Effective skill refinement: Focusing on process to ensure outcome

In contrast to the abundance of motor skill acquisition and performance research, there is a paucity of work which addresses how athletes with an already learnt and well-established skill may go about making a subtle change, or refinement, to that skill. Accordingly, the purpose of this review paper is to provide a comprehensive overview of current understanding pertaining to such practice. Specifically, this review addresses deliberately initiated refinements to closed and self-paced skills (e.g., javelin throwing, golf swing and horizontal jumps). In doing so, focus is directed to three fundamental considerations within applied coaching practice and future research endeavours; the intended outcomes, process and evaluative measures of skill refinement. Conclusions suggest that skill refinement is not the same as skill acquisition or performing already learnt skills with high-levels of automaticity. Due to the complexity of challenge faced, refinements are best addressed as an interdisciplinary solution, with objective measures informing coach decision making

Ethical decision-making, passivity and pharmacy

Background: Increasing interest in empirical ethics has enhanced understanding of healthcare professionals' ethical problems and attendant decision-making. A four-stage decision-making model involving ethical attention, reasoning, intention and action offers further insights into how more than reasoning alone may contribute to decision-making. Aims: To explore how the four-stage model can increase understanding of decision-making in healthcare and describe the decision-making of an under-researched professional group. Methods: 23 purposively sampled UK community pharmacists were asked, in semi-structured interviews, to describe ethical problems in their work and how they were resolved. Framework analysis of transcribed interviews utilised the four decision-making stages, together with constant comparative methods and deviant-case analysis. Results: Pharmacists were often inattentive and constructed problems in legal terms. Ethical reasoning was limited, but examples of appeals to consequences, the golden rule, religious faith and common-sense experience emerged. Ethical intention was compromised by frequent concern about legal prosecution. Ethical inaction was common, typified by pharmacists' failure to report healthcare professionals' bad practices, and ethical passivity emerged to describe these negative examples of the four decision-making stages. Pharmacists occasionally described more ethically active decision-making, but this often involved ethical uncertainty. Discussion: The four decision-making stages are a useful tool in considering how healthcare professionals try to resolve ethical problems in practice. They reveal processes often ignored in normative theories, and their recognition and the emergence of ethical passivity indicates the complexity of decision-making in practice. Ethical passivity may be deleterious to patients' welfare, and concerns emerge about improving pharmacists' ethical training and promoting ethical awareness and responsibility

Verification of Hierarchical Artifact Systems

Data-driven workflows, of which IBM's Business Artifacts are a prime exponent, have been successfully deployed in practice, adopted in industrial standards, and have spawned a rich body of research in academia, focused primarily on static analysis. The present work represents a significant advance on the problem of artifact verification, by considering a much richer and more realistic model than in previous work, incorporating core elements of IBM's successful Guard-Stage-Milestone model. In particular, the model features task hierarchy, concurrency, and richer artifact data. It also allows database key and foreign key dependencies, as well as arithmetic constraints. The results show decidability of verification and establish its complexity, making use of novel techniques including a hierarchy of Vector Addition Systems and a variant of quantifier elimination tailored to our context.Comment: Full version of the accepted PODS pape

Place-Making as Contemplative Practice

In an age of chronic and widespread displacement, the work of place-making—the discovery and cultivation of a sense of place—has gained new significance and meaning. In this essay, I propose to consider how place-making can be understood as a form of contemplative practice. Anthropologist Keith Basso describes place-making as a work of “retrospective world-building” that enables a person or community to see a place in all its richness and complexity and hold that place in the imagination. Following the work of photographer Robert Adams, I want to suggest that what makes this work contemplative in character is the integration and interplay of geography, autobiography, and metaphor. The example of Thomas Merton’s attention to place as part of an encompassing spiritual vision will serve as a focal point for arguing that the work of place-making can and ought to be considered a genuine part of contemplative practice

Dilemmas in doing insider research in professional education

This article explores the dilemmas I encountered when researching social work education in England as an insider researcher who was simultaneously employed as an educator in the host institution. This was an ethnographic project deploying multiple methods and generating rich case study material which informed the student textbook Becoming a Social Worker the four-year period of the project. First, ethical dilemmas emerged around informed consent and confidentiality when conducting surveys of students and reading their portfolios. Second, professional dilemmas stemmed from the ways in which my roles as a researcher, academic tutor, social worker and former practice educator converged and collided. Third, political dilemmas pertained to the potential for the project to crystallize and convey conflicts among stakeholders in the university and community. Since the majority of research in social work education is conducted by insiders, we have a vital interest in making sense of such complexity

The illusion of competency versus the desirability of expertise: Seeking a common standard for support professions in sport

In this paper we examine and challenge the competency-based models which currently dominate accreditation and development systems in sport support disciplines, largely the sciences and coaching. Through consideration of exemplar shortcomings, the limitations of competency-based systems are presented as failing to cater for the complexity of decision making and the need for proactive experimentation essential to effective practice. To provide a better fit with the challenges of the various disciplines in their work with performers, an alternative approach is presented which focuses on the promotion, evaluation and elaboration of expertise. Such an approach resonates with important characteristics of professions, whilst also providing for the essential ‘shades of grey’ inherent in work with human participants. Key differences between the approaches are considered through exemplars of evaluation processes. The expertise-focused method, although inherently more complex, is seen as offering a less ambiguous and more positive route, both through more accurate representation of essential professional competence and through facilitation of future growth in proficiency and evolution of expertise in practice. Examples from the literature are also presented, offering further support for the practicalities of this approach

A Framework for Analyzing, Developing, and Applying Community Practice Interventions

Due to multiple factors, the community practice field struggles with incongruent community practice language and activities. In this article, authors unpack various challenges associated with community practice and explore implications for analysis, development, and application of effective interventions. Grounded in applied social science paradigms, authors offer a framework incorporating multi-paradigmatic approaches to inform intervention development and application. Principally centered in praxis—that is, reflection and action—this article builds on the work of foundational scholars to cultivate contextual interventions in planned change work. The authors aim to further develop the community practice knowledge base, expand what constitutes relevant evidence, and aid practitioners in making sense of complexity and contradiction in practice

Working with Gekidan Kaitaisha: Addressing the complexity of the self of the performer as other

This project focuses on performance-making practices for contemporary audiences and addresses the complexity of the self of the performer as other, drawing primarily on the author’s collaborative practice with Japanese performance company Gekidan Kaitaisha. The investigation approaches the enquiry from a practitioner’s perspective and addresses questions that emerge from that practice. The aim of this is to establish accounts of the self of the performer, performer expertise, collaborative performance processes and cultural hybridization. The project specifically transcribes the sensed and felt experience, and knowledge, of the expert practitioner. This offers insights into the complexity of the self of the performer as other, transcultural collaboration, and performance making. Through a qualitative research based inquiry, the project draws on a practice-centred approach, with the inquiry taking place through both practice as research and literature-based research, culminating in a written thesis and the DVD documentation of the rehearsal processes and performances from a range of collaborative projects. The inquiry constructs a layered, multifaceted, and multi-linear map of performer-bodyness and performer-selfhood that operates within the compositional processes of performance-making, and draws out an ‘actional self’ in-process and constantly altered, composed, recomposed, and difficult to grasp as a singular static unchanging “thing” or quality. The investigation addresses post-colonial complexities through an understanding of the work of certain twentieth century writers and practitioners, in terms of a desire for difference, and addresses the complexity of the self of the performer as other in a culturally complex context. It locates ‘otherness’ in terms of identity within the framework of cultural distinctions, where the other might be perceived to be a site of desire. The practice reveals that something is being played out, in performance-making terms, that is much more complex, complicated, and ungraspable than the idea of the ambiguities of cultural distinctiveness

Finding out what works and what doesn't work : caring for women with a fungating tumour of the breast : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in Nursing at Massey University, Albany Campus, New Zealand

A fungating tumour of the breast causes distress to those living with the illness and createss many challenges to the nurses who care for them. Control of malodour. exudate, haemorrhage and cosmetic acceptability creates complex wound care problems. Managing to live and maintain a sense of normality must take account of the palliative and chronic nature of this illness. This study utilises the grounded theory research method to discover the main concerns of nurses who care for this group of clients and how they continually resolve them. Three women who have this condition have provided information that adds and lends support to how the nurses provide care. This thesis argues that finding what works and what doesn't work is the core process that resolves the main concern of striving to maintain a sense of normality in life activities. Problem-solving, wound care and wider psychosocial problems initiate the process of finding what works and what doesn't work. Through making sense of the situation by gaining an understanding of the women's situations, being non-judgemental and building trusting relationships, the ability to find what works and what doesn't work is more likely to be achieved. This must take account of the physical, cultural and professional considerations that impact on the nurse's ability to provide appropriate care. The consequence of finding what works and what doesn't work is that the nurses' practice has the capacity to be transformed. This study provides insight into the creativity and complexity that characterises expert community nursing practice in caring for this particularly challenging group of clients