. Data from Los Angeles school children show that…

The Children's Interaction Matrix, Intermediate and Primary Forms, are designed to identify the preferred work and content styles of children in group situations. These factors aid the researcher, teacher, and counselor in understanding the individual's preferred mode of behavior in groups as well as indicating the students' reaction to group…