The Role of the Hidden Curriculum: Institutional Messages of Inclusivity

Significant attention is rightly given in literature concerning institutional curricular change to the design and delivery of the formal curriculum. Particularly influential in this area has been Biggs’ work on constructive alignment (Biggs, 1999, and subsequent editions) and the learning taxonomies which higher education has sought to utilise in the alignment process (Biggs & Collins, 1982; Bloom, 1956). However, the role of the hidden curriculum (Giroux & Purpel, 1983), much discussed in the context of school education for many years, has barely featured in the discourse around learning and teaching in higher education. In this reflective analysis, I consider the question, ‘To what extent do the learning communities we create and the hidden curriculum which frames them foster or fight the development of capabilities needed by our global students?’ and propose the hidden curriculum to be an area we can no longer neglect

Critical intercultural practice: learning in and for a multicultural globalizing world

© Journal of International Students. Universities fail to offer equitable learning experiences for their diverse students. At the same time, the value of diverse student identities and perspectives remains largely unrealized. In a globalising higher education context, these issues are exacerbated while the post-national university is increasingly complicit in advancing the neoliberal project and neglecting its potential to enable its diverse students to enhance social justice locally and globally. Although much current practice in outcomes-based higher education contributes to each of these processes, its underpinning theories of learning and its design features are compatible with more expansive and inclusive aspirations. Drawing upon critical and culturally relevant pedagogies, this article presents principles for the development of “critical intercultural practice” to empower all students in and for a multicultural globalizing world

“Now he sings”. The My Musical Memories Reminiscence Programme: Personalised Interactive Reminiscence Sessions for People Living With Dementia

This paper explores the impact of the My Musical Memories Reminiscence Programme (MMMRP), an innovative intervention that adopts a music-based reminiscence approach. MMMRP builds on the format of the popular Singing for the Brain sessions with the aim of increasing opportunities for interaction and reminiscence among people living with dementia. Data were collected pre- and post-intervention and three months later using structured observation, interviews and focus groups. Results suggest that that programme had a positive impact on participants by promoting engagement, reminiscence and social interaction. For some individuals the impacts continued beyond their participation in the programme. A range of key facilitators for successful implementation of this approach were identified including the Session Leader role, the involvement of informal carers and the input of volunteers

Intercultural ethics: questions of methods in language and intercultural communication

This paper explores how questions of ethics and questions of method are intertwined and unavoidable in any serious study of language and intercultural communication. It argues that the focus on difference and solution orientations to intercultural conflict has been a fundamental driver for theory, data collection and methods in the field. These approaches, the paper argues, have created a considerable consciousness raising industry, with methods, trainings and ‘critical incidents’, which ultimately focus intellectual energy in areas which may be productive in terms of courses and publications but which have a problematic basis in their ethical terrain. Dieser Artikel untersucht wie ethische und methodische Fragen nicht nur ineinander greifen, sondern in keiner ernstzunehmenden Studie ueber Sprache und interkulturelle Kommunikation ausgelassen werden duerfen. Es wird hier argumentiert, dass der Schwerpunkt auf Verschiedenheit und Problemorientierung im interkulturellen Konflikt einen wesentlichen Einfluss auf theoretische Entwicklungen, Datenerhebung und Methoden in diesem Bereich hatte. Dieser Artikel legt auch dar, wie diese Ansaetze eine betraechtliche ‘Bewusstseinsbildungs – Branche' erzeugt haben, mit Methoden, Trainings, und ‘kritischen Interaktionssituationen’, welche letztendlich allen intellektuellen Arbeitseifer auf Bereiche konzentriert hat, die zwar ertragreich sind in Bezug auf Kurse und Publikationen, jedoch eine problematische Grundlage im ethischen Bereich aufweisen

Cultural relativism and the discourse of intercultural communication: aporias of praxis in the intercultural public sphere

The premise of much intercultural communication pedagogy and research is to educate people from different cultures towards open and transformative positions of mutual understanding and respect. This discourse in the instance of its articulation realises and sustains Intercultural Communication epistemologically – as an academic field of social enquiry, and judgementally – as one which locates itself on a moral terrain. By adopting an ethical stance towards difference, the discourse of intercultural communication finds itself caught in a series of aporias, or performative contradictions, where interculturalists are projected simultaneously into positions of cultural relativism on the one hand and ideological totalism on the other. Such aporias arise because the theoretical premises upon which the discourse relies are problematic. We trace these thematics to a politics of presence operating within the discourse of intercultural communication and links this to questions of judgement and truth in the intercultural public sphere. We propose that the politics of presence be set aside in favour of an intercultural praxis which is oriented to responsibility rather than to truth

Beyond competencies and silos: Embedding graduate capabilities for a multicultural globalizing world across the mainstream curriculum

© The Author(s) 2020. This article presents a critical analysis of key elements within the conference question as the basis for proposals for an inclusive and systematic approach to the development of mainstream disciplinary higher education curricula designed to meet the needs of students and societies in a multicultural globalizing world. The critical analysis considers key objectives, understandings and limitations of GII ‘competencies’, how we conceptualize ‘students’ within a globalizing higher education, how ‘effective’ strategies might be framed, and how internationalization abroad and at home might be re-envisioned in the era of the post-national university. The article illustrates how this critical analysis points to the need to embed internationalization efforts, and their success indicators, within the mainstream curriculum across the disciplines

Educating novice practitioners to detect elder financial abuse: A randomised controlled trial

© 2014 Harries et al.; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly credited.This article has been made available through the Brunel Open Access Publishing Fund.Background - Health and social care professionals are well positioned to identify and intervene in cases of elder financial abuse. An evidence-based educational intervention was developed to advance practitioners’ decision-making in this domain. The objective was to test the effectiveness of a decision-training educational intervention on novices’ ability to detect elder financial abuse. The research was funded by an E.S.R.C. grant reference RES-189-25-0334. Methods - A parallel-group, randomised controlled trial was conducted using a judgement analysis approach. Each participant used the World Wide Web to judge case sets at pre-test and post-test. The intervention group was provided with training after pre-test testing, whereas the control group were purely given instructions to continue with the task. 154 pre-registration health and social care practitioners were randomly allocated to intervention (n78) or control (n76). The intervention comprised of written and graphical descriptions of an expert consensus standard explaining how case information should be used to identify elder financial abuse. Participants’ ratings of certainty of abuse occurring (detection) were correlated with the experts’ ratings of the same cases at both stages of testing. Results - At pre-test, no differences were found between control and intervention on rating capacity. Comparison of mean scores for the control and intervention group at pre-test compared to immediate post-test, showed a statistically significant result. The intervention was shown to have had a positive moderate effect; at immediate post-test, the intervention group’s ratings had become more similar to those of the experts, whereas the control’s capacity did not improve. The results of this study indicate that the decision-training intervention had a positive effect on detection ability. Conclusions - This freely available, web-based decision-training aid is an effective evidence-based educational resource. Health and social care professionals can use the resource to enhance their ability to detect elder financial abuse. It has been embedded in a web resource at http://www.elderfinancialabuse.co.uk.ESR