Certainty abandoned and some implications for curriculum research

This article presents ideas about curriculum as a process in which people come together on an equal footing to explore ideas about how they might live and draw up plans about how they might do so. This is a negotiated process that recognizes the need of all to speak and be listened to, recognizing the historically constituted nature of social situations in different traditions, each with its own sets of culturally specific norms. Curriculum may then be seen as a process of everyday enquiry that may be conducted anywhere and by anyone, grounded in and informed by everyday practices

Certainty abandoned and some implications for curriculum research

This article presents ideas about curriculum as a process in which people come together on an equal footing to explore ideas about how they might live and draw up plans about how they might do so. This is a negotiated process that recognizes the need of all to speak and be listened to, recognizing the historically constituted nature of social situations in different traditions, each with its own sets of culturally specific norms. Curriculum may then be seen as a process of everyday enquiry that may be conducted anywhere and by anyone, grounded in and informed by everyday practices

The significance of ‘I' in educational research and the responsibility of intellectuals

In this paper I call for an unequivocal legitimisation of the living ‘I' in educational research. The paper itself becomes a context that explains this call. It is a report of my action research into my professional learning through working in South Africa, within the context of new policy frameworks for continuing teacher development. The call embeds issues about the need for higher education practitioners to produce their explanatory accounts of practice as they support teachers' enquiries for improving practice and knowledge creation, and to legitimise a free academic press for the dissemination of those accounts. The accounts need to demonstrate epistemological, methodological and scholarly validity, to strengthen practitioners' attempts to influence policy debates about continuing professional development. By clarifying the processes of establishing quality, it becomes possible to show the links between continuing professional education and the active contributions of practitioners to economic and social wellbeing. Keywords: academic freedom; epistemological accountability; living educational theories; practitioner enquiry; professional learning in higher education South African Journal of Education Vol. 28 (3) 2008: pp. 351-36

Enhancing Catholic Identity: The Genesis of a National Consortium

This article describes a new program specifically designed to assist Catholic school administrators. The genesis for this program and the creation of the Consortium for Catholic School Identity which sponsors it are the result of a grant from Our Sunday Visitor Foundation. The Consortium, a diverse team of professional Catholic school educators, is now positioned to offer a unique and innovative series of national seminars to support principals in their efforts to enhance the Catholic identity of their schools

Buckling of Cold Formed Stainless Steel Columns under Concentric and Eccentric Loading

This paper describes the results obtained from a series of compression tests performed on cold formed stainless steel Type 304 columns of lipped channel cross-section. The cross-section dimensions, the column length and the eccentricity of the applied compressive load are varied to examine the effects on the buckling load capacity of the columns. The results obtained are compared to those obtained from the relevant design specifications in America and in Europe, and conclusions are drawn on the basis of the comparisons

“I think it fits in”: Using Process Drama to Promote Agentic Writing with Primary School Children

Set against the backdrop of children being “alienated” from their writing (Lambirth 2016), this paper is taken from a UKLA sponsored project where primary school teachers were trained to use process drama in order to give children more agency in their writing across the curriculum. Here we use discourse analysis (Gee 2010) to think about the children’s historical creative writing in relation to the drama lessons which are differently framed (Bernstein 2000) by the teachers. Building upon a theoretical model of drama as “blended space” (Duffy 2014) and writing as problem-solving (Bereiter and Scardamalia 1986), a case is made that process drama can lead to what we term ‘agentic writing’. Agentic writing, we demonstrate, involves children actively translating their embodied experience of the blended space into writing by making a range of intertextual borrowings. These borrowing serve both to capture and transform their embodied experience as the children gain agency by “standing outside language” to achieve “double voicedness” (Bakthin 1986). Seeing the relationship between process drama and writing in this light, we argue, provides a means of reconnecting children to the act of writing

How was your day? : exploring a day in the life of probation workers across Europe using practice diaries

This paper presents a reflection upon the preliminary analysis of diary research conducted during the period 2014-2015 in five European countries (England and Wales, France, Norway, Romania and Slovakia). The authors gathered and analysed data from a pilot project which used semi-structured diaries to generate data on probation workers’ daily lives with a view to understanding ‘a day in the life’ of probation officers across jurisdictions. The findings open up questions in relation to diary research in probation practice (diary format, follow-up interview etc.) and we use this article to discuss the relative advantages and benefits of using diary research in this area. We conclude with the argument that diaries as a method of social research hold considerable potential for conducting research in the context of probation but acknowledge that the method we employed requires some development and greater clarification in terms of the aims of the research

Somatic Mutations in NEK9 Cause Nevus Comedonicus

Acne vulgaris (AV) affects most adolescents, and of those affected, moderate to severe disease occurs in 20%. Comedones, follicular plugs consisting of desquamated keratinocytes and sebum, are central to its pathogenesis. Despite high heritability in first-degree relatives, AV genetic determinants remain incompletely understood. We therefore employed whole-exome sequencing (WES) in nevus comedonicus (NC), a rare disorder that features comedones and inflammatory acne cysts in localized, linear configurations. WES identified somatic NEK9 mutations, each affecting highly conserved residues within its kinase or RCC1 domains, in affected tissue of three out of three NC-affected subjects. All mutations are gain of function, resulting in increased phosphorylation at Thr210, a hallmark of NEK9 kinase activation. We found that comedo formation in NC is marked by loss of follicular differentiation markers, expansion of keratin-15-positive cells from localization within the bulge to the entire sub-bulge follicle and cyst, and ectopic expression of keratin 10, a marker of interfollicular differentiation not present in normal follicles. These findings suggest that NEK9 mutations in NC disrupt normal follicular differentiation and identify NEK9 as a potential regulator of follicular homeostasis