Digging our own grave: A Marxian consideration of formal education as a destructive enterprise

The negative impact of human activity has been known throughout history. The epic tale of Gilgamesh, Koranic and biblical texts all make clear the potential that humans have to destroy the world in which they live. Climate breakdown, biodiversity collapse and zoonotic diseases such as COVID-19 have also been predicted well in advance. The “wicked problem” (dilemma) to address is: “Why do humans still persist in ‘digging their own graves’ by damaging the environments they inhabit?” The author of this article argues that the motive to engage in education can be understood as an ancient human response to ecological change. This has led to a range of behaviours, including teaching and learning that serve only to further disrupt the relationship between the human and the “more-than-human” world. When formal education structures are viewed through a Marxian lens, it soon becomes clear that the unsustainable impact of humans on the more-than-human is the result of capitalist entrapment. Karl Marx’s proposition of a metabolic rift helps make sense of the nonsensical, while a discussion of use and exchange value shows how formal education has become ensnared in the mire of capitalist productivity, concealing from view the educationally-induced destruction of planetary systems that support human flourishing. Fortunately, a more sustainable and sustaining education is possible – this is an education for a “long-life” that is no longer influenced by the machinery of neoliberalism

Beginning teaching: the theory/practice divide

It is well reported that during the early career development of teachers there is a tendency to favour practical experience over an engagement with professional knowledge. This article considers the seductive nature of experience and how educational settings may offer a unique professional environment. This environment is characterised by a heightened transference response that brings the personal and professional into conflict. It is acknowledged that affect proceeds cognition, which goes some way towards explaining this phenomenon. The tension produced by the encounter with new knowledge creates an array of defences that resist what is perceived as an attack on the self. It is argued that the desire ‘not to know’ is problematic for new professionals and that knowledge cannot simply be transferred but, rather, providing conditions to encourage a disposition to learn is paramount

Digital technology, human world making and the avoidance of learning

This paper explores the role of digital technologies and their application to learning situations in higher education and questions how and why such technologies have become increasingly common pedagogical tools. This debate highlights the complexity of learning by synthesising theories from a wide range of disciplines that, it is argued, more accurately reflect the reality and process of human learning. Initially, a sociological approach on the human construction of reality will be discussed, to highlight the impact that the physical and psychological constructions of human world making, paradoxically confront human learning. This then leads into a consideration of the interrelationship between humans and the wider non-human world and does so to position an understanding of learning within an ecological framework. Psychoanalytic ideas highlight the role of holding environments, anxiety and associated unconscious defences, caused to a large extent by a separation between the human and non-human world. It is suggested that the continual desire to design and use ever more complex technologies in learning situations, highlights an unconscious and seductive motivation to avoid the complexity of human learning, resulting in digital technologies having fetish-like properties. Finally, it is argued that those involved in teaching and learning must be mindful that technology should not determine learning environments and processes but that pedagogical thinking should drive technological applications

Melody based tune retrieval over the World Wide Web

In this paper we describe the steps taken to develop a Web-based version of an existing stand-alone, single-user digital library application for melodical searching of a collection of music. For the three key components: input, searching, and output, we assess the suitability of various Web-based strategies that deal with the now distributed software architecture and explain the decisions we made. The resulting melody indexing service, known as MELDEX, has been in operation for one year, and the feed-back we have received has been favorable

Quadri-stability of a spatially ambiguous auditory illusion

In addition to vision, audition plays an important role in sound localization in our world. One way we estimate the motion of an auditory object moving towards or away from us is from changes in volume intensity. However, the human auditory system has unequally distributed spatial resolution, including difficulty distinguishing sounds in front vs. behind the listener. Here, we introduce a novel quadri-stable illusion, the Transverse-and-Bounce Auditory Illusion, which combines front-back confusion with changes in volume levels of a nonspatial sound to create ambiguous percepts of an object approaching and withdrawing from the listener. The sound can be perceived as traveling transversely from front to back or back to front, or “bouncing” to remain exclusively in front of or behind the observer. Here we demonstrate how human listeners experience this illusory phenomenon by comparing ambiguous and unambiguous stimuli for each of the four possible motion percepts. When asked to rate their confidence in perceiving each sound’s motion, participants reported equal confidence for the illusory and unambiguous stimuli. Participants perceived all four illusory motion percepts, and could not distinguish the illusion from the unambiguous stimuli. These results show that this illusion is effectively quadri-stable. In a second experiment, the illusory stimulus was looped continuously in headphones while participants identified its perceived path of motion to test properties of perceptual switching, locking, and biases. Participants were biased towards perceiving transverse compared to bouncing paths, and they became perceptually locked into alternating between front-to-back and back-to-front percepts, perhaps reflecting how auditory objects commonly move in the real world. This multi-stable auditory illusion opens opportunities for studying the perceptual, cognitive, and neural representation of objects in motion, as well as exploring multimodal perceptual awareness.United States. Dept. of Defense (National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate (NDSEG) Fellowships

The return of a cultural icon to Kent: attitudes towards the red-billed chough​

National and international conventions encourage the use of reintroduction to restore populations of native species. BIAZAs' actions for the conservation of biodiversity are guided by WAZA (TheWorld Association of Zoos and Aquariums)and the IUCN​. The IUCNs guidelines for Reintroductions state that to establish a viable, free-ranging population in the wild it is necessary to enlist public support (IUCN, 2013). ​ An understanding of the attitudes of varied sectors of society about the focal species helps projects address key issues more effectively, saving time and funding. The red-billed chough was once widespread in coastal areas but today it is Britain’s most endangered corvid, mostly due to changes in farming practises. ​ In the UK fewer than 450 pairs remain in small and isolated populations. ​The chough has been missing from Kent for more than 200 years. After decades of restauration the local chalk grasslands now provide the perfect conditions for its return. The aims of this study was to inform the reintroduction project planned for summer 2023, a collaboration between Kent Wildlife Trust, Wildwood Trust and other partners. They wish to establish a population that can connect with others along the southern coast. ​ In the summer of 2022 we conducted focus groups and interviews to learn about how different groups and local residents relate to the chough, its conservation, reintroduction and management of populations. ​ Questions were structured based on the Theory of Planned Behaviour, however, the main point of focus groups is to give local people a voice and listen to emerging themes that will be of interest for further investigation. ​ The findings from the focus groups and interviews together with questionnaires, will provide a baseline that can be revisited and compared with future attitudinal surveys, providing evidence of changes in attitudes over time in response to interventions and campaigns by the Chough Reintroduction Project.​ In this presentation we discuss the findings from the focus groups and make recommendations.

Improved cassava processing technology: Final technical report

The overall purpose of the project was to develop improved cassava processing methods that have enhanced post-harvest qualities including low cyanogen levels and/or product storability

Responding to research evidence in Parliament: a case study on selective education policy

This research focusses on how members of the UK Parliament engaged with evidence in relation to the policy decision leading to the Selective Schools Expansion Fund, a policy designed to enable the existing 163 English Grammar Schools to apply for additional funds to expand their intake. Although a small case study, the narrow focus provides a fertile setting for analysis of the relationship between research evidence, Parliamentary debates, and policy decisions. The article provides contextual background in relation to the dominant political parties’ (Conservative and Labour) education policy manifesto statements and a discussion on the nature and understanding of evidence. Particular attention is given to how evidence can be used to support claims and the importance of justified warrants. Using NVivo software, we identified the thematic content of 11 Parliamentary debates and analysed the findings using descriptive statistics, which we tested with a playful, carnivalesque extrapolation of the data. Argumentative analysis shows that within the debates a number of rhetorical tools are used to avoid empirical evidence, including the deployment of a ‘moral sidestep’ which discourse analysis reveals in this case to be the repeated communication that grammar schools are ‘good’. In this way, Ofsted ratings are conflated with moral goodness, leading to a disproportionate diversion of school funding in their favour. This case study exposes strengths and weaknesses of Parliamentary debate, which might be relevant to educational researchers who focus on evidence-based policy and to the policy makers and other stakeholders who engage with the evidence such researchers offer