Health-Saving Competence of Future Primary School Teachers: Indicators of Development

The research revealed an increasing interest of scientists to the problem of formation of health-saving competence of future primary school teachers. This tendency is due to the need for a social inquiry to modernize the training of future educators, to improve the individual areas. The authors of research developed an experimental test of the formation of health-saving competency of future primary school teachers. Achieving this goal involves the analysis of the state of development of a particular problem in pedagogical theory and practice. The study systematizes the physical, social and mental health life skills that contribute to the formation of a person’s health-saving competence. As a result of the study, a diagnostic system was developed to determine the health-saving competency of future primary school teachers. The analysis of scientific and pedagogical sources made it possible to identify such structural components of students’ preparation for the organization of health-saving activities of younger students as motivational, content, and technological ones. The motivational component was assessed according to the criterion of students’ positive attitude towards the organization of health-saving competence of younger students and the formation of a system of internal motives (interests, values, beliefs). Knowledge of the theoretical block was diagnosed with the help of tests that included the task of identifying the level of mastery of information about the essence of health-saving competence of children. The ability to develop their own variants of pedagogical health technologies for preserving younger students was assessed with the help of the creative tasks

Tapping into the ‘standing-reserve’: a comparative analysis of workers’ training programmes in Kolkata and Toronto

This paper examines employment-related training programmes offered by state funded agencies and multinational corporations in Toronto (Canada) and Kolkata (India). In recent years both cities have witnessed a rise in the service sector industries aligned with global regimes of flexible work and the consequent reinvention of a worker subject that is no longer disciplined according to the needs of industrial production. A worker must now be self-regulated, competitive, flexible, with an ability to convey an urbane, English-speaking deportment within the workplace. Training of employees, especially soft skill training becomes crucial in this connection as a form of technology for achieving this end. Based on Martin Heidegger’s conceptualisation of ‘standing-reserve’, we suggest that what training programmes do in the context of neoliberal capitalist production is the creation of an essential quality of human-ness that has to be harnessed, its potentialities tapped and amplified through training. We further suggest that such programmes often remain heavily influenced by race/class/gender hierarchies as well as stereotypical assumptions of desirable/undesirable bodies, forms of socialisation and modes of habitation that often are naturalised in the course of training

Emotional Maturity

Hogg Foundation for Mental Healt

The application of Han Dynasty cultural elements to modern product design

Chinese Han Culture, as Chinese nation's "core culture", is the cultural symbol of Chinese nation, and played an important role in the history of Chinese cultural development, even in the history of world cultural development. Designing in the Han Dynasty, while inheriting Chinese traditional culture, but also having its unique style, are appreciated and respected by the people nowadays. In a modern society where the design is becoming more diversified, the innovative design based on traditional culture and art has its unique charm and vitality. This paper presented our recent research on the application of Han Dynasty cultural elements to modern product design, reflected the local design connotation of Han Dynasty cultural elements

Consumer-driven innovation networks and e-business management systems

This paper examines the use of consumer-driven innovation networks within the UK food-retailing industry using qualitative interview-based research analysed within an economic framework. This perspective revealed that, by exploiting information gathered directly from their customers at point-of-sale and data mining, supermarkets are able to identify consumer preferences and co-ordinate new product development via innovation networks. This has been made possible through their information control of the supply-chain established through the use of transparent inventory management systems. As a result, supermarkets’ e-business systems have established new competitive processes in the UK food-processing and retailing industry and are an example of consumer-driven innovation networks. The informant-based qualitative approach also revealed that trust-based transacting relationships operated differently from those previously described in the literature

Book Review of Heather McCrea, Diseased Relations: Epidemic, Public Health, and State-Building in Yucatán, Mexico, 1847-1924

Diseased Relations is an impressive work succinct in its focus on the topic of public health history in the Mexican state of Yucatán. Adding to a growing body of scholarship on the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this book offers a new lens through which to consider the mechanics of state formation. In this turn to the study of disease and public health, McCrea pulls in the unfolding story of science’s understanding of the origin and spread of diseases and reflects upon the dialogue between national officials and state or local officials in the Yucatán. By choosing to focus on specific disease campaigns, McCrea extends the common discussion of state formation and casts it into a light of intimacy and personal level as she explores the ways in which disease prevention touched and changed the lives of individuals. Instead of viewing ‘nation-building’ through abstractions, she adroitly pursues the palpable and deadly topic of disease and efforts to combat epidemics as a clear implementation of the long-arm of the state into the private lives of individuals