Making postgraduate students and supervisors aware of the role of emotions in the PhD process

Emotions are an integral part of the PhD process. A range of emotions are common and to be expected. How do emotions affect the PhD process for both postgraduate students and their supervisors? How can we make our emotions work positively for us in the PhD process? To explore answers to these questions, three lecturers currently supervising postgraduates and three postgraduates at various stages in their doctoral studies collectively pooled their experiences. We developed an interactive workshop that was recently conducted for postgraduate students at Murdoch University and at the Australian Association for Social Research annual conference 2002. This presentation will explore the role that emotions play in the PhD process and how supervisors and postgraduates alike can benefit from reflecting on this issue. A number of practical (and humorous) tips will be provided as well as examples from others' PhD experiences. The role of emotions at the beginning, middle and end of a PhD program will be explored. The data collection and analysis phases are a time when emotions may run riot. Trepidation is especially common when fieldwork or data collection is involved, as is anger when postgraduate's views about how the world works are challenged and then sadness (and relief!) when the data collection phase is finished. We will discuss how supervisors can assist their postgraduates to make these feelings work for them. The presentation will also explore the emotions that arise from the supervisor-postgraduate partnership

Value Added: Best Practices For The Utilization Of Assistant Principals' Skills And Knowledge In Schools

There are many demands on schools today to perform at a high level with competence that improves teaching and learning and promotes higher student achievement. When students perform below national standards, schools may be given a “no vote of confidence” from the public. Therefore, principals in schools need to find ways to groom and utilize the talents of assistant principals in a broader capacity. The assistant principal is the individual who should work closely with the principal to handle management and instructional matters within the school. Too many school districts today have principals who continue to under utilize the strong talents, skills, knowledge of the assistant principal (Bolman & Terrence, 2002). Typical uses of an assistant principal in too many schools include being on hall, bus, recess, and cafeteria duty and handling of student discipline on a daily basis. Some assistant principals bring to the school setting skills and knowledge related to broader practices for improving instruction and management in schools. In order to help create and maintain effective schools, there should be identified ways to improve the use of assistant principals’ skills and knowledge that could impact teaching and learning. A central part of being a great school leader is to cultivate the leadership skills of others, especially the assistant principal (Darling-Hammond, 2007). The purpose of this study is to discuss the contemporary role of today’s assistant principals including getting to know the assistant principal, value in shared leadership, developing the assistant principal’s leadership skills, use of technology, and the professional learning community. The benefits of this study hopefully will remind principals and school leaders to assess the skills and knowledge that the assistant principal brings to the school setting and to utilize those talents for improving school performance. The effective principal will also continue to provide opportunities for leadership development and engagement for the assistant principal in meaningful ways that support strong instructional leadership

Recreational trampling negatively impacts vegetation structure of an Australian biodiversity hotspot

Recreational trampling damage of natural vegetation is an increasing problem in the global context and has the potential to impact on vegetation communities that are of high ecological and socio-economic interest. Wildflower tourism in the national parks of southwest Australia, a global biodiversity hotspot, has the potential to damage the flora on which it depends through trampling. Little research has been previously undertaken in these largely shrub-dominated communities to identify and quantify such impacts. This study is the first to do so, using observational studies of tourists, a descriptive study, and trampling experiments. The behaviours of independent tourists and tour groups were observed. Of the 213 independent visitors observed 41 visitors left trails to view flowers and in the process trampled vegetation. Vegetation height and cover were measured at three sites frequented by wildflower tourists. Vegetation height and cover declined in response to use by tourists. Trampling experiments, which relied on trampling treatments of 0, 30, 100, 200, 300/500 passes, where 0 passes represents the control, were applied at four sites. Trampling led to a significant reduction in vegetation height immediately post-treatment, for all treatments, with a non-significant recovery over time. Trampling also significantly reduced vegetation cover, with the resistance indices for these experimental sites ranging from 30 to 300 passes. Collectively these results illustrate the low resilience and resistance of these valued communities and the possible impacts of wildflower and other nature based tourism, through trampling. The paper concludes with suggested management strategies, which strongly emphasise the importance of education for the tourism industry and provide for international comparisons in regard to recreational trampling impacts on biodiverse shrub land communities

Scoping recreational disturbance of shorebirds to inform the agenda for research and management in Tropical Asia

In addition to scoping the impacts of the four most reported sources of recreational disturbance on shorebirds, this study also advances the concept of Tropical Asia (TA) to collectively describe tourist destinations in the ecologically and geopolitically diverse part of the planet that incorporates the tourism megaregion of South and Southeast Asia. At a time of growing global concern about the rapid decline of shorebird populations, many governments in TA are embracing and capitalising on the exponential growth in demand for coastal recreation and tourism across the region. This political response is partly driven by efforts to deliver economic development, aligned to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, in order to secure the livelihoods of people living in less developed coastal areas. However, the rapid increase in visitor numbers and the development of infrastructure to support the booming demand for coastal tourism destinations in TA are further exacerbating the pressures on shorebird populations across the region. Despite these growing pressures and the wealth of research reporting on shorebird populations across the Asian flyways, this scoping study identified surprisingly little research that reports on the recreational disturbance of shorebirds in TA. While undertaken to inform future research, this study also provides a synthesis of management strategies reported in the global literature into a set of management recommendations for coastal destinations in TA

Just Passing Through: stakeholder constructs and value in Overland Truck Tourism through N.W. Zimbabwe

This research seeks to identify and examine constructs and values held by tourists and stakeholders concerning the biophysical and sociocultural environments encountered along a six-day stretch of overland truck journey in North-Western Zimbabwe. An interpretivist approach is taken with the use of Kelly’s theory of Constructive Alternativism as a lens through which to address the formation of constructs of place. Using a multi-sited ethnographical framework (Marcus, 1995) an immersive approach enabled the researcher to participate on the journey with a group of overland truck tourists allowing for experience of place and also the internal dynamics of truck life. An in-depth interview containing an embedded repertory grid was used in discussion with tourist participants in order to extract prior constructs of place and to identify those constructs held soon after the journey. Further interviews with tourism brokers and local stakeholders took place after the trip. Constructs were coded and themes extracted revealing primarily emotional constructs of place. Participation exposed the wildlife focus of the tour and very limited contacts with local populations who were seen as the ‘other’ Urry (2011) through the windows of the truck. Short contacts with place meant that the tourists had little depth in encounter or ability to interpret what they saw. As a result, tourists retained and built upon constructs based upon narratives and interpretation of the environment framed through a European cultural lens, which were built upon and legitimised by a small number of brokers, primarily safari guides. The postcolonial recurs as an underlying theme when examining the data and constructs held and is also observable as linked to an inherited power dynamic within the tourism product. Local community members with little direct contact with the tourists held difference constructs of their environments viewing them holistically through a combination of spiritual and utilitarian meaning, but these remained largely invisible to the tourist. Suggestions to add value and address the sustainability of this form of tourism involve widening the narrative and partnerships amongst stakeholders

Using registry data to estimate the effects of long-term treatment use in cystic fibrosis

Cystic fibrosis (CF) is a disease affecting over 10,000 people in the UK. It has no cure, but there are many treatments to help improve health. Randomised controlled trials are the gold standard for establishing treatment efficacy, but most trials for CF treatments have no more than one year of follow-up. In practice treatments are commonly used for many years, and it is therefore important to evaluate their long-term effectiveness. The UK CF Registry collects annual data on almost all people with CF in the UK. The overall aim of this work is to investigate how data from such registries can be harnessed to provide insights into the effects of long-term treatment use. My research illustrates the potential of registry data by investigating two CF treatments: DNase and ivacaftor. DNase is a common CF treatment and generally, once started, it continues to be used indefinitely. Despite this, no studies have investigated its long-term effects. Estimating these effects using registry data is difficult due to time-dependent confounding. I investigate five methods that can account for this: sequential conditional mean models, inverse probability weighting of marginal structural models (MSM), history-adjusted MSM, gcomputation formula and g-estimation of structural nested models. The performance of these methods is assessed through simulation studies, where it is shown that all methods perform similarly under correct model specification, suggesting that more than one method could be applied to assess consistency of results. My analysis of the UK CF Registry data suggests that DNase provides a step-change improvement in lung function only in individuals with ppFEV1 < 70% (e.g. for a person starting DNase with ppFEV1 of 20%, the one-year treatment effect was a 1.6% absolute difference in ppFEV1, 95% CI 0.4, 2.8). However, the slope of lung function decline over five years remained unchanged. Ivacaftor was introduced in the UK in 2012, but it is only available to people with a gating mutation. In this subgroup, it appears to be so beneficial that almost all eligible people are now receiving it. In this situation, it is difficult to estimate the treatment effect, because there are no eligible people not receiving treatment. Two possible comparator groups were identified: 1) those currently receiving ivacaftor, but using their data from years prior to its introduction, 2) those ineligible to receive ivacaftor due to their genotype. This work shows how analyses using negative controls can be used to assess the comparability of the different groups, and how differences between groups not due to treatment can be mitigated. Our analysis suggests that these two groups are comparable to people who are currently receiving ivacaftor, and the results of the analysis show that ivacaftor not only provides an initial step-change improvement in lung function (5.9% absolute difference in ppFEV1, 95% CI 4.7, 7.1), but also decrease the rate of lung function decline (0.5% absolute decrease in ppFEV1 decline per year, 95% CI 0.02, 1.0)