An evidence-based review of creative problem solving tools: a practitioner’s resource

Creative problem solving (CPS) requires solutions to be useful and original. Typically, its operations span problem finding, idea generation and critical evaluation. The benefits of training CPS have been extolled in education, industry and government with evidence showing it can enhance performance. However, while such training schemes work, less is known about the specific tools used. Knowing whether a particular tool works or not would provide practitioners with a valuable resource, leading to more effective training schemes, and a better understanding of the processes involved. A comprehensive review was undertaken examining the empirical support of tools used within CPS. Despite the surprising lack of research focusing on the use and success of specific tools some evidence exists to support the effectiveness of a small set. Such findings present practitioners with a potential resource that could be used in a stand-alone setting or possibly combined to create more effective training programmes

Posthuman disability studies

This article explores the human through critical disability studies and the theories of Rosi Braidotti. We ask: What does it mean to be human in the twenty-first century and in what ways does disability enhance these meanings? In addressing this question we seek to work through entangled connections of nature, society, technology, medicine, biopower and culture to consider the extent to which the human might be an outdated phenomenon, replaced by Braidotti’s posthuman condition. We then introduce disability as a political category, an identity and a moment of relational ethics. Critical disability studies, we argue, are perfectly at ease with the posthuman because disability has always contravened the traditional classical humanist conception of what it means to be human. Disability also invites a critical analysis of the posthuman. We examine the ways in which disability and posthuman work together, enhancing and complicating one another in ways that raise important questions about the kinds of life and death we value. We consider three of Braidotti’s themes in relation to disability: (i) Life beyond the self: Rethinking enhancement; (ii) Life beyond the species: Rethinking animal; (iii) Life beyond death: Rethinking death. We conclude by advocating a posthuman disability studies that responds directly to contemporary complexities around the human while celebrating moments of difference and disruption

Teaching disability : strategies for the reconstitution of disability knowledge

As teachers of disability studies, working with students from the health and psychological sciences, we tackle some of our pedagogical challenges and offer productive possibilities. We begin by introducing the offerings of disability studies and then consider our first question: how might we invite disability into our teaching? We introduce a Spanish tale – Por cuatro esquinitas de nada – that, while aimed at children and not explicitly engaged with a disability, permits us to engage in inter-textual analyses of disability. We find that students move through different stages of what we term distinction, idealisation and invisibility/concealment. We then address our second question – what does it mean to teach disability? We answer this with reference to the generative practices of two teaching methodologies: disposal and disavowal. We conclude the paper by considering the importance of generating critical theories of disability

Becoming original: effects of strategy instruction

Visual arts education focuses on creating original visual art products. A means to improve originality is enhancement of divergent thinking, indicated by fluency, flexibility and originality of ideas. In regular arts lessons, divergent thinking is mostly promoted through brainstorming. In a previous study, we found positive effects of an explicit instruction of metacognition on fluency and flexibility in terms of the generation of ideas, but not on the originality of ideas. Therefore, we redesigned the instruction with a focus on building up knowledge about creative generation strategies by adding more complex types of association, and adding generation through combination and abstraction. In the present study, we examined the effects of this intervention by comparing it with regular brainstorming instruction. In a pretest-posttest control group design, secondary school students in the comparison condition received the brainstorm lesson and students in the experimental condition received the newly developed instruction lesson. To validate the effects, we replicated this study with a second cohort. The results showed that in both cohorts the strategy instruction of 50 min had positive effects on students' fluency, flexibility and originality. This study implies that instructional support in building up knowledge about creative generation strategies may improve students' creative processes in visual arts education

Assessing Tourism Development from Sen’s Capability Approach

The purpose of this study is to assess tourism development in the context of Sen’s capability approach. The study developed a model to investigate the relationship between tourism development and human development while focusing on two countries, Nicaragua and Costa Rica. The study applied a cointegration technique based on the Granger representation theorem. Overall, tourism development and human development reveals a tenuous relationship in both cases, reflecting some threshold effect. The importance of tourism growth is merited in the distribution of its benefits and the extent that tourism receipts are allocated to support human development (public health, education, safety, etc.). Rising incomes will not necessarily translate into human development performance, thereby rendering support to Sen’s contention that well-being should not be measured by its instrumental antecedents (such as income) alone. Private incomes through tourism expansion seem to matter most at lower levels of human development

We came here to remember’: Using participatory sensory ethnography to explore memory as emplaced, embodied practice

Memory can be seen as an emplaced phenomenon rather than as an internal, psychological archive. Approaches relating to cognition and memory as practice, seeing cognition as an extended, distributed phenomenon, will be considered in theoretical and empirical contexts in this article. Theoretical approaches to emplaced, embodied memory will be explored in the context of my sensory ethnographic research on place perception. I curated a series of sensory ethnographic engagements to explore how three international students from Tunisia, Indonesia, and Germany used emplaced knowledge and memories of their city and of their previous homes. Using a participatory sensory ethnography, involving walking interviews, my collaborators devised unique memorial responses to evoke their new and previous places of residence. The collaborations presented here illustrate the embodied, emplaced nature of memory. The use of sensory ethnography has enabled me to construct memory as an emplaced, embodied, multisensory phenomenon, rather than an internal archive

Functional diversity positively affects prey suppression by invertebrate predators: a meta-analysis

The use of pesticides within agricultural ecosystems has led to wide concern regarding negative effects on the environment. One possible alternative is the use of predators of pest species that naturally occur within agricultural ecosystems. However, the mechanistic basis for how species can be manipulated in order to maximise pest control remains unclear. We carried out a meta-analysis of 51 studies that manipulated predator species richness in reference to suppression of herbivore prey to determine which components of predator diversity affect pest control. Overall, functional diversity (FD) based on predator’s habitat domain, diet breadth and hunting strategy was ranked as the most important variable. Our analysis showed that increases in FD in polycultures led to greater prey suppression compared to both the mean of the component predator species, and the most effective predator species, in monocultures. Further analysis of individual traits indicated these effects are likely to be driven by broad niche differentiation and greater resource exploitation in functionally diverse predator communities. A decoupled measure of phylogenetic diversity, whereby the overlap in variation with FD was removed, was not found to be an important driver of prey suppression. Our results suggest that increasing FD in predatory invertebrates will help maximise pest control ecosystem services in agricultural ecosystems, with the potential to increase suppression above that of the most effective predator species