Social trajectories or disrupted identities? : Changing and competing models of teacher professionalism under New Labour

Since the 1988 Education Reform Act, the teacher’s role in England has changed in many ways, a process which intensified under New Labour after 1997. Conceptions of teacher professionalism have become more structured and formalized, often heavily influenced by government policy objectives. Career paths have become more diverse and specialised. In this article, three post-1997 professional roles are given consideration as examples of these new specialised career paths: Higher Level Teaching Assistants, Teach First trainees and Advanced Skills Teachers. The article goes on to examine such developments within teaching, using Bourdieu’s concept of habitus to inform the analysis, as well as Bernstein’s theories of knowledge and identity. The article concludes that there has been considerable specialization and subsequent fragmentation of roles within the teaching profession, as part of workforce remodelling initiatives. However, there is still further scope for developing a greater sense of professional cohesion through social activism initiatives, such as the children's agenda. This may produce more stable professional identities in the future as the role of teachers within the wider children’s workforce is clarified

Probing New Physics Models of Neutrinoless Double Beta Decay with SuperNEMO

The possibility to probe new physics scenarios of light Majorana neutrino exchange and right-handed currents at the planned next generation neutrinoless double beta decay experiment SuperNEMO is discussed. Its ability to study different isotopes and track the outgoing electrons provides the means to discriminate different underlying mechanisms for the neutrinoless double beta decay by measuring the decay half-life and the electron angular and energy distributions.Comment: 17 pages, 14 figures, to be published in E.P.J.

Transversity Form Factors and Generalized Parton Distributions of the pion in chiral quark models

The transversity Generalized Parton Distributions (tGPDs) and related transversity form factors of the pion are evaluated in chiral quark models, both local (Nambu--Jona-Lasinio) and nonlocal, involving a momentum-dependent quark mass. The obtained tGPDs satisfy all a priori formal requirements, such as the proper support, normalization, and polynomiality. We evaluate generalized transversity form factors accessible from the recent lattice QCD calculations. These form factors, after the necessary QCD evolution, agree very well with the lattice data, confirming the fact that the spontaneously broken chiral symmetry governs the structure of the pion also in the case of the transversity observables.Comment: 6 pages, 3 figures, presented by WB at LIGHTCONE 2011, 23 - 27 May, 2011, Dalla