Conceptualising examinable physical education in the Irish context: Leaving Certificate Physical Education

peer-reviewedA Physical Education Development Group (PEDG) was responsible for constructing a new school subject curriculum, Leaving Certificate Physical Education (LCPE), in Ireland. This paper provides an insight into this development group and explores the process of curriculum development, and the influence of roles and power-ratios within the group, in the construction of the LCPE curriculum. Figurational sociology concepts (Elias, 1978) were drawn on to make sense of the curriculum makers’ experiences. Interviews were conducted with 10 PEDG members. The findings suggest that the members’ roles had very little, if any, influence on the curriculum development process. Findings also revolved around the unbalanced power-ratios which existed in the PEDG and highlighted the socially powerful position of ‘strong, well-established’ (in the academic field of curriculum development – participant's words) members and the other members (predominantly representing practicing teachers). We express concern for the role of teachers in the curriculum process and argue that they play a crucial and significant role in the school subject curriculum development process. This paper supports Goodson’s (1983) and Penney’s (2006) conceptualisation of the contested and socially constructed nature of the curriculum development process.peer-reviewe

Furthering alternative cultures of valuation in higher education research

The value of higher education is often implicit or assumed in educational research. The underlying and antecedent premises that shape and influence debates about value remain unchallenged which perpetuates the dominant, but limiting, terms of the debate and fosters reductionism. I proceed on the premise that analyses of value are not self–supporting or self-referential but are embedded within prevailing cultures of valuation. I contend that challenging, and providing alternatives to, dominant narratives of higher education requires an appreciation of those cultures. I therefore highlight some of the existing cultures of valuation and their influence. I then propose Sayer’s concept of lay normativity as a culture of valuation and discuss how it translates into the practices of research into higher education, specifically the practice of analysis. I animate the discussion by detecting the presence of lay normativity in the evaluative space of the capability approach

Investigating student teachers’ presentations of literacy and literacy pedagogy in a complex context

The field of literacy and primary literacy education is patterned by multiple discourses and this raises challenges for those educating the next generation of primary literacy teachers. In England, the last 15 years have seen considerable levels of prescription in the primary literacy curriculum and compliance by the school and teacher education sectors has been enforced through demanding accountability regimes. In this paper, the authors draw on findings of a small-scale interview study to consider how understandings of literacies associated with different contexts may or may not inflect student teachers’ orientations towards literacy provision in school. The authors explore how five student teachers presented their experiences of literacy within and beyond the classroom and how they seemed to position themselves in relation to literacy pedagogy. The authors focus particularly on continuities and discontinuities between literacies in the student teachers’ personal and professional lives, and on tensions they identified between the teachers they felt they wanted to, and were expected to, become. Reflecting on this work, the authors consider how they can best equip pre-service primary and early years teachers to develop as critical reflective literacy practitioners in the current context

Logarithmic perturbation theory for radial Klein-Gordon equation with screened Coulomb potentials via ℏ\hbar expansions

The explicit semiclassical treatment of logarithmic perturbation theory for the bound-state problem within the framework of the radial Klein-Gordon equation with attractive real-analytic screened Coulomb potentials, contained time-component of a Lorentz four-vector and a Lorentz-scalar term, is developed. Based upon $\hbar$-expansions and suitable quantization conditions a new procedure for deriving perturbation expansions is offered. Avoiding disadvantages of the standard approach, new handy recursion formulae with the same simple form both for ground and excited states have been obtained. As an example, the perturbation expansions for the energy eigenvalues for the Hulth\'en potential containing the vector part as well as the scalar component are considered.Comment: 14 pages, to be submitted to Journal of Physics

"From ‘What the hell is going on?’ to the ‘Mushy middle ground’ to ‘getting used to a new normal’: Young people’s biographical narratives around navigating parental dementia"

The number of young people who have a parent with dementia is rising as a result of improvements in diagnosis of young onset variants and demographic shifts. There has, however, been very little research focusing on this group. Accounts elicited as part of the Perceptions and Experiences of Young People With a Parent With Dementia described the period, usually some years, leading up to a diagnosis of a dementia and then the progress of the condition post diagnosis. These narratives were characterised by confusion, uncertainty, trauma and distress as the young people struggled to make sense of the significant and often extreme, behavioural and attitudinal changes that were symptoms of the illness. This paper describes and discusses how the young people experienced and navigated the temporal messiness and consequent biographical disruption arising from parental dementia

A statistical analysis of X-ray variability in pre-main sequence objects of the Taurus Molecular Cloud

This work is part of a systematic X-ray survey of the Taurus star forming complex with XMM-Newton. We study the time series of all X-ray sources associated with Taurus members, to statistically characterize their X-ray variability, and compare the results to those for pre-main sequence stars in the Orion Nebula Cluster and to expectations arising from a model where all the X-ray emission is the result of a large number of stochastically occurring flares. We find that roughly half of the detected X-ray sources show variability above our sensitivity limit, and in ~ 26 % of the cases this variability is recognized as flares. Variability is more frequently detected at hard than at soft energies. The variability statistics of cTTS and wTTS are undistinguishable, suggesting a common (coronal) origin for their X-ray emission. We have for the first time applied a rigorous maximum likelihood method in the analysis of the number distribution of flare energies on pre-main sequence stars. In its differential form this distribution follows a power-law with index alpha = 2.4 +- 0.5, in the range typically observed on late-type stars and the Sun. The flare energy distribution is probably steep enough to explain the heating of stellar coronae by nano-flares (alpha > 2), albeit associated with a rather large uncertainty that leaves some doubt on this conclusion.Comment: accepted for publication in Astronomy & Astrophysics; to appear in a Special Section dedicated to the XMM-Newton Extended Survey of the Taurus Molecular Cloud (XEST

Curriculum-making in school and college: The case of hospitality

Drawing upon research in the curriculum of Hospitality, this article explores the contrasting ways in which the prescribed curriculum is translated into the enacted curriculum is school and college contexts. It identifies organisational culture and teacher and student backgrounds and dispositions as central to the emerging contrasts. It uses this evidence to argue that the evolution of credit frameworks which assume a rational curriculum is unhelpful in understanding the multiple plays of difference in learning and the enacted curriculu

School self-evaluation and its impact on teachers’ work in England

This study, based on in-depth interview data from a sample of schools in the midlands of England, offers an analysis of UK teachers’ perceptions and understandings of school self evaluation at a point when national accountability procedures have required that all schools complete and constantly update a web-based self evaluation schedule, which is then used as the basis for high stakes external inspection. School systems and cultures of self evaluation were found to be diverse, complex and school-specific. Three broad cultural categories are proposed as a heuristic to illuminate: issues of compliance and resistance, teacher motivation and behaviours, understandings of professionalism and leadership, school ethos, job satisfaction, and the use and interpretation of school level data in relation to school self evaluation

Temperature-ramped 129Xe spin-exchange optical pumping

We describe temperature-ramped spin-exchange optical pumping (TR-SEOP) in an automated high-throughput batch-mode 129Xe hyperpolarizer utilizing three key temperature regimes: (i) “hot”where the 129Xe hyperpolarization rate is maximal, (ii) “warm”-where the 129Xe hyperpolarization approaches unity, and (iii) “cool” where hyperpolarized 129Xe gas is transferred into a Tedlar bag with low Rb content (<5 ng per ∼1 L dose) suitable for human imaging applications. Unlike with the conventional approach of batch-mode SEOP, here all three temperature regimes may be operated under continuous high-power (170 W) laser irradiation, and hyperpolarized 129Xe gas is delivered without the need for a cryocollection step. The variable-temperature approach increased the SEOP rate by more than 2-fold compared to the constant-temperature polarization rate (e.g., giving effective values for the exponential buildup constant γSEOP of 62.5 ± 3.7 × 10−3 min−1 vs 29.9 ± 1.2 × 10−3 min−1) while achieving nearly the same maximum %PXe value (88.0 ± 0.8% vs 90.1% ± 0.8%, for a 500 Torr (67 kPa) Xe cell loadingcorresponding to nuclear magnetic resonance/magnetic resonance imaging (NMR/MRI) enhancements of ∼3.1 × 105 and ∼2.32 × 108 at the relevant fields for clinical imaging and HP 129Xe production of 3 T and 4 mT, respectively); moreover, the intercycle “dead” time was also significantly decreased. The higher-throughput TR-SEOP approach can be implemented without sacrificing the level of 129Xe hyperpolarization or the experimental stability for automation-making this approach beneficial for improving the overall 129Xe production rate in clinical settings

Teacher agency in curriculum making: agents of change and spaces for manoeuvre

In the wake of new forms of curricular policy in many parts of the world, teachers are increasingly required to act as agents of change. And yet, teacher agency is under-theorised and often misconstrued in the educational change literature, wherein agency and change are seen as synonymous and positive. This paper addresses the issue of teacher agency in the context of an empirical study of curriculum making in schooling. Drawing upon the existing literature, we outline an ecological view of agency as an effect. These insights frame the analysis of a set of empirical data, derived from a research project about curriculum-making in a school and further education college in Scotland. Based upon the evidence, we argue that the extent to which teachers are able to achieve agency varies from context to context based upon certain environmental conditions of possibility and constraint, and that an important factor in this lies in the beliefs, values and attributes that teachers mobilise in relation to particular situations