Embodied learning: Responding to AIDS in Lesotho's education sector

This is an Author's Accepted Manuscript of an article published in Children's Geographies, 7(1), 2009. Copyright @ 2009 Taylor & Francis, available online at: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/14733280802630981.In contrast to pre-colonial practices, education in Lesotho's formal school system has historically assumed a Cartesian separation of mind and body, the disciplining of students' bodies serving principally to facilitate cognitive learning. Lesotho has among the highest HIV-prevalence rates worldwide, and AIDS has both direct and indirect impacts on the bodies of many children. Thus, students' bodies can no longer be taken for granted but present a challenge for education. Schools are increasingly seen as a key point of intervention to reduce young people's risk of contracting the disease and also to assist them to cope with its consequences: there is growing recognition that such goals require more than cognitive learning. The approaches adopted, however, range from those that posit a linear and causal relationship between knowledge, attitudes and practices (so-called ‘KAP’ approaches, in which the role of schools is principally to inculcate the pre-requisite knowledge) to ‘life skills programmes’ that advocate a more embodied learning practice in schools. Based on interviews with policy-makers and practitioners and a variety of documentary sources, this paper examines a series of school-based AIDS interventions, arguing that they represent a less radical departure from ‘education for the mind’ than might appear to be the case. The paper concludes that most interventions serve to cast on children responsibility for averting a social risk, and to ‘normalise’ aberrant children's bodies to ensure they conform to what the cognitively-oriented education system expects

Roadmap on Neuromorphic Photonics

This roadmap consolidates recent advances while exploring emerging applications, reflecting the remarkable diversity of hardware platforms, neuromorphic concepts, and implementation philosophies reported in the field. It emphasizes the critical role of cross-disciplinary collaboration in this rapidly evolving field