Devising a Competence-Based Training Program for Educators of Sustainable Development: Lessons Learned

Over recent decades, education policy has been preoccupied with economic growth while paying insufficient heed to global sustainability challenges. International initiatives to promote education for sustainable development (ESD) have been hampered by a lack of clarity on how to implement this form of education. To address this concern, a Rounder Sense of Purpose (RSP) began as a three-year EU-funded project that set out to develop a practical accreditation model for educators working on ESD. Expert and user opinion was sought through several rounds of structured consultation with over 500 people, chiefly using a Delphi approach, to develop and validate the model. The resulting framework comprises 12 competences, each with three learning outcomes and several underpinning components. This is supported by a range of activities largely reflecting a constructivist pedagogy. A range of assessment techniques have also been piloted within the project although this remains an area for further enquiry. Ultimately, it was decided not to design a single qualification template because defining the award to such a level of detail would make it more difficult to apply across multiple jurisdictions. Partners also felt that such an approach would atomize learning in a way that runs counter to the holistic principles of sustainability. RSP provided a rich learning experience for those involved and has already demonstrated its potential to extend its impact well beyond the original participants

Go From the General to the Particular: Multi-Domain Translation with Domain Transformation Networks

The key challenge of multi-domain translation lies in simultaneously encoding both the general knowledge shared across domains and the particular knowledge distinctive to each domain in a unified model. Previous work shows that the standard neural machine translation (NMT) model, trained on mixed-domain data, generally captures the general knowledge, but misses the domain-specific knowledge. In response to this problem, we augment NMT model with additional domain transformation networks to transform the general representations to domain-specific representations, which are subsequently fed to the NMT decoder. To guarantee the knowledge transformation, we also propose two complementary supervision signals by leveraging the power of knowledge distillation and adversarial learning. Experimental results on several language pairs, covering both balanced and unbalanced multi-domain translation, demonstrate the effectiveness and universality of the proposed approach. Encouragingly, the proposed unified model achieves comparable results with the fine-tuning approach that requires multiple models to preserve the particular knowledge. Further analyses reveal that the domain transformation networks successfully capture the domain-specific knowledge as expected.Comment: AAAI 202

Challenges, paradigm shift and theoretical underpinnings of learning advising in higher education: the case of an Australian university in Singapore

Learning advisors are teaching professionals who play an important role in higher education. They exist in universities in order to help students achieve success in their studies and in their careers. However, learning advisors are faced with some key challenges. One issue is the seemingly vague and inferior position that they have in higher education. Another challenge includes the questions about where they belong and what key roles they perform. This paper responds to these challenges through the following propositions: (1) creating a unique and more nuanced understanding of learning advising by looking at an Australian university in Singapore, (2) making a stand that learning advisors constitute a duality of self or function, i.e., as an academic and as a professional, (3) explaining a paradigm shift in learning advising by embracing the humanistic and social constructivist ideologies, and (4) framing the role of learning advisors within key theoretical lenses that guide them in performing such roles in higher education. Examples of teaching practices are discussed by situating them within the key theoretical frameworks. This paper concludes that learning advisors are both academics (teachers) and professionals (e.g., learning resource developers) and teaching is at the core of what they do. Higher education institutions must become proactive in clarifying the misconceptions associated with learning advising and in breaking the labels associated with learning support that proliferate in the academe

Rewarding educators and education leaders in research-intensive universities

The reward and recognition of staff focused on learning and teaching is an issue that affects all types of higher education institutions. Research-intensive institutions, for example, have always been conscious of the balance between research and teaching, particularly in relation to funding streams and the REF, but have ensured that their students receive the excellent teaching that they deserve. One indication of this is the increasing number of HEA Fellows at such institutions. At a time of growing emphasis on the importance of high quality student education, the HEA’s research into career structures and prospects - which includes Rebalancing promotion in the HE sector: Is teaching excellence being rewarded by Annette Cashmore et al, and Shifting landscapes: Meeting the staff development needs of the changing academic workforce by William Locke et al – can help to inform policy and practice. The HEA will continue to commission high quality research - from across the sector - to address key issues in this area. The research offered below by Dilly Fung et al focuses solely on the Russell Group – which it is acknowledged comprises only a small section of the UK’s research-intensive institutions - and examines the challenges at those particular institutions. It is hoped that some of the findings, analysis and recommendations might be applicable more broadly, however, in the UK and elsewhere

Learning to Become a Taste Expert

Evidence suggests that consumers seek to become more expert about hedonic products to enhance their enjoyment of future consumption occasions. Current approaches to becoming expert center on cultivating an analytic mindset. In the present research the authors explore the benefit to enthusiasts of moving beyond analytics to cultivate a holistic style of processing. In the taste context the authors define holistic processing as non-verbal, imagery-based, and involving narrative processing. The authors conduct qualitative interviews with taste experts (Master Sommeliers) to operationalize the holistic approach to hedonic learning, and then test it against traditional analytic methods in a series of experiments across a range of hedonic products. The results suggest that hedonic learning follows a sequence of stages whose order matters, and that the holistic stage is facilitated by attending to experience as a narrative event and by employing visual imagery. The results of this multi-method investigation have implications for both managers and academics interested in how consumers learn to become expert in hedonic product categories

We’re Not Barbie Girls: Tweens Transform a Feminine Icon

“Reinventing Barbie” was a workshop for middle-school girls to discuss, critique, and reflect on the construction of female bodies and feminine identities in popular culture by remaking Barbie dolls. The workshop was designed to foster conversations with and among girls about what it means to be embodied as female in American culture. The girls reconstructed Barbies based on their reflections, and then they came together to discuss their dolls as expressions of their visions for transforming the feminine. The article analyzes the collaborative process of the workshop, which was grounded in women’s studies scholarship and developed by an interdisciplinary group of feminist academics