Responses of three Muslim majority primary schools in England to the Islamic faith of their pupils

This paper considers the responses of three English primary schools to the education of their Muslim pupils. It begins by setting out the context of discussion about Muslims and education in Europe as well as by describing some of the structural and pedagogical characteristics and trends in English education influencing the schools’ options and choices. The main body of the article is a comparative analysis of the three schools, focusing on the approaches of teachers and school leaders to the faith backgrounds of their pupils, their constructions of Islam for these educational contexts, and their preparation of Muslim children for a religiously plural Britain. As the schools devise strategies and select between options, they provide in microcosm differing models of the inclusion of minority Islam in a western society

Beyond the Patient: Nursing Presence With Families During the Perioperative Period

Nurses have used the intervention of caring for many years, but little attention has been given to describing the phenomenon of nursing presence in the perioperative setting. The purpose of this research was to learn more about the experience of the connection of the family to the nurse who kept them informed during the perioperative period. A hermeneutic phenomenological approach was utilized to identify patterns of caring, connecting, and transpersonal nursing presence described by the family of surgical patients. Five women were interviewed for this study. Transcribed interviews became the phenomenological texts for my hermeneutic analysis. Essential themes were uncovered that captured the essence of their experience. The women described the nurse\u27s presence as a relationship that involved a kind of being with. They expressed a remarkable feeling knowing that someone cared, and described a special connection with someone they had just met. The presence of the nurse was an important factor in feeling reassured, even though time seemed endless. Perioperative nurses must understand the impact of nursing presence with families, and transform their nursing practice

Somali CARES: Listening to the Voices of the Other

Care during pregnancy is an important preventative health intervention for women and their unborn baby in all cultures. Healthcare inequities exist among some ethnic minority groups and contribute to racial disparities in birth outcomes. Pregnant Somali women, newly immigrated to the United States, ffie forced to seek prenatal care within a cultural context that can be very different from their own experiences and expectations. This refugee population is expected to fit into a medical system that is not only unfamiliar to them, but at times unable to meet their needs during pregnancy. As Somali women seek access to western healthcare systems, practitioners need to understand, facilitate, and integrate traditional cultural practices into prenatal care encounters. Somali Culturally Appropriate and Respectful Education and Support (CARES) Program for Pregnancy is a clinic-based, group prenatal care program for Somali refugees that advances healthcare delivery. A creative approach of providing prenatal care, the Somali CARES program was developed and implemented at Mayo Clinic, Rochester, MN in 2009 to support the cultural and social contexts of Somali women through the use of a cross-cultural pedagogy. Incorporating storytelling, role playing, and facilitative discussion created an atmosphere of respect for cultural differences and built trust between the Somali women and their healthcare practitioners. The use of learning through cultural ways of expression was a very effective method of bring traditional African education alive for the learners and enabled active participation as teachers involved the learners in uncovering the meaning of their stories. Through a both ways educational approach, an equal power status was created between the healthcare practitioners and the Somali women, because both learned from the other. When healthcare practitioners listened and partnered with the Somali women, a new paradigm for advancing participatory healthcare practice transformed. The Somali women indicated a high level of satisfaction with the program and recommended it to other Somali women. Entering into the world of the Somali culture, while listening to the voices of the women, while honoring their ways of knowing and doing, new insights unfolded for healthcare practitioners. Listening to the voices of the other help to dismantle barriers of providing culturally appropriate prenatal care for the Somali women created an atmosphere of a caring, teaching-learning environment that lead to improved health outcomes of the mother and baby

The Citizen Nurse: An Educational Innovation for Change

Background: Nursing education needs to provide the necessary tools for students to develop leadership skills and to practice civic agency to create meaningful change in the shifting health care field. This article focuses on facilitating a student\u27s role in becoming a citizen nurse through curricular modifications. Method: Through an ongoing partnership, nursing faculty and community organizers implemented a year-long pilot project to discover the deeper insights into the role of a citizen nurse and to analyze the skills students need to be effective agents of change. Pilot lectures and workshops were held throughout the academic year, and curricular changes were implemented. Results: Based on input from pilot class experiences, student reflections, and faculty workshop feedback, the decision to implement ongoing curricular changes was made by the department. Conclusion: The development of citizen nurses in nursing education will pave the way for praxis embedded in meaningful work with just solutions, enhancing the agency of all involved in promoting health and well-being. [J Nurs Educ. 2017;56(4):247–250.

The maintenance of urban circulation: An operational logic of infrastructural control

This paper examines the increased visibility of urban infrastructures occurring through a close coupling of information technologies and the selective integration of urban services. It asks how circulatory flow is managed in the contemporary city, by focusing on the emergence of new forms of governmentality associated with “smart” technologies. Drawing on Foucault’s governmentality, and based on a case study of Rio de Janeiro’s Operations Centre (COR), the paper argues that new understandings of the city are being developed, representing a new mode of urban infrastructure based on the partial and selective rebundling of splintered networks and fragmented urban space. The COR operates through a “un-black boxing” of urban infrastructures, where the extension of control room logics to the totality of the city points to their fragility and the continuous effort involved in their operational accomplishment. It also functions through a collapse in relations of control—of the everyday and the emergency—, which, enabled by the incorporation of the public in operational control, further raise public awareness of urban infrastructures. These characteristics point to a specific form of urban governmentality based on the operationalisation of infrastructural flows and the development of novel ways of seeing and engaging with the city

Classification of phase transitions and ensemble inequivalence, in systems with long range interactions

Systems with long range interactions in general are not additive, which can lead to an inequivalence of the microcanonical and canonical ensembles. The microcanonical ensemble may show richer behavior than the canonical one, including negative specific heats and other non-common behaviors. We propose a classification of microcanonical phase transitions, of their link to canonical ones, and of the possible situations of ensemble inequivalence. We discuss previously observed phase transitions and inequivalence in self-gravitating, two-dimensional fluid dynamics and non-neutral plasmas. We note a number of generic situations that have not yet been observed in such systems.Comment: 42 pages, 11 figures. Accepted in Journal of Statistical Physics. Final versio

Quasi-stationary States of Two-Dimensional Electron Plasma Trapped in Magnetic Field

We have performed numerical simulations on a pure electron plasma system under a strong magnetic field, in order to examine quasi-stationary states that the system eventually evolves into. We use ring states as the initial states, changing the width, and find that the system evolves into a vortex crystal state from a thinner-ring state while a state with a single-peaked density distribution is obtained from a thicker-ring initial state. For those quasi-stationary states, density distribution and macroscopic observables are defined on the basis of a coarse-grained density field. We compare our results with experiments and some statistical theories, which include the Gibbs-Boltzmann statistics, Tsallis statistics, the fluid entropy theory, and the minimum enstrophy state. From some of those initial states, we obtain the quasi-stationary states which are close to the minimum enstrophy state, but we also find that the quasi-stationary states depend upon initial states, even if the initial states have the same energy and angular momentum, which means the ergodicity does not hold.Comment: 9 pages, 7 figure

Kinetics of the long-range spherical model

The kinetic spherical model with long-range interactions is studied after a quench to $T < T_c$ or to $T = T_c$. For the two-time response and correlation functions of the order-parameter as well as for composite fields such as the energy density, the ageing exponents and the corresponding scaling functions are derived. The results are compared to the predictions which follow from local scale-invariance.Comment: added "fluctuation-dissipation ratios"; fixed typo

Critical Casimir forces for O(n){\cal O}(n) systems with long-range interaction in the spherical limit

We present exact results on the behavior of the thermodynamic Casimir force and the excess free energy in the framework of the $d$-dimensional spherical model with a power law long-range interaction decaying at large distances $r$ as $r^{-d-\sigma}$, where $\sigma<d<2\sigma$ and $0<\sigma\leq2$. For a film geometry and under periodic boundary conditions we consider the behavior of these quantities near the bulk critical temperature $T_c$, as well as for $T>T_c$ and $T<T_c$. The universal finite-size scaling function governing the behavior of the force in the critical region is derived and its asymptotics are investigated. While in the critical and under critical region the force is of the order of $L^{-d}$, for $T>T_c$ it decays as $L^{-d-\sigma}$, where $L$ is the thickness of the film. We consider both the case of a finite system that has no phase transition of its own, when $d-1<\sigma$, as well as the case with $d-1>\sigma$, when one observes a dimensional crossover from $d$ to a $d-1$ dimensional critical behavior. The behavior of the force along the phase coexistence line for a magnetic field H=0 and $T<T_c$ is also derived. We have proven analytically that the excess free energy is always negative and monotonically increasing function of $T$ and $H$. For the Casimir force we have demonstrated that for any $\sigma \ge 1$ it is everywhere negative, i.e. an attraction between the surfaces bounding the system is to be observed. At $T=T_c$ the force is an increasing function of $T$ for $\sigma>1$ and a decreasing one for $\sigma<1$. For any $d$ and $\sigma$ the minimum of the force at $T=T_c$ is always achieved at some $H\ne 0$.Comment: 13 pages, revtex, 8 figure