Grease Stability Under Vibrating Conditions

In Australian industry, centralised lubrication systems are used to deliver grease to various mechanical components, usually bearings. In many situations, the length of the delivery lines is in excess of 20 metres. These lines meander through other pieces of equipment and infrastructure. In some situations when these lines are attached to support devices that are subject to vibration, the delivery pipes have become “plugged” because the oil in the grease has leaked/separated from the grease matrix. This scenario is very costly to the owner/operator of the equipment as a lack of lubrication can cause major repair/maintenance costs. A laboratory test procedure has been devised to evaluate the suitability of various greases to remain stable under these conditions

Compassionate collaboration, choice and creativity: Learning Communities against the grain in hierarchical institutions

This short article accompanies the one by Claire Badger, Miles Golland and Amanda Triccas, also in this edition of Impact. These teacher-authors describe the collaborative interaction that is promoted by Teacher Learning Communities and Student Learning Communities in Godolphin and Latymer School. They define this as ‘constructing knowledge with others’ and they emphasise the power of talking with colleagues face to face at regular intervals of time. They also discuss ‘peer learning’, in which colleagues support and encourage each other’s learning, regardless of their position in the formal school hierarchy. They highlight the importance of Learning Community membership being voluntary rather than coerced; and how each teacher or student exercises agency by determining their own route for change. They tell us that new learning, outside the comfort zone, and creative risk-taking are also essential parts of the process

Feeling Less Than Other People: attainment scores as symbols of children's worth

This article addresses how an educational purpose of social efficiency, such as the one we have in England, affects each child's school Life-history and the process through which children thereby come to identify themselves. The author considers whether schools could engage in practices that decrease pupils' resignation to a system that controls them, and enhance children's resilience; she also considers their resistance towards being unjustly controlled. She addresses this question by exploring primary schooling's relatively recent practice of grouping children according to their attainment scores on tests of maths and writing. She explores how such grouping may contribute to a perception of children as only as valuable as their test scores. With reference to a particular pupil, Wayne, who describes his school Life-history, the author emphasises how struggling with one high-stakes subject can lead children to a sense of being 'less than other people', even when a child has obvious knowledge and skill in other curriculum areas. She then previews a Leverhulme research project which has recently begun, which narrates and investigates 'Children's Life-histories In Primary Schools' (CLIPS) across five years of school, to identify the role played by attainment labels in children's social and cognitive development

Life-history research with children: Extending and enriching the approach

This article explores the life-history research approach, outlining its key aims and traditions. It suggests that what is often missing from life-history research is the inclusion of young children as life-history participants. This paper considers some innovative means for constructing children's life-histories across 5 years of their primary schooling in Britain. These include interviews based on activities, games, role-play, pictures and filming, and photography. The article concludes by narrating a short life-history of one child who is a participant in our life-history study of 23 ‘lower-attaining’ children. To close, I consider the critical role of life-history research in highlighting social injustice

Exploring collaborative interaction and self-direction in Teacher Learning Teams: case-studies from a middle-income country analysed using Vygotskian theory

This article explores teachers’ learning from a Vygotskian perspective, which emphasises collaborative interaction and self-direction. The article describes case-studies of three senior teachers in socio-economically disadvantaged Egyptian primary schools where collaboration and self-direction were systemically discouraged. It analyses how, through a teacher development intervention, the teachers learned to use collaborative interaction to support their own learning and felt more creative, authoritative and powerful after being guided to exercise self-direction

Professional development through mutually respectful relationship: senior teachers' learning against the backdrop of hierarchical relationships

This article draws on interview data across eight months from senior teachers (i.e. experienced teachers who are subject leaders) in Egyptian primary schools, to explore how they described their learning during a professional development project in which they led gatherings of interested teachers in teacher learning communities. The article explores the hypothesis that an important ingredient for effective teacher professional development is an affirming relationship between the learning-teacher and their coach or peers. Carl Rogers’ person-centred theory from the psychotherapy context is explored here in an educational context where, as in many countries, hierarchical relationships control how professionals relate to each other and express themselves. The article concludes that an enhanced sense of professional value and authority can result from more mutually respectful relationships and become the bedrock for significant professional development

Why Won’t They Speak English? Guidelines for Teachers on Using Pairwork to Enhance Speaking in the EFL Primary Classroom

This Guidance Booklet is for teachers who wish to support their students' speaking of English as an additional or foreign language in primary schools

Referencing Sources of Molecular Spectroscopic Data in the Era of Data Science: Application to the HITRAN and AMBDAS Databases

The application described has been designed to create bibliographic entries in large databases with diverse sources automatically, which reduces both the frequency of mistakes and the workload for the administrators. This new system uniquely identifies each reference from its digital object identifier (DOI) and retrieves the corresponding bibliographic information from any of several online services, including the SAO/NASA Astrophysics Data Systems (ADS) and CrossRef APIs. Once parsed into a relational database, the software is able to produce bibliographies in any of several formats, including HTML and BibTeX, for use on websites or printed articles. The application is provided free-of-charge for general use by any scientific database. The power of this application is demonstrated when used to populate reference data for the HITRAN and AMBDAS databases as test cases. HITRAN contains data that is provided by researchers and collaborators throughout the spectroscopic community. These contributors are accredited for their contributions through the bibliography produced alongside the data returned by an online search in HITRAN. Prior to the work presented here, HITRAN and AMBDAS created these bibliographies manually, which is a tedious, time-consuming and error-prone process. The complete code for the new referencing system can be found at \url{https://github.com/hitranonline/refs}.Comment: 11 pages, 5 figures, already published online at https://doi.org/10.3390/atoms802001