This article examines children's literature written by African American teachers during the first part of the twentieth century. Drawing on theories of racialization, I analyze children's books written by two African American teachers: Helen Adele Whiting (1885-1959) and Jane Dabney Shackelford (1895-1979). I argue that their books represented more than an effort toward greater Black representation in schools; they also served as a contribution to a larger discourse on Blackness and identity that emerged during the “New Negro” movement. In this view, African American teachers were not mere passive recipients of an outside Black culture, but rather intellectual actors involved in the production of racial identity during the interwar period.

People use reflection and reflective practice for many different reasons, including for self-care and to make sense of their experiences. In this study, social workers spoke about how they learned to be reflective, with many participants describing activities in their childhood that developed their reflective capacity. The aim of this article is to apply these ideas and examine the factors that enhance reflective capacity in children and young people. This research was part of a PhD study that involved interviews with 35 social workers in USA, Canada, UK and Australia. This exploratory study found that activities like story reading and asking children to reflect on their behaviour are early steps in the process of becoming reflective, but this needs to be followed up with conversations that deconstruct assumptions to make sense of experiences and explore multiple perspectives. This research is important for health and human service workers and others who want to develop reflective capacity in children and young people, particularly for children subject to disadvantage who need to overcome trauma and adversities.

Executive abilities have been suggested to show differential age-related changes. This study aimed to extend this evidence to a Brazilian sample, which was composed of 572 children and adolescents aged 6 to 14 years, assessed in tests of visual and auditory working memory, selective attention, inhibitory control, cognitive flexibility, attentional abilities, verbal fluency and planning. ANOVAs revealed significant age effect on performance in all tests, with a trend toward better performance with the progression of age, even in differential ways. Overall, the performance on simpler tests, such as the basic attention, increased with age progression until around 11 or 12 years, when performance becomes more stable. However, in more complex tasks, including working memory tasks, the performance showed a more continuous improvement. There was gender effect in two measures: visual working memory, in which boys outperformed girls, and verbal fluency, in which the girls outperformed boys. In general, the results of this Brazilian sample were similar to those reported by studies conducted in other countries, what suggests that Brazilian socio-cultural specificities, at least of the participants of this sample, were not sufficient to reveal a distinct pattern of progression.