Do schools promote social inclusion? The experiences of intercountry adoptees in Australia

Intercountry adoption programs have brought children from racially and culturally diverse backgrounds to live as Australians, including 30 children from Rangsit Children’s Home who arrived in South Australia in the late 1980s and early 1990s. As part of a project which explored the life experiences of 12 adults who had arrived as children aged between 4 and 9 from Rangsit, this paper explores the role of schools in facilitating their inclusion into life in Australia. The school experience was often critical in learning English and was pre-requisite for acceptance in the school yard but also a place in which most of these Thai-born intercountry adoptees experienced racism. More than half of the participants did not complete secondary school but all had employment. However, many of these jobs were low-paying and this precluded them from participating in opportunities to return to Thailand to learn more about their Thai origins or participating as adoptive parents in intercountry adoption programs. Hence, while schools can play an important role in facilitating social inclusion, the school system alone may be unable to address the multiple dimensions of exclusion experienced by intercountry adoptees

The power and value of placebo and nocebo in painful osteoarthritis.

This paper reviews some recent advances in our understanding of the effects of sham or dummy interventions on pain and other symptoms in osteoarthritis (OA), and outlines two new approaches to the investigation of placebo and nocebo effects. We argue that the placebo effect provides us with a valuable way of investigating the nature of conditions like OA. For example, by examining which symptoms, biochemical markers or imaging features do or do not respond to placebo, we might learn more about the relationships between pathology and symptoms in OA. Placebo and nocebo effects are positive or negative outcomes resulting from the human interactions and contexts in which healthcare consultations take place. Subtle changes in behaviours and the environments in which consultations take place can have major effects on pain and other symptoms being experienced by people with OA. Nocebo effects are particularly powerful, leading to many health-care professionals (HCPs) causing unintended harm to their clients. Based on our own research, we conclude that beneficial outcomes are most likely to occur when both the (HCP) and the client feel safe and relaxed, and when the experiences of the client are validated by the (HCP). These findings have important implications for clinical practice. We believe that research in this field needs to be 'trans-disciplinary', escaping from the constraints of the purely biomedical, deterministic, positivist paradigm of most medical research. We provide the example of our own work which combines performance studies and scholarship, with psychology and medicine

Transcendent Experiences Among Pilgrims to Lourdes: A Qualitative Investigation

This is the final version. Available on open access from Springer via the DOI in this recordMillions of pilgrims visit Lourdes each year, often seeking revitalisation rather than miraculous cures. We sought to understand the phenomenon of transcendent experiences. We spoke with 67 pilgrims including assisted pilgrims, young volunteers and medical staff. About two in five reported a transcendent experience: some felt they had communicated or had close contact with a divine presence, while others reported a powerful experience of something intangible and otherworldly. Transcendent experiences are an important feature of pilgrimage to Lourdes and the place offers the faithful a means of connecting with the divine, with nature and with the self.BIAL Foundatio

Holding up mirrors: reflections on academic literacy development across course curricula

The aim of the HEPPP funded project presented here is to embed support for the development of academic literacies (Lea & Street 1998) by developing inclusive curricula in courses with a high percentage of students from low socioeconomic status (LSES) backgrounds (Devlin et al. 2012). Reflection is central in both the Bachelor of Early Childhood Education (BECE) and the Bachelor of Social Work, and the student profiles in these two courses mirror each other, but the approach taken differs. Many BECE students enter university through a TAFE pathway, some have low or no school exit scores and may have faced significant educational disadvantage in the past (Whitington et al. 2009). The BECE team responded to the invitation to use the Harper (2011) framework for academic literacy mapping by revising it and making it their own. Similarly, a large proportion of social work students are mature aged and first in their family to attend university with many entering via the TAFE sector (Goldingay et al. 2011). This earlier study found differences between staff and student perceptions of the academic skills needed for success, so resources developed through the project drew on the student voice and student perceptions to invite new students into disciplinary practices. This presentation will illustrate the approaches taken by Language and Learning Advisers (LLAs) working collaboratively with these two academic teams to help academic staff reflect on, scaffold and support the development of the academic literacies relevant to their discipline and provide more relevant feedback (Jolly 2001)

(Re)acting Medicine: applying theatre in order to develop a whole-systems approach to understanding the healing response.

This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis Group in Research in Drama Education: The Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance on 30/09/2014, available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/13569783.2014.928007UK health and care provision is in crisis. Dominant practices, ideologies and infrastructure need to change. Our research team is investigating how performance-led research and creative practice is able to positively shape that change. Presently biomedicine holds the power; its reductionist research approach and acute medical model dominate. Neither are well-equipped to engage with increasing non-communicable, long-term, multi-issue, chronic ill-health. We believe that creative practitioners should be using their own well-established approaches to trouble this dominant paradigm to both form and inform the future of healing provision and wellbeing creation. Our transdisciplinary team (drama and medicine) is developing a methodology that is rooted in productive difference; an evolving synergy between two cultural and intellectual traditions with significant divergences in their world-view, perceptions, approaches and training methods. This commonality is underpinned by four assumptions that; (1) human-to-human interactions matter, (2) context matters, (3) the whole person and their community matters and (4) interpretation matters. Initially, we are using this methodology to investigate the fundamental human-to-human interaction of a person seeking healing (a healee) with a healer: we believe that this interaction enables the Healing Response - the intrinsic ability of the human organism to self-heal and regain homeostasis. In this paper we reflect on the project’s early stages

Biology of gliding mammals

This volume is the proceedings of a symposium ... that was held at the seventh International Theriological Congress (ITC7) in Acapulco, Mexico, in September 199

'And the pain just disappeared into insignificance':The healing response in Lourdes - Performance, psychology and caring

This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis Group in International Review of Psychiatry on 22/06/2014, available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.3109/09540261.2014.914472Three academic/practitioners from different disciplines (performance, medicine and psychology) describe the ways in which observing, and importantly, participating in the healing rituals of the French pilgrimage site of Lourdes challenged their ways of thinking about both their discipline's research approaches and their understandings of community, caring and healing. By positioning themselves as both first-person and third-person researchers, they suggest that a new type of 'trans-disciplinary', longitudinal, reflexively sensitive methodology is needed in order to investigate activities involving groups of people and spiritual practices as a whole system in order to better understand how they can positively affect our innate healing response