This volume contains chapters that invite conversations about sensitive issues to help educators, children and families use real-life experiences to construct knowledge about their world and other people.

Teaching Tough Topics shows teachers how to lead students to become caring citizens as they read and respond to quality children’s literature. It focuses on topics that can be challenging or sensitive, yet are significant in order to build understanding of social justice, diversity, and equity. Racism, Homophobia, Bullying, Religious Intolerance, Poverty, and Physical and Mental Challenges are just some of the themes explored. The book is rooted in the belief that by using picture books, novels, poetry, and nonfiction, teachers can enrich learning with compassion and empathy as students make connections to texts, to others, and to the world.

This book critically examines the potential of, and suggests ways forward in, harnessing a versatile and powerful method of research - focus groups. The book challenges some of the emerging orthodoxies and presents accessible, insightful and reflective discussions about the issues around focus group work. The contributors, an impressive group of experienced researchers from a range of disciplines and traditions, discuss different ways of designing, conducting and analyzing focus group research. They examine sampling strategies; the implications of combining focus groups with other methods; accessing views of `minority' groups; their contribution to participatory or feminist research; use of software packages; discourse anal

This book is a comprehensive guide to the methodological, ethical and practical issues involved in undertaking research on sensitive topics. Raymond M Lee explores the reasons why social research may be politically or socially contentious: its relation to issues of social or political power; its capacity to encroach on people's lives; and its potentially problematic nature for the researcher. Issues examined include: the choice of methodologies for sensitive research; problems of estimating the size of hidden populations; questions of sampling, surveying and interviewing; and sensitivity in access and the handling of data. The book also discusses the political and ethical issues at stake in the relations between the researcher and the researched, and in the disclosure, dissemination and publication of research.

‘Powerful, humane and wise’ JULIA SAMUEL ‘Everyone should read it’ NIGELLA LAWSON ‘Beautiful ... This is a book for everyone. You feel held by it’ PHILIPPA PERRY Most of us have a conversation we’re avoiding.

The 10th-anniversary edition of the New York Times business bestseller-now updated with "Answers to Ten Questions People Ask" We attempt or avoid difficult conversations every day-whether dealing with an underperforming employee, disagreeing with a spouse, or negotiating with a client. From the Harvard Negotiation Project, the organization that brought you Getting to Yes, Difficult Conversations provides a step-by-step approach to having those tough conversations with less stress and more success. you'll learn how to: · Decipher the underlying structure of every difficult conversation · Start a conversation without defensiveness · Listen for the meaning of what is not said · Stay balanced in the face of attacks and accusations · Move from emotion to productive problem solving