Participation of children and parents is a central notion in child and family social work. This paper reports on a research dealing with how the participative paradigm comes to the fore in the practice of report writing in the work with looked‐after children. As social work is essentially a language‐centred activity, report writing is a core skill in social work. A participative practice of report writing would imply that the perspective of the children and parents is present in the reports. The results of our research show that a participatory approach to writing reports is not self‐evident. On the one hand, the practice of report writing shows a big diversity in the way the client's perspectives are given attention. On the other hand, the incorporation of the client's voice does not necessarily stand for a participatory approach because it may be used to strengthen professional views rather than clarify clients' perspectives. The case is made in such a way that a participatory approach of child and family social work demands more attention to the practice of writing reports.

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This paper examines what can be learnt from 'new rhetoric' (focusing on the work of the American rhetorician Kenneth Burke [1897-1993]) about (national) identity and discusses how nationalism can be taught from such a rhetorical perspective. Despite the 'deconstruction' of nation(alism) as a grand narrative, there is a new tendency towards emphasizing national identity, caused by trends such as globalization and multiculturalism. In the language and literature teaching curriculum, this paradoxical situation often causes frictions for teachers who very often are expected to teach standard language and national literature. The hypothesis is that rhetoric is a tool to deal with these tensions in the curriculum. This paper focuses on Flanders as a case-study. Together with pre-service teachers it analysed the rhetorical construction of Flanders from a dramatistic perspective. It is argued that Burke's concepts are useful tools to make students 'symbol-wise': to understand the way national symbols work, and to develop critical engagement with, as well as on behalf of, those symbols

There is abundant educational research indicating that graphic organisers (knowledge maps, concept maps, or mind maps) have a beneficial impact on learning, but hardly any research has examined this in the context of presentations. This study therefore investigated how graphic organisers – as delivered via presentation software – affect learning outcomes and mediating variables such as self-efficacy, cognitive load and appreciation of the learning material. An experiment was set up during a university course (n = 155). E-lectures were designed that shared recorded audio, but differed in the design of the learning material (graphic organisers), considering the presentation software being used. In both research conditions presentation design was in line with the principles of the cognitive theory of multimedia learning. The results revealed no statistically relevant difference in cognitive load, self-efficacy and knowledge gain, but participants preferred the e-lecture with the graphic organisers to the control version

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