Seeing beyond labels: staff and student perspectives on the importance of building community

Based on the principle of everyone working towards the same goal, this chapter outlines the value of building community in academic settings, taking a holistic approach, and seeing everyone within a school, college, university, and discipline as members of the one community. As both teaching-focused academics (McAleer and Cleland Woods) and student collaborators (Brady, Reid, Schorrlepp, and Sijtsma), we aim to give insight from the staff and student perspectives as to the shared experience and importance of a community built on collaboration and trust, focused on a common goal of developing graduate skills within students so that they develop as prime contributors to today’s employment market. The three key principles of our approach are: (i) communication and the importance of regular contact between staff and students, (ii) accessibility and the value of students feeling able to connect with staff both pastorally and academically, and (iii) seeing beyond labels and showing how staff and students working in partnership to develop pedagogical frameworks has a positive outcome on ownership of the development of skills and knowledge. Behind our approach is the desire to create a working and learning environment that encapsulates a sense of belonging, for both staff and students, and we provide first-hand student perspectives as well as practical examples as to how this can be achieved regardless of resources

Major depression and the perception of affective instrumental and expressive gestures: an fMRI investigation

Major depressive disorder (MDD) is associated with biased perception of human movement. Gesture is important for communication and in this study we investigated neural correlates of gesture perception in MDD. We hypothesised different neural activity between individuals with MDD and typical individuals when viewing instrumental and expressive gestures that were negatively or positively valenced. Differences were expected in brain areas associated with gesture perception, including superior temporal, frontal, and emotion processing regions. We recruited 12 individuals with MDD and 12 typical controls matched on age, gender, and handedness. They viewed gestures displayed by stick figures while functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) was performed. Results of a random effects three-way mixed ANOVA indicated that individuals with MDD had greater activity in the right claustrum compared to controls, regardless of gesture type or valence. Additionally, we observed main effects of gesture type and valence, regardless of group. Perceiving instrumental compared to expressive gestures was associated with greater activity in the left cuneus and left superior temporal gyrus, while perceiving negative compared to positive gestures was associated with greater activity in the right precuneus and right lingual gyrus. We also observed a two-way interaction between gesture type and valence in various brain regions