The local matters- working with teachers to rethink the poverty and achievement gap discourse

This paper is concerned with the current achievement gap policy agenda and associated material and discursive power that shape teachers’ work in schools with high child poverty rates. More specifically, it explores how a university/school research collaboration – Local Matters – can disturb such forms of subjectivation by enabling educators to resist such policy agendas/discourses by drawing on locally contextualized knowledge and place-based evidence. Based on fieldwork undertaken over the past three years at over forty schools with eighty-four teachers across five Local Authority regions in Northern England, we provide a critical discourse analysis of a series of semi structured interviews and focus group activities of those who participated in the project. Based on an interdiscursive and linguistic analysis of the data we show how educators wrestle with the tensions between attempting to enact a social justice, collaborative and a democratic pedagogic approach and dealing with policy requirements that focus on the achievement gap problem and associated ‘what works’ discourse solution. Through the enactment of the program we show how educators, in collaboration with activist researchers, can develop forms of principled resistance that shake up and unsettle dominant forms of child poverty practice and discourses in schools

Automated power gating methodology for dataflow-based reconfigurable systems

Modern embedded systems designers are required to implement efficient multi-functional applications, over portable platforms under strong energy and resources constraints. Automatic tools may help them in challenging such a complex scenario: to develop complex reconfigurable systems while reducing time-to-market. At the same time, automated methodologies can aid them to manage power consumption. Dataflow models of computation, thanks to their modularity, turned out to be extremely useful to these purposes. In this paper, we will demonstrate as they can be used to automatically achieve power management since the earliest stage of the design flow. In particular, we are focussing on the automation of power gating. The methodology has been evaluated on an image processing use case targeting an ASIC 90 nm CMOS technology

Mutual Impact between Clock Gating and High Level Synthesis in Reconfigurable Hardware Accelerators

With the diffusion of cyber-physical systems and internet of things, adaptivity and low power consumption became of primary importance in digital systems design. Reconfigurable heterogeneous platforms seem to be one of the most suitable choices to cope with such challenging context. However, their development and power optimization are not trivial, especially considering hardware acceleration components. On the one hand high level synthesis could simplify the design of such kind of systems, but on the other hand it can limit the positive effects of the adopted power saving techniques. In this work, the mutual impact of different high level synthesis tools and the application of the well known clock gating strategy in the development of reconfigurable accelerators is studied. The aim is to optimize a clock gating application according to the chosen high level synthesis engine and target technology (Application Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC) or Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA)). Different levels of application of clock gating are evaluated, including a novel multi level solution. Besides assessing the benefits and drawbacks of the clock gating application at different levels, hints for future design automation of low power reconfigurable accelerators through high level synthesis are also derived

Modelling and Automated Implementation of Optimal Power Saving Strategies in Coarse-Grained Reconfigurable Architectures

This paper focuses on how to efficiently reduce power consumption in coarse-grained reconfigurable designs, to allow their effective adoption in heterogeneous architectures supporting and accelerating complex and highly variable multifunctional applications. We propose a design flow for this kind of architectures that, besides their automatic customization, is also capable of determining their optimal power management support. Power and clock gating implementation costs are estimated in advance, before their physical implementation, on the basis of the functional, technological, and architectural parameters of the baseline design. Experimental results, on 90 and 45 nm CMOS technologies, demonstrate that the proposed approach guides the designer towards optimal implementation

Quel avenir pour les initiatives territoriales en éducation en Angleterre ? [Résumé]

Cet article s’intéresse au rôle des initiatives territoriales (Area-Based Initiatives ou ABIs) dans la lutte contre les inégalités en éducation. L’avenir de ce dispositif est remis en cause au regard de leur efficacité mitigée. Un nouveau type d’initiatives territoriales fondé sur des bases théoriques renouvelées devrait leur donner un nouvel élan et asseoir leur développement. Les responsables politiques en Angleterre (et ailleurs) s’inquiètent régulièrement des résultats scolaires durableme..

Quel avenir pour les initiatives territoriales en éducation en Angleterre ? [Résumé]

Cet article s’intéresse au rôle des initiatives territoriales (Area-Based Initiatives ou ABIs) dans la lutte contre les inégalités en éducation. L’avenir de ce dispositif est remis en cause au regard de leur efficacité mitigée. Un nouveau type d’initiatives territoriales fondé sur des bases théoriques renouvelées devrait leur donner un nouvel élan et asseoir leur développement. Les responsables politiques en Angleterre (et ailleurs) s’inquiètent régulièrement des résultats scolaires durableme..

Curriculum projects, learner agency and young people’s fullness of life

From Wiley via Jisc Publications RouterHistory: received 2019-10-24, rev-recd 2020-03-16, accepted 2020-05-13, pub-electronic 2020-05-30, pub-print 2021-06Article version: VoRPublication status: PublishedA recent article in this journal suggests that although learner agency is central to understanding young people's engagement with the curriculum, there is little exploration of such ideas in the field. In response, they argued for an Archerian approach to learner agency and a contextually, interpersonally, intra‐personally and temporally situated curriculum that suggests the centrality of young people's educational reflexivity and associated learner agency for mediating the structural aspects of their educational lives. We reflect on this thinking through the lens of a curriculum project the design of which was similarly inspired by the work of Margaret Archer. We do so through the eyes of Grace, one of the young participants in the project. We learn from Grace that learner agency and curriculum engagement is not, as Archer's framework suggests, a substantively self‐authored reflexive endeavour that can be made amenable to change through a bespoke curriculum project. Rather learner (agency) in young people might be more accurately theorised in pragmatist terms as something embedded in the drama of the fullness of their everyday lives of which the curriculum represents just a tiny part. The implications for the field of learner agency and curriculum studies are discussed

Reconfigurable Adaptive Multiple Transform Hardware Solutions for Versatile Video Coding

Computer aided design is nowadays a must to quickly provide optimized circuits, to cope with stringent time to market constraints, and to be able to guarantee colliding constrained requirements. Design automation is exploited, whenever possible, to speed up the design process and relieve the developers from error prone customization, optimization and tuning phases. In this work we study the possibility of adopting automated algorithms for the optimization of reconfigurable multiple constant multiplication circuits. In particular, an exploration of novel reconfigurable Adaptive Multiple Transform circuital solutions adoptable in video coding applications has been conducted. These solutions have also been compared with the unique similar work at the state of the art, revealing to be beneficial under certain constraints. Moreover, the proposed approach has been generalized with some guidelines helpful to designers facing similar problems