Present teaching stories as re-membering the humanities

he ways in which Humanities scholars talk about teaching tell something about how we interact with the past of our own discipline as well as anticipate our students’ futures. In this we express collective memories as truths of learning and teaching. As cultural artifacts of our present, such stories are worthy of excavation for what they imply about ourselves as well as messages they pass onto our successors. This paper outlines “collective re-membering” as one way to understand these stories, particularly as they present in qualitative interviews commonly being used to research higher education practice in the Humanities. It defines such collective re-membering through an interweaving of Halbwachs, Ricoeur, Wertsch and Bakhtin. It proposes that a dialogic reading between this understanding of collective re-membering and qualitative data-sets enables us to both access our discursive tendencies within the Humanities and understand the impact they might have on student engagement with our disciplines, noting that when discussing learning and teaching, we engage in collectively influenced myth-making and hagiography. The paper finishes by positing that the Humanities need to change their orientation from generating myths and pious teaching sagas towards the complex and ultimately more intellectually satisfying, articulation of learning and teaching parables

Education as Re-Embedding: Stroud Communiversity, Walking the Land and the Enduring Spell of the Sensuous

How we know, is at least as important as what we know: Before educationalists can begin to teach sustainability, we need to explore our own views of the world and how these are formed. The paper explores the ontological assumptions that underpin, usually implicitly, the pedagogical relationship and opens up the question of how people know each other and the world they share. Using understandings based in a phenomenological approach and guided by social constructionism, it suggests that the most appropriate pedagogical method for teaching sustainability is one based on situated learning and reflexive practice. To support its ontological questioning, the paper highlights two alternative culture’s ways of understanding and recording the world: Those of the Inca who inhabited pre-Columbian Peru, which was based on the quipu system of knotted strings, and the complex social and religious system of the songlines of the original people of Australia. As an indication of the sorts of teaching experiences that an emancipatory and relational pedagogy might give rise to, the paper offers examples of two community learning experiences in the exemplar sustainable community of Stroud, Gloucestershire in the United Kingdom where the authors live

Autism = Death: The social and medical impact of a catastrophic medical model of autistic spectrum disorders

This discussion interrogates the continuing impact of the pervasive and persistent usage of debilitating metaphors perpetuating ‘historical’ superstitions, myths and beliefs surrounding disability. This article examines the real-life consequences of the power exercised through the deployment of derogatory metaphors and their very real effects on care and treatment decisions. The article illuminates how diagnostic categories and their associative metaphors work to situate boundaries of normality with pathologising difference. It concludes by demonstrating the catastrophic effect of the metaphoric dehumanisation of autistics that has recently culminated in murder being euphemistically referred to and condoned as ‘mercy killing’

Reading between the lines : is news media in Fiji supporting or challenging gender stereotypes? : a frame analysis of local news media coverage of violence against women during the 16 Days of Activism against Gender-based Violence campaign of 2017

Violence against women is recognised as a global public health issue and an obstacle to development, as ending it is inextricably linked with achieving gender equality. The public relies on and believes in the capacity of news media to present them with a ‘true’ picture of reality and the news media are therefore treated as valuable allies in changing the norms, beliefs and attitudes that perpetuate violence against women. In the production and consumption of news, however, journalists employ frames to condense complex events into interesting and appealing news reports, in turn influencing how audiences view particular events, activities and issues, especially when it comes to attributing blame and responsibility. This study employs a frame analysis to identify whether, and to what extent, episodic or thematic framing is used in news articles on violence against women published in the Fiji Sun and Fiji Times during and around the 16 Days of Activism against Gender-based Violence campaign of 2017. It showed that episodic framing was overwhelmingly used in the sample, thereby divorcing the violence from its social roots and encouraging audiences to blame the individuals involved, both for the violence itself and for remedying it. This directly contradicts the campaign’s central principles positioning violence against women as a social and development issue that requires every member of society to play a part in ending it. The results, therefore, suggest that changes are needed in how organisations engage with the news media to ensure that coverage of violence against women improves in both quantity and quality

Leading Turnaround and Improvement in Low Performing Schools in Malaysia and Indonesia

Improving the fortunes of low-performing schools, often in the most challenging circumstances, remains a persistent and pervasive challenge in many education systems (Meyers & Darwin, 2017). This working paper outlines the findings from a small, qualitative comparative research project funded by the Head Foundation. The working paper commences with some explanation and contextualization of the idea of ‘turnaround schools’ from the literature. It presents the research methodology and subsequently outlines the main findings from the research project

Principles in Patterns (PiP) : Evaluation of Impact on Business Processes

The innovation and development work conducted under the auspices of the Principles in Patterns (PiP) project is intended to explore and develop new technology-supported approaches to curriculum design, approval and review. An integral component of this innovation is the use of business process analysis and process change techniques - and their instantiation within the C-CAP system (Class and Course Approval Pilot) - in order to improve the efficacy of curriculum approval processes. Improvements to approval process responsiveness and overall process efficacy can assist institutions in better reviewing or updating curriculum designs to enhance pedagogy. Such improvements also assume a greater significance in a globalised HE environment, in which institutions must adapt or create curricula quickly in order to better reflect rapidly changing academic contexts, as well as better responding to the demands of employment marketplaces and the expectations of professional bodies. This is increasingly an issue for disciplines within the sciences and engineering, where new skills or knowledge need to be rapidly embedded in curricula as a response to emerging technological or environmental developments. All of the aforementioned must also be achieved while simultaneously maintaining high standards of academic quality, thus adding a further layer of complexity to the way in which HE institutions engage in "responsive curriculum design" and approval. This strand of the PiP evaluation therefore entails an analysis of the business process techniques used by PiP, their efficacy, and the impact of process changes on the curriculum approval process, as instantiated by C-CAP. More generally the evaluation is a contribution towards a wider understanding of technology-supported process improvement initiatives within curriculum approval and their potential to render such processes more transparent, efficient and effective. Partly owing to limitations in the data required to facilitate comparative analyses, this evaluation adopts a mixed approach, making use of qualitative and quantitative methods as well as theoretical techniques. These approaches combined enable a comparative evaluation of the curriculum approval process under the "new state" (i.e. using C-CAP) and under the "previous state". This report summarises the methodology used to enable comparative evaluation and presents an analysis and discussion of the results. As the report will explain, the impact of C-CAP and its ability to support improvements in process and document management has resulted in the resolution of numerous process failings. C-CAP has also demonstrated potential for improvements in approval process cycle time, process reliability, process visibility, process automation, process parallelism and a reduction in transition delays within the approval process, thus contributing to considerable process efficiencies; although it is acknowledged that enhancements and redesign may be required to take advantage of C-CAP's potential. Other aspects pertaining to C-CAP's impact on process change, improvements to document management and the curation of curriculum designs will also be discussed