Sentinel Lymph Node Biopsy in Pure DCIS: Is It Necessary?

Introduction. Sentinel lymph node biopsy (SLNB) in patients with pure ductal carcinoma in situ (DCIS) has been a matter of debate due to very low rate of axillary metastases. We therefore aimed to identify factors in a single institutional series to select patients who may benefit from SLNB. Material and Methods. Patients, diagnosed with pure DCIS (n = 63) between July 2000 and March 2011, were reviewed. All the sentinel lymph nodes were examined by serial sectioning (50 μm) of the entire lymph node and H&E staining, and by cytokeratin immunostaining in suspicious cases. Results. Median age was 51 (range, 30–79). Of 63 patients, 40 cases (63.5%) with pure DCIS underwent SLN, and 2 of them had a positive SLN (5%). In both 2 cases with SLN metastases, only one sentinel lymph node was involved with tumor cells. Patients who underwent SLNB were more likely to have a tumor size >30 mm or DCIS with intermediate and high nuclear grade or a mastectomy in univariate and multivariate analyses. Conclusion. In our series, we found a slightly higher rate of SLNB positivity in patients with pure DCIS than the large series reported elsewhere. This may either be due to the meticulous examination of SLNs by serial sectioning technique or due to our patient selection criteria or both

Employability and higher education: contextualising female students' workplace experiences to enhance understanding of employability development

Current political and economic discourses position employability as a responsibility of higher education, which deploys mechanisms such as supervised work experience (SWE) to embed employability skills development into the undergraduate curriculum. However, workplaces are socially constructed complex arenas of embodied knowledge that are gendered. Understanding the usefulness of SWE therefore requires consideration of the contextualised experiences of it, within these complex environments. This study considers higher education's use of SWE as a mechanism of employability skills development through exploration of female students' experiences of accounting SWE, and its subsequent shaping of their views of employment. Findings suggest that women experience numerous, indirect gender-based inequalities within their accounting SWE about which higher education is silent, perpetuating the framing of employability as a set of individual skills and abilities. This may limit the potential of SWE to provide equality of employability development. The study concludes by briefly considering how insights provided by this research could better inform higher education's engagement with SWE within the employability discourse, and contribute to equality of employability development opportunity

Engaging with issues of emotionality in mathematics teacher education for social justice

This article focuses on the relationship between social justice, emotionality and mathematics teaching in the context of the education of prospective teachers of mathematics. A relational approach to social justice calls for giving attention to enacting socially-just relationships in mathematics classrooms. Emotionality and social justice in teaching mathematics variously intersect, interrelate or interweave. An intervention, usng creative action methods, with a cohort of prospective teachers addressing these issues is described to illustrate the connection between emotionality and social justice in the context of mathematics teacher education. Creative action methods involve a variety of dramatic, interactive and experiential tools that can promote personal and group engagement and embodied reflection. The intervention aimed to engage the prospective teachers with some key issues for social justice in mathematics education through dialogue about the emotionality of teaching and learning mathematics. Some of the possibilities and limits of using such methods are considered

The discursive construction of childhood and youth in AIDS interventions in Lesotho's education sector: Beyond global-local dichotomies

This is the post-print version of this article. The definitive, peer-reviewed and edited version of this article is published in Environment and Planning D,Society and Space 28(5) 791 – 810, 2010, available from the link below. Copyright @ 2010 Pion.In southern Africa interventions to halt the spread of AIDS and address its social impacts are commonly targeted at young people, in many cases through the education sector. In Lesotho, education-sector responses to AIDS are the product of negotiation between a range of ‘local’ and ‘global’ actors. Although many interventions are put forward as government policy and implemented by teachers in schools, funding is often provided by bilateral and multilateral donors, and the international ‘AIDS industry’—in the form of UN agencies and international NGOs—sets agendas and makes prescriptions. This paper analyses interviews conducted with policy makers and practitioners in Lesotho and a variety of documents, critically examining the discourses of childhood and youth that are mobilised in producing changes in education policy and practice to address AIDS. Focusing on bursary schemes, life-skills education, and rights-based approaches, the paper concludes that, although dominant ‘global’ discourses are readily identified, they are not simply imported wholesale from the West, but rather are transformed through the organisations and personnel involved in designing and implementing interventions. Nonetheless, the connections through which these discourses are made, and children are subjectified, are central to the power dynamics of neoliberal globalisation. Although the representations of childhood and youth produced through the interventions are hybrid products of local and global discourses, the power relations underlying them are such that they, often unintentionally, serve a neoliberal agenda by depicting young people as individuals in need of saving, of developing personal autonomy, or of exercising individual rights.RGS-IB

Population policies and education: exploring the contradictions of neo-liberal globalisation

The world is increasingly characterised by profound income, health and social inequalities (Appadurai, 2000). In recent decades development initiatives aimed at reducing these inequalities have been situated in a context of increasing globalisation with a dominant neo-liberal economic orthodoxy. This paper argues that neo-liberal globalisation contains inherent contradictions regarding choice and uniformity. This is illustrated in this paper through an exploration of the impact of neo-liberal globalisation on population policies and programmes. The dominant neo-liberal economic ideology that has influenced development over the last few decades has often led to alternative global visions being overlooked. Many current population and development debates are characterised by polarised arguments with strongly opposing aims and views. This raises the challenge of finding alternatives situated in more middle ground that both identify and promote the socially positive elements of neo-liberalism and state intervention, but also to limit their worst excesses within the population field and more broadly. This paper concludes with a discussion outling the positive nature of middle ground and other possible alternatives

Positive emotions: passionate scholarship and student transformation

This paper challenges the practical and conceptual understanding of the role of emotions in higher education from the twin perspectives of transition and transformation. Focusing on the neglected area of positive emotions, exploratory data reveal a rich, low-level milieu of undergraduate emotional awareness in students chiefly attributed to pedagogic actions, primarily extrinsically orientated, and pervasive throughout the learning experience. The data conceive positive affect as oppositional, principally ephemeral and linked to performative pedagogic endeavours of getting, knowing and doing. A cyclical social dynamic of reciprocity, generating positive feedback loops, is highlighted. Finally we inductively construct a tentative 'emotion-transition framework' to assist our understanding of positive emotion as a force for transformational change; our contention is that higher education might proactively craft pedagogic spaces so as to unite the feeling discourse, the thinking discourse (epistemological self) and the wider life-self (ontological) discourse

Films and critical pedagogy in management education: A tourism studies context

This article examines and critically assesses the role of films in the practice of critical pedagogy in undergraduate management education, using tourism studies as a context. Utilising online focus groups, it aims to gain an in-depth knowledge and understanding of the role of films as an effective pedagogical medium in enhancing experiential approaches to learning. It argues that films play an important role in facilitating critical analyses of the studied phenomenon, illustrating and problematising abstract concepts and ideas, as well as in facilitating students’ ability to discern multiple and alternative discourses about management. The findings highlight the role of films in context-specific critical engagement with the studied content and in stimulating emotionality in learning development, thereby enhancing deep approaches to learning. Emotional responses, even negative ones, prove to be critical in engaging with intellectual and critical reflection after watching films. The findings yield new and empirical insights into the pedagogic use of films in management education, thereby contributing to some of the goals of critical management studies

"Find Out Exactly What to Think-Next!": Chris Morris, Brass Eye, and Journalistic Authority

This article discusses Chris Morris's fake news TV series Brass Eye (1997, 2001). It concentrates on the ways in which Brass Eye exposed and undermined not only the textual conventions of TV news and current affairs, but also the ways in which the program deployed those textual conventions to highlight and sabotage the cultural authority of public figures who appeared on it. The article first introduces Morris and Brass Eye, before identifying some of the key textual strategies of broadcast news that are satirized in the program, including its mode of address, its music, and its visuals and graphics. It then examines how the program's use of those strategies enables it to exercise the authority of broadcast news to expose the accessed voices of public figures within the show

Hope as a critical resource for small scale farmers in Mpumalanga

I contrast formal institutional structures that are part of water resources management policy and practice with more fluid ‘outside’ spaces that I claim are more apt for participatory engagement around food production. I link these ideas to a discussion on hope. I make three distinct contributions. First the paper expands on the theoretical concerns of the Capability Approach by bringing to the fore the linkages between subjective well-being and emotions. The paper thus connects the Capability Approach and discourses of affect and emotions explicit. The Capability Approach (CA) is a helpful entry point into the idea of hope in particular and emotions in general. Second, I claim that emotions are of public concern and that they are embedded structurally. In these spaces the dimension of power is crucial in determining the nature of the emotions that are experienced, and there is a connection between hope and power