Developing capabilities for social inclusion: engaging diversity through inclusive school communities

The effort to make schools more inclusive, together with the pressure to retain students until the end of secondary school, has greatly increased both the number and educational requirements of students enrolling in their local school. Of critical concern, despite years of research and improvements in policy, pedagogy and educational knowledge, is the enduring categorisation and marginalization of students with diverse abilities. Research has shown that it can be difficult for schools to negotiate away from the pressure to categorise or diagnose such students, particularly those with challenging behaviour. In this paper, we highlight instances where some schools have responded to increasing diversity by developing new cultural practices to engage both staff and students; in some cases, decreasing suspension while improving retention, behaviour and performance

Microbial dynamics and human health risks at the beach – Will climate change matter?

Beaches provide recreational opportunities, relief from hot weather, and economic benefits to coastal communities. Visitors to the beach may be exposed to microbial contaminants and pathogens via water, sand, and aerosols. Water and sand coincide at the beach, providing an environment with unique advantages and challenges to pathogen introduction, growth and persistence, transport, and exchange among habitats. Advantages, such as refuge from predators in sand biofilms, and challenges, such as the relatively dry environment, may be both exacerbated and complicated by seasonal variability and predicted long-term anthropogenic climate change. Human exposure to waterborne pathogens will likely be amplified in the face of predicted extreme rain events, warming of water, and sea level rise, combined with urbanization and the popularity of beach activities. Such changes may also alter microbial dynamics at beaches, potentially impacting assumptions and population relationships used in mechanistic water quality and E. coli concentration models as well as quantitative microbial risk assessment frameworks. With model refinement and parameter development designed to fill critical knowledge gaps, predictive models of fecal indicator bacteria and pathogen fate and transport can help to characterize the risk of infectious disease from recreational water use. Here, we not only present a conceptual model that may serve as a first step toward inclusion of biofilm mechanics at beaches, but we also discuss potential approaches to incorporate sand-water interactions into hydrodynamic coastal models for enhanced beach health prediction. While beach health and water quality have long been active areas of research, the sand and sand-water interface habitats at beaches remain relatively unexplored. Recent work has shown that sand can be a reservoir of microbial contaminants at beaches, signaling a potential paradigm shift in both research and management of recreational water and beaches to a more holistic, beachshed-based model, as further detailed in Weiskerger et al. (doi: 10.20944/preprints201901.0225.v1).info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

A Genetic and Physiological Study of the Role of Extracellular Copper-Binding Proteins in Copper Detoxification by the Marine Bacterium \u3ci\u3eVibrio alginolyticus\u3c/i\u3e

Supernatant proteins in Vibrio alginolyticus batch cultures were analyzed by SDS-PAGE before copper was added, 24 and 48 hours after the addition of copper, and in 24 hour control (no Cu) cultures. Two proteins, one 21 kilodalton (kDa) and one 19 kDa, were found to be copper-induced, and were designated copper-binding protein 1 (CuBP1) and CuBP2. CuBP1 and CuBP2 became detectable in supernatants during the Cu-induced lag phase, and increased in concentration over the following 48 hours. Chloramphenicol inhibited production of these proteins. Gel-to-gel variability was implicated as the dominant factor determining whether one or two Cu-induced proteins were detected in Vibrio alginolyticus supernatants, and ca. 20 kDa Cu-induced proteins were quantitated together in subsequent analyses. Experiments in continuous (chemostat) cultures of Vibrio alginolyticus demonstrated that the bacteria could survive copper stress in an open system. Copper stress reversibly inhibited swarming in most colonies from long-term copper-stressed cultures, and permanent inhibition of swarming was observed in some isolates. Mutation to an oxidase negative phenotype, which was not reversible, occurred at high frequency in copper-stressed continuous cultures. The stability of two Cur mutants isolated from continuous culture was demonstrated by subculturing each isolate ten times on nonselective marine agar (10° MA), and comparing plate counts on unamended and 40μM Cu-amended agar to corresponding plate counts of isolates freshly passed on Cu-amended agar. One Cur isolate, Cu40B3, constitutively produced a ca. 21 kDa protein which displayed the same chromatographic behavior (immobilized metal ion affinity chromatography followed by reverse phase high performance liquid chromatography) as CuBP. After fifteen nonselective subcultures, a revertant Cus derivative of Cu40B3 (Cu40B3(SW)) was isolated. Cu40B3(SW) lost the mutation to constitutive CuBP production and copper resistance simultaneously, indicating that constitutive CuBP production in Cu40B3 is necessary for maintenance of its copper-resistant phenotype. Copper-sensitive Vibrio alginolyticus mutants displayed a range of alterations in supernatant protein profiles, and two of the seven mutants were indistinguishable from the wild-type in terms of supernatant proteins with and without copper stress. One Cus mutant was isolated which contained no CuaP in supernatants from 50 μM copper-stressed cultures

Young people, education and unlawful non-citizenship: Spectral sovereignty and governmentality in Australia

This paper considers Judith Butler’s discussion of the intersections between governmentality and sovereign power in Precarious life: the powers of mourning and violence. We consider this interrelationship with a view to considering how this might enable us to expand our understanding of contemporary discourses governing young people within and outside Australia. In particular we focus on the production of groups of young people, such as those classified as ‘illegal immigrants’ who may be situated outside the frame of ‘public good’ or the ‘private interest’. This enables for a theorisation of the lives of groups of young people who may ‘have no definitive prospect for a re-entry into the political fabric of life, even as one’s situation is highly, if not fatally, politicized’. It is questionable whether the Foucauldian notion of governmentality gives sufficient account of the lives of these young people whose conduct is effectively considered irrelevant by the State. As educators, it is arguable that we have an ethical imperative to encourage our students to care for themselves, and for others, especially those others whose lives have been ‘fatally politicized’

Foucault as educator

Review of Stephen Ball's "Foucault as educator

Concept mapping: Is it a useful method when there is no \u27correct\u27 knowledge on the topic?

Concept mapping is a research method often used to assess participants\u27 knowledge of a topic. Our project studied how preservice teachers\u27 knowledge of challenging behaviour changes (or not) during their final professional teaching experience. We asked the participants to make a concept map before and after their final professional teaching experience because we anticipated it would (1) provide reflective space for the preservice teachers to think about \u27what\u27 they knew about challenging behaviour, without feeling like they were being \u27tested\u27 in an interview, and (2) illustrate knowledge change during their final professional teaching experience. However, our use of concept maps was not without trepidation because of the type of knowledge under investigation. Concept mapping to assess an individual\u27s knowledge can be epistemologically rigid because (regardless of the quantitative or qualitative analytic approach used) maps are typically assessed against a \u27correct\u27, \u27factual\u27 knowledge-base. We, on the contrary, were interested in participants\u27 knowledge of a contentious issue and our theoretical framework supported the existence of multiple knowledges. This case describes how we negotiated the boundaries of existing concept mapping methods to facilitate analysis of participants\u27 understandings of \u27messy\u27 knowledge and how this changed over time

‘Students that just hate school wouldn’t go’: educationally disengaged and disadvantaged young people’s talk about university education

This paper contributes to a growing body of literature on widening university participation and brings a focus on the classed and embodied nature of young people’s imagination to existing discussions. We interviewed 250 young people living in disadvantaged communities across five Australian states who had experienced disengagement from compulsory primary and secondary schooling. We asked them about their education and their educational futures, specifically how they imagined universities and university participation. For these young people, universities were imagined as ‘big’, ‘massive’ alienating schools. The paper explores how the elements of schooling from which these young people disengaged became tangible barriers to imagining and pursuing participation in university education. The primary barrier they described was their relationships with school teachers. Our analysis shows how relationships with teachers can impact the imagined improbability/probability of university participation. We offer suggestions for how barriers to university created by poor relationships with teachers may be overcome

Biological sciences, social sciences and the languages of stress

There are well documented concerns with the imposition of high stakes testing into the fabric of school education, and there is now an increasing focus on how such tests impact children’s ‘well-being’. This can be witnessed in reports in the popular news media, where discussion of these impacts frequently refer to ‘stress’ and ‘anxiety’. Yet, there is no work that is able to tell us about what is happening in the bodies of the teachers and children who are living this schooling in the day-to-day; whether this is best considered through the languages of ‘stress’; or what the implications – emotional, educational, embodied – of these experiences might be. This paper develops a transdisciplinary approach that brings social and biological accounts together in order to address the ‘more-than-social’ of the emotionality of childhood and schooling. We seek out opportunities for transdisciplinary connectivity and for new ways of seeing and knowing about learning. We consider what these ways of seeing and knowing might offer to education

Precarious education and the university: navigating the silenced borders of participation

Access to and participation in university education is a key equity issue, with increased efforts to widen the participation of secondary school-aged students from low socio-economic status (LSES) backgrounds in many countries worldwide. In Australia, programmes aimed at widening university participation generally target LSES children and young people engaged in schooling. Access to such programmes thus demands a connection to schooling, yet not all school-age young people have such connections: they may experience what we term \u27precarious\u27 relationships to education. Without school connections, young people with precarious relationships to education have extremely limited opportunities to engage (or to imagine engaging) in higher education. This paper considers this issue from the perspectives of young people who have precarious relationships with school education. Drawing on qualitative research investigating disadvantage and university education, the paper reports on how the imagination of university education, which might be argued to be a \u27silenced\u27 border of social inclusion, is described by young people with precarious relationships to education. Drawing on Judith Butler\u27s book Precarious Life (2004), the paper puts forward the argument that the precariousness of education is relational and that universities thus have a moral responsibility to recognize and respond to the educational precariousness of the Other

Biological sciences, social sciences and the languages of stress

There are well documented concerns with the imposition of high stakes testing into the fabric of school education, and there is now an increasing focus on how such tests impact children’s ‘well-being’. This can be witnessed in reports in the popular news media, where discussion of these impacts frequently refer to ‘stress’ and ‘anxiety’. Yet, there is no work that is able to tell us about what is happening in the bodies of the teachers and children who are living this schooling in the day-to-day; whether this is best considered through the languages of ‘stress’; or what the implications – emotional, educational, embodied – of these experiences might be. This paper develops a transdisciplinary approach that brings social and biological accounts together in order to address the ‘more-than-social’ of the emotionality of childhood and schooling. We seek out opportunities for transdisciplinary connectivity and for new ways of seeing and knowing about learning. We consider what these ways of seeing and knowing might offer to education