The responsibilisation of teachers: a neoliberal solution to the problem of inclusion

This paper critically examines competing demands placed on teachers, with reference to recent inclusion policy in England and Australia. The authors draw on Michael Foucault’s analysis of power, neoliberalism(s) and biopolitics to explore the ways in which teachers are ‘responsibilised’ into negotiating and fulfilling demands related to both state-imposed accountability practices and social justice agendas. The economic context and associated ‘politics of austerity’ are taken into account in a critical exploration of how the (biopolitical) management of inclusion in the neoliberal present coincides with diminishing funding for social and educational expertise, with ever-increasing responsibilities being placed on teachers to fill this void. The responsibilisation of teachers in recent legislation and statutory guidance discursively constructs the teacher as a professional who takes responsibility for student and school performance, pastoral care, inclusion and social change. Responsibilisation relies on ‘dividing practices’, obliging some teachers to assess the conformity of colleagues to inclusion policy

Painful invisibilities: Roll management or ‘off-rolling’ and professional identity

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from the publisher via the DOI in this record‘Off-rolling’ is widely defined as the illegal removal of students from a school roll unlike permanent exclusion which involves sanctioned formal procedures. It is a practice that brings very different logics, political agendas, governmental imperatives and the associated matter of school leader professional identity into sharp relief. Deviant professional identities have already been discursively constituted despite the current lack of research into the motivation of senior school leaders who engage in ‘off-rolling’. This paper draws on Foucault to explore tensions between a political standards and an inclusion agenda, and to consider how the professional identities of senior school leaders are shaped such that ‘off-rolling’ becomes possible. It is suggested that chronic under-funding of the inclusion agenda has combined with what England’s Office for Standards in Education, Children’s Services and Skills (Ofsted) now describes as an overemphasis on academic performance to create unsustainable pressures on many senior school leaders. The descriptor ‘contextual roll management’ may therefore be more appropriate. The moral outrage which accompanies public and political discourse around ‘off-rolling’ is theorised with reference to Apple, Ball and Popkewitz. Such moral indignation distracts attention from the wider socio-political and economic context within which schools are now required to deliver academic progress and inclusion. We conclude the paper by outlining key empirical questions that have yet to be addressed

A content analysis of school leaders’ conversations about ‘off rolling’ on Twitter and its relevance to teacher education

This article seeks to illustrate the usefulness to teacher educators of small-scale qualitative social media content analysis by reporting a study of online microblogs (tweets) posted by senior school leaders’ relating to ‘off rolling’ (practices that bypass legal permanent exclusion procedures in English mainstream schools). The outlined method enables analysis of social media content in the absence of costly opinion mining software and its associated affordances and limitations are discussed. The article also outlines the implications of the study’s findings for teacher education. In this instance, it served to illustrate a disparity between different types of professional discourse which future teachers should be prepared to navigate in their teacher training. Given the illegality of ‘off rolling’ and an increasingly incontestable socio-political discourse around inclusive education, it was hypothesised that Twitter affords school leaders a forum for the articulation of views that rest uneasily with this discourse, current legislation and statutory guidance around off rolling. A tendency to discount ‘off rolling’ as a rare occurrence was found despite growing anecdotal evidence that it is viewed as a legitimate, if illegal, practice within some school cultures. This finding is relevant to teacher educators and future teachers who aspire to an inclusive education system

An Intermediate-mass Black Hole of Over 500 Solar Masses in the Galaxy ESO 243-49

Ultra-luminous X-ray sources are extragalactic objects located outside the nucleus of the host galaxy with bolometric luminosities >10^39 erg s^-1. These extreme luminosities - if the emission is isotropic and below the theoretical (i.e. Eddington) limit, where the radiation pressure is balanced by the gravitational pressure - imply the presence of an accreting black hole with a mass of ~10^2-10^5 times that of the Sun. The existence of such intermediate mass black holes is in dispute, and though many candidates have been proposed, none are widely accepted as definitive. Here we report the detection of a variable X-ray source with a maximum 0.2-10 keV luminosity of up to 1.2 x 10^42 erg s^-1 in the edge-on spiral galaxy ESO 243-49, with an implied conservative lower limit of the mass of the black hole of ~500 Msun. This finding presents the strongest observational evidence to date for the existence of intermediate mass black holes, providing the long sought after missing link between the stellar mass and super-massive black hole populations.Comment: 5 pages, 2 figures, 1 table, published in Natur

Application of the PM6 semi-empirical method to modeling proteins enhances docking accuracy of AutoDock

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Molecular docking methods are commonly used for predicting binding modes and energies of ligands to proteins. For accurate complex geometry and binding energy estimation, an appropriate method for calculating partial charges is essential. AutoDockTools software, the interface for preparing input files for one of the most widely used docking programs AutoDock 4, utilizes the Gasteiger partial charge calculation method for both protein and ligand charge calculation. However, it has already been shown that more accurate partial charge calculation - and as a consequence, more accurate docking- can be achieved by using quantum chemical methods. For docking calculations quantum chemical partial charge calculation as a routine was only used for ligands so far. The newly developed Mozyme function of MOPAC2009 allows fast partial charge calculation of proteins by quantum mechanical semi-empirical methods. Thus, in the current study, the effect of semi-empirical quantum-mechanical partial charge calculation on docking accuracy could be investigated.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>The docking accuracy of AutoDock 4 using the original AutoDock scoring function was investigated on a set of 53 protein ligand complexes using Gasteiger and PM6 partial charge calculation methods. This has enabled us to compare the effect of the partial charge calculation method on docking accuracy utilizing AutoDock 4 software. Our results showed that the docking accuracy in regard to complex geometry (docking result defined as accurate when the RMSD of the first rank docking result complex is within 2 Å of the experimentally determined X-ray structure) significantly increased when partial charges of the ligands and proteins were calculated with the semi-empirical PM6 method.</p> <p>Out of the 53 complexes analyzed in the course of our study, the geometry of 42 complexes were accurately calculated using PM6 partial charges, while the use of Gasteiger charges resulted in only 28 accurate geometries. The binding affinity estimation was not influenced by the partial charge calculation method - for more accurate binding affinity prediction development of a new scoring function for AutoDock is needed.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>Our results demonstrate that the accuracy of determination of complex geometry using AutoDock 4 for docking calculation greatly increases with the use of quantum chemical partial charge calculation on both the ligands and proteins.</p