Continuing professional development : putting the learner back at the centre

Continuing professional development (CPD) is changing. Once seen as flexible on the basis of personal choice and mainly consisting of conferences and lecture style meetings, it is now much more likely to be specified, mandatory and linked to specific regulatory or quality improvement activities. This may not be well aligned with how adult professionals learn best and the evidence of resulting change in practice is limited. Also there is a danger of losing out on serendipity in learning by pushing experienced professionals into focusing excessively on mandatory activities that seem to be increasingly ‘ticking the box’. However, the previous impression of flexibility may have hidden poor education practice. This paper defines CPD and asks whether there are problems with CPD. It looks at how adults are thought to learn and places this in the context of current practice. It considers practical models of how to deal with a series of common challenges met by those who provide and undertake CPD

"The Bees' needs" : using molecular analysis of bee collected pollen to understand which plants play an important role in honey bee forage

Summary: Honey bees and other pollinators provide essential pollination services to agriculture and the environment; however they are under increasing pressure from changes in land management, disease and climate change. Current mitigation places emphasis on establishing flower meadows to improve nutritional diversity, but preserving what is already in place is also of importance. ‘CSI Pollen’ was a recent European citizen science project coordinated by COLOSS, investigating the diversity of pollen collected by honey bees in many countries across Europe. Volunteer beekeepers sampled pollen from colonies every three weeks during the foraging season over a two to three year period, creating a huge collection of data and samples. A selection of samples collected from 14 Scottish sites during the second year of study in 2015 were analysed by DNA fingerprinting to identify pollen gathered by honey bees at critical points of the colony’s life cycle; some results and potential implications for land use are discussed here

Estudio relacional y comparativo entre el desarrollo perceptivo motor y el rendimiento académico de dos establecimientos de distinta dependencia administrativa

Tesis (Profesor de Educación Física, Licenciado en Educación)El cuerpo humano necesita la actividad física para mantener una serie de funciones básicas. Mover el cuerpo durante el ejercicio requiere de una activación cerebral generalizada, aparte de coordinar el movimiento de los músculos implicados en el movimiento que se realice, el cerebro coordina las funciones corporales necesarias para que los músculos funcionen correctamente, aumenta el flujo sanguíneo, el consumo de glucosa, la respiración, el ritmo cardíaco, la capacidad sensorial, entre otras cosas. Todo esto está regulado por distintos centros nerviosos distribuidos en zonas muy dispares del cerebro. Por lo tanto, el ejercicio físico activa amplias zonas cerebrales. El presente trabajo de investigación tiene como principal propósito de estudio la relación entre el desarrollo motriz y el rendimiento académico, suponiendo un acercamiento proporcional entre dichas variables

Strategies for Mentoring Success: A Qualitative Study of Award-Winning Research Mentors

Medical Schoolhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/170649/1/AlexandraHighet_1.docxhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/170649/2/AlexandraHighet_2.pptxhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/170649/3/AlexandraHighet_3.pd

Confronting the Political Economy of Englishes in the Classroom

Despite celebratory discourses of Global English(es), scholars adopting political economic approaches have demonstrated the continued unequal distribution and valuation of English(es), and have shifted the focus to questions of unequal speakers in unequal conditions (Tupas, 2020). Drawing on ethnographic data from an English-teaching NGO for ‘disadvantaged’ young adults in Delhi, this paper seeks to contribute to political economic scholarship of English Language Teaching and Learning in two ways. In a first instance, I trace the shaping effects of class, caste and coloniality on how marginalised students orient themselves to notions of correctness and discursively reject fluid language practices. In a second instance, I introduce data from workshops with staff at the NGO in which we attempt to co-analyse the findings outlined in the first section and discuss potential implications for their practice. Noting the discursive, political and affective discomfort that marked these interactions, I ask what is at stake when engaging in discussions with English language teaching institutions that explicitly locate English learning and teaching within its political economic and ideological conditions, and what this means for scholarly projects aligned with critical, emancipatory and social justice causes. Keywords: English, India, Political Economy, Caste, Critiqu

English and ‘personality development’:the hyper-individualization and de-politicization of social mobility in India

In the last two decades, English learning in India has undergone noticeable and subtle transformations. Alongside the massive increase in coaching centres to cater for widespread demand, there has also emerged a tacit understanding that it is no longer enough to speak English to be socially mobile: students must also engage in a range of self-work, or ‘personality development’. In this article, I draw on ethnographic data from an NGO in Delhi that seeks to alleviate poverty through English and personality development training for disadvantaged youth. I show how discourses of personality development (re)produce and juxtapose particular understandings of the self that work to hyper-individualize and depoliticize the project of social mobility. Situating these discourses within the context of shifting political economic configurations in India, this paper demonstrates how these notions of ‘personality development’ both emerge from and obscure long-standing and newly-developing colonial, caste and class histories, and how they work to produce depoliticised subjectivities

“She will control my son”: Navigating womanhood, English and social mobility in India

Through its colonial, class- and caste-based history, English in India has come to be seen as a powerful resource that opens doors for those who ‘have’ it and holds back those who do not. For women, English ostensibly offers various promises in addition to employment: progressiveness and ‘empowerment’; and the potential for upward mobility through marriage. Yet, the conversion of English capital for English-speaking Indian women proves to be intensely complex in practice, as many find themselves forced to navigate between shifting moral regimes attached to ‘tradition’ and ‘modernity’. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in an NGO in Delhi that offers free English training to ‘disadvantaged youth’, this paper explores how English capital is managed by young women striving to attain middle classness through English, and how their class, caste and gender positionings are negotiated across particular time-space configurations as they seek to become English speakers