Student writer competition winners 2002

Sarah O'Toole: As people go about their daily lives, they enter into a complexity of activities and social interactions on many levels. This is especially true of children at school age, who enter into a web of sophisticated interactions in a number of contexts. Home, the playground, the classroom, the school and out-of-school activities such as religious classes, may affect each other in ways that we don't fully understand. Among researchers and educationists there is a growing call to understand the impact of the relationships between home and school. All this may seem intuitive, even obvious, and yet it is only in recent times that psychologists have taken on board the importance of these social practices and the ways in which we move between them (Wenger, 1998).

Jeanette Senior: Eye movement desensitisation and reprocessing (EMDR) has attracted an abundance of scientific interest. Hailed as a cost-effective and powerful technique for the treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) by its founder Francine Shapiro (1989), this relatively new treatment entered the arena amid extraordinary claims of efficacy, and the battle soon began. From its inception fervent debate has continued between proponents of EMDR and its healthy sceptics. Many debates have centred on claims of swift, long-lasting success and its superiority over other treatments due to its speed of curative action.

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