BAICE Thematic Forum:Challenging deficit discourses in international education and development

Research and policy in international education has o en been framed in terms of a deficit discourse. For instance, policy debates on women’s literacy and education have begun by positioning women as a group who need to ‘catch up’ on certain skills in order to become more active in development. Rather than recognising the skills and knowledge that participants already have and prac se in their everyday lives, researchers who adopt this deficit perspective on learning and education may find that the research agenda and questions will already be shaped to a large extent by the providers’/ policy makers’ standpoint. This BAICE Thematic Forum aimed to deepen understanding around how deficit discourses have shaped the questions and objectives of international educational research. As well as deconstructing and gaining greater knowledge into why and how these dominant deficit discourses have influenced the research agenda, we also set out to investigate and propose alternative conceptual models through two linked seminars. The seminars were intended to explore and challenge dominant deficit discourses that have shaped the way researchers/policy makers look at specific groups in development and thematic policy areas

The Social Contract and India's Right to Education

India's 2009 Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education (RTE) Act presents an idealized social contract which assigns roles to multiple actors to uphold a mutual duty, or collective responsibility, to secure children's access to a quality school education. This article explores how the social contract assumed by the RTE Act misrepresents the conditions required to enact mutual responsibilities as well as actors’ agreement to do so. Qualitative data from Bihar and Rajasthan show how state actors, parents, community groups and teachers negotiate and contest the RTE Act norms. The analysis illuminates the unequal conditions and ever-present politics of accountability relations in education. It problematizes the idealization of the social contract in education reform: it proposes that if the relations of power and domination through which ‘contracts’ are entered into remain unaddressed, then expressions of ‘mutual’ responsibility are unlikely to do other than reproduce injustice. It argues that policy discourses need to recognize and attend to the socially situated contingencies of accountability relations, and that doing so would offer an alternative pathway towards addressing structural inequalities and their manifestations in education

Preventing homelessness among women prison leavers in Wales

Under the Housing (Wales) Act 2014, prison leavers are among those who are no longer considered a priority need. This paper draws on interviews conducted with 17 women prison leavers and ten professionals that formed part of a Welsh Government funded evaluation of homelessness services to adults in the secure estate. The findings in this study lend support to previous research that indicates women who come into contact with the criminal justice system often have multiple and complex needs. The need for gender specific services and more availability of supported accommodation to ensure the effective resettlement of women prison leavers is also identified

Rethinking Preventing Homelessness amongst Prison Leavers

The Wales (Housing) Act 2015 introduced a preventative approach to addressing homelessness that impacted on prison leavers in Wales. Since the same changes will take effect in England from October 2018, this paper provides early insight into how new preventative duties have been implemented in Wales. Drawing on interviews with 114 stakeholders and 75 prison leavers, we report that the promise associated with a preventative agenda is presently not fully realised. We contend that resettlement activity might be improved if it was better incentivised and facilitated inside the prison wall. However, we also suggest the time has come for more radical options to be pursued to address homelessness amongst prison leavers. We argue against short prison sentences, which are so often causative of homelessness, and for providers of probation services to be better incentivised and resourced to take a more active role in meeting accommodation needs

Morphological response to a North Sea bed depression induced by gas mining

Gas mining leads to saucer-like surface depressions. In the North Sea, gas is currently mined at several offshore locations. The associated bed depression has a similar spatial extent as offshore tidal sandbanks, which are large-scale bed patterns covering a significant part of the North Sea bottom. The morphological time scales of bed depressions and tidal sandbanks are similar, so that significant interaction between these features is expected. In this paper we allow the bed depression to become morphologically active. A simple depression model based on a homogeneous soil is tuned with data of a bed depression near the Dutch barrier island of Ameland. Next, this subsidence model is included in a morphodynamic model. We show that this model is able to explain tidal sandbanks, which represent natural bed behavior. Here we approximate the solution by an expansion up to first order. The zeroth-order solution of the model is a flat bed with a spatially uniform, time-independent current. The first-order solution is investigated using a Fourier transformation. In general, we observe significant interaction between the bed depression and the natural sandbank formation process. The process of induced bed depression triggers and intensifies the natural morphological behavior of the offshore seabed. The model also shows essential differences between modeling a morphodynamically active marine bottom depression and a bottom depression below the threshold for sediment motion. The maximum bed level depression in the active case is significantly larger, and the circular shape of depression contours is affected by stretching toward the preferred orientation of the tidal sandbank formation process

Genetic diversity of human RNase 8

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Ribonuclease 8 is a member of the RNase A family of secretory ribonucleases; orthologs of this gene have been found only in primate genomes. RNase 8 is a divergent paralog of RNase 7, which is lysine-enriched, highly conserved, has prominent antimicrobial activity, and is expressed in both normal and diseased skin; in contrast, the physiologic function of RNase 8 remains uncertain. Here, we examine the genetic diversity of human RNase 8, a subject of significant interest given the existence of functional pseudogenes (coding sequences that are otherwise intact but with mutations in elements crucial for ribonucleolytic activity) in non-human primate genomes.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>RNase 8 expression was detected in adult human lung, spleen and testis tissue by quantitative reverse-transcription PCR. Only two single-nucleotide polymorphisms and four unique alleles were identified within the RNase 8 coding sequence; nucleotide sequence diversity (π = 0.00122 ± 0.00009 per site) was unremarkable for a human nuclear gene. We isolated transcripts encoding RNase 8 via rapid amplification of cDNA ends (RACE) and RT-PCR which included a distal potential translational start site followed by sequence encoding an additional 30 amino acids that are conserved in the genomes of several higher primates. The distal translational start site is functional and promotes RNase 8 synthesis in transfected COS-7 cells.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>These results suggest that RNase 8 may diverge considerably from typical RNase A family ribonucleases and may likewise exhibit unique function. This finding prompts a reconsideration of what we have previously termed functional pseudogenes, as RNase 8 may be responding to constraints that promote significant functional divergence from the canonical structure and enzymatic activity characteristic of the RNase A family.</p

Shortcomings of services for persons with severe and persistent mental health challenges: a qualitative study of service users and family carers

IntroductionThe opinions of service users and carers are crucial to identifying ways to innovate and implement system change. This study aims to explore the views and experiences of service users and carerson the services they have used for their mental health challenges and their suggestions for service reform.MethodsTwenty participants (15 carers and 5 service users) were interviewed for the study.ResultsEight categories emerged from the data. They were: Several gaps in the system, Barriers to accessing services, Services are not fit for purpose, Services operate in isolation, System is not person focused, Service users and carers are treated poorly, Services are overloaded and under resourced and Recommendations for service reform. Respondents reported that a persistent lack of funding and resources for mental health services was a main cause of these shortcomings. Respondents also noted that innovations were needed to re-orient services to enable continuity of care, and training of mental health professionals was needed for a better understanding of the needs of service users and their carers.DiscussionAdditional research is needed with larger and more diverse samples to further explore these findings

Re-imagining a synchronous linguistic landscape of public and school uses of Runyoro-Rutooro and Runyankore-Rukiga in early childhood education in Western Uganda

Uganda’s ‘early exit’ language policy positions African languages ambiguously in public education provision. Runyoro-Rutooro and Runyankore-Rukiga are spoken in Western Uganda in public spaces where translanguaging happens as a matter of course. These languages are heard at pre-primary and lower primary levels but are superseded by English from primary grade 4. Teachers speak Rutooro, Rukiga and English to varying degrees but must negotiate the different priorities stipulated by the policy within this linguistic landscape as they teach reading to multilingual children. In so doing teachers create linguistic synergies and disjunctures between home, community and school. This exerts a toll both on teachers and on students’ capabilities to become proficient in spoken and written local language and English in both the dynamic present, and in the imagined future. This paper reports from a small-scale qualitative cross-sectional study of synergies and disjunctures in language use as children learn to read in local language and English across home, Early Childhood Education and primary school in two sites in Western Uganda. Findings suggest that mitigation of such cognitive wastage in young children by a ‘late-exit’ policy would support reading proficiency and encourage translanguaging practic es, creating synergies with the wider, public use of Ugandan languages