Dissolving the digital divide : Creating coherence in young people's social ecologies of learning and identity building

This chapter discusses current research on educational efforts to connect school learning with young people’s digital practices in- and out-of-school. Instead of focusing on divides between in-school and out-of-school learning or between the “digital generation” and other age groups, in this chapter we discuss what recent research says about the ways in which school can become a space in which young people’s digital practices can transformatively converge with schooling, and how this convergence is related to their learning and identity building. We begin our narrative reflection of current research by focusing on the myth of digital natives. Next, we will conceptualize recent efforts to researching and understanding young people’s engagement, learning and identity building across sites and contexts. We will then turn to illuminating some key rationales of current educational research on creating convergence in young people’s social ecologies via the use of digital technologies and media. We conclude our reflections by pointing out that although there are some promising findings on how digital technologies and media can create convergence in young people’s engagement and learning across sites and contexts, less research attention is given to young people’s personal sense-making and self-making mediated by their digital practices, and how formal education could build on those practices for academic, vocational and/or civic ends.Peer reviewe

Supervision Dialogues in Teacher Education : Balancing Dis/continuities of the Vocational Self-Concept

Teacher educators and student teachers are increasingly expected to reflect together on the student teachers’ image of self as a teacher. To better understand how to deal with occurring tensions, we studied 42 supervision dialogues, audiotaped in a 1-year, post-master, teacher education program. We analyzed in what way student teachers and teacher educators explored both sensed continuity and sensed discontinuity when they discussed development as a teacher. We identified three types of processes in which student teachers and teacher educators outweighed issues of discontinuity: (a) balancing with time, or accentuating specific perceptions of the past in relation to expectations of the future, or vice versa; (b) balancing with content, or elaborating on other self-attributes; and (c) balancing with salience, exploring the relative worth of self-attributes and/or intentions. The results support student teachers and teacher educators in explicitly discussing sense making patterns in the context of teacher education

Self-Study Methodology: An Emerging Approach for Practitioner Research in Europe

© Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2019.This chapter highlights the European contribution to the growing knowledge about self-study methodology. Europe is a patchwork of countries, cultures and languages. Looking at teacher educators in Europe, we see a broad variation in background, tasks and opportunities for professional development and self-study research.In this chapter we firstly map the development of self-study research in Europe which has mainly been the work of individuals and small groups. Then we focus on four countries that are in the forefront: England, Iceland, Ireland and the Netherlands. In all four countries self-study has proved to be a useful and stimulating way to aid the transition from being a teacher - or researcher - to becoming a teacher educator. Self-study methodology not only supported the understanding and development of the teacher education practice, but also led to identity development. Most helpful proved to be working together and mentoring, and sharing results publicly. In this context the role of the biannual S-STEP Castle Conference in England, which offers European self-study researchers to connect with colleagues from North America and Australia, plays an important role

Uveal Melanoma: The Inflammatory Microenvironment

Ophthalmic researc

Molecular pathology of uveal melanoma

Like other cancers, uveal melanomas (UM) are characterised by an uncontrolled, clonal, cellular proliferation, occurring as a result of numerous genetic, and epigenetic aberrations. Signalling pathways known to be disrupted in UM include: (1) the retinoblastoma pathway, probably as a result of cyclin D1 overexpression; p53 signalling, possibly as a consequence of MDM2 overexpression; and the P13K/AKT and mitogen-activated protein kinase/extracellular signal-related kinase pathway pathways that are disturbed as a result of PTEN and GNAQ/11 mutations, respectively. Characteristic chromosomal abnormalities are common and include 6p gain, associated with a good prognosis, as well as 1p loss, 3 loss, and 8q gain, which correlate with high mortality. These are identified by techniques such as fluorescence in situ hybridisation, comparative genomic hybridisation, microsatellite analysis, multiplex ligation-dependent probe amplification, and single-nucleotide polymorphisms. UM can also be categorised by their gene expression profiles as class 1 or class 2, the latter correlating with poor survival, as do BRCA1-associated protein-1 (BAP1) inactivating mutations. Genetic testing of UM has enhanced prognostication, especially when results are integrated with histological and clinical data. The identification of abnormal signalling pathways, genes and proteins in UM opens the way for target-based therapies, improving prospects for conserving vision and prolonging life