Boarding the school bus

EVERY DAY DURING THE SCHOOL TERM, several thousand buses travel along country roads once marked with distinctive dark yellow bus route signs (now fluorescent green), carrying more than 100,000 pupils to school in the morning and returning them home again in the late afternoon,' Since their inception more than 80 years ago, school buses have changed the educational and social landscapes of rural New Zealand. As with many innovations in education, the service was initiated largely in an effort to save money; part of a process referred to as school consolidation. Before the first buses rolled down the driveway of the first consolidated school at Piopio in the South Waikato on 1 April 1924. the merits of consolidation had been debated in educational and community circles for nearly a decade. Its implementation would bring enormous change to the lives of rural children and their experience of school

The scope for biomanipulation in improving water quality

Biomanipulation is a form of biological engineering in which organisms are selectively removed or encouraged to alleviate the symptoms of eutrophication. Most examples involve fish and grazer zooplankton though mussels have also been used. The technique involves continuous management in many deeper lakes and is not a substitute for nutrient control. In some lakes, alterations to the lake environment have given longer-term positive effects. And in some shallow lakes, biomanipulation may be essential, alongside nutrient control, in re- establishing former aquatic-plant-dominated ecosystems which have been lost through severe eutrophication. The emergence of biomanipulation techniques emphasises that lake systems are not simply chemical reactors which respond simply to engineered chemical changes, but very complex and still very imperfectly understood ecosystems which require a yet profounder understanding before they can be restored with certainty

The Making of Faulty Optic's Dead Wedding: Inertia, Chaos and Adaptation

An examination of Faulty Optic's creative process during the devising and construction of their show Dead Wedding. Published by Palgrave Macmillan as Chapter 3 in 'Devising in Process' edited by Alex Mermikides and Jackie Smart, 201

Report on eight weeks at the Fisheries Department of the Lancashire River Authority [including a Leeds / Liverpool Canal survey]

This report looks at the interests of the Fisheries Department for the Lancashire River Board, focusing on the Liverpool and Leeds Canal Survey. It looks at finding parasites in fish from an electrofishing survey (roach and perch). This was to contribute towards the main survey with a possible view to suggesting whether or not the parasites were one reason for the poor fish population. Methods of finding parasites are given, and results of what parasites that were found in the fish are discussed

Literacy policy and English/literacy practice: : Researching the interaction between different knowledge fields

This article considers the role of research in disentangling an increasingly complex relationship between literacy policy and practice as it is emerging in different local and national contexts. What are the tools and methodologies that have been used to track this relationship over time? Where should they best focus attention now? In answering these questions this paper will consider three different kinds of research perspectives and starting points for enquiry: 1. Policy evaluation. The use of a range of quantitative research tools to feed policy decision-making by tracking the impact on pupil performance of different kinds of pedagogic or policy change (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development [OECD], 2010). 2. Co-construction and policy translation. This has for some time been a central preoccupation in policy sociology, which has used small-scale and context specific research to test the limits to the control over complex social fields that policy exercises from afar (Ball, 1994). Agentic re-framings of policy at the local level stand as evidence for the potential to challenge, mitigate or reorder such impositions. 3. Ethnographies of policy time and space. Ethnographic research tools have long been used to document community literacy practices, and in training their lens on the classroom have sought to focus on the potential dissonance between community and schooled practices. It is rarer to find such research tools deployed to explore the broader policy landscape. In the light of debate within the field, part of the purpose of this article is to examine how ethnographic research tools might be refined to study how policy from afar reshapes literacy practices in the here and now. (Brandt and Clinton, 2002)