‘Let Them Be Who They Are’: Discovering Special Education Teachers’ Perceptions of Oppressive Normativity and Their Practice of Celebrating Neurodiversity

Autistic students are faced with ableism and oppressive practices daily in their school environments. Special educators can mitigate this problem by celebrating the neurodiversity of the students in their classroom. Utilizing a critical disability theory lens, I conducted an instrumental case study through observations and interviews with six special education teachers at a special education school. The research objective was to understand how special education teachers approach oppressive normativity in their classroom and adapt their practice for neurodiverse learners. The findings revealed that special education teachers who work strictly with neurodiverse learners do not perceive oppressive normativity in their classroom because the acceptance of neurodiversity is the standard. The findings showed that special education teachers celebrated neurodiversity and approached oppressive normativity by using sensory techniques, social support, student differentiation, and choices for learning. Yet, there is also evidence of oppressive normativity through the use of planned ignoring, prompting, and deficit-based teacher language. The findings of this study can lead to further development of the special education practice, which I call neurodiverse communication empowerment, by highlighting student voice and strengths, understanding oppressive normativity, and developing strong teacher-student relationships with autistic students. This study adds to the scholarly research in the field of autism education and critical disability theory by considering the perceptions of special education teachers on neurodiversity. The findings have implications for increasing training in developmental, relationship-based, strength-based, and passion-based pedagogy; receiving feedback from neurodiverse learners; and providing mainstream and inclusion teachers with opportunities to observe in strictly neurodiverse classrooms to better their practice. Keywords: neurodiversity, autism, special educatio

The Book Spotter's Guide to Avian Titled Literature

In order to remain relevant in the digital age, physical libraries have to strengthen their position as social and cultural spaces. They need to find ways to challenge existing users perceptions of the collections and how they are accessed and presented. In an attempt to engage with these challenges, the University of Technology Sydney Library redesigned its visual identity and interior spaces, and commissioned us to create an installation in the central stairwell. From our initial research we formed the following question: how can we design a creative work (installation) that suggests the library is a space for play and discovery? This paper reports a practice-based research project with two intrinsically linked outcomes:1. An installation: `Avian Titled Literature'; 2. A hybrid exegesis: `Field Guide to Avian Titled Literature'. The project is the first iteration of a larger, ongoing research project investigating ways visual communication design could encourage serendipitous discovery, browsing and more playful engagement within libraries

Canadian Chancery in Bangladesh

https://openscholarship.wustl.edu/bcs/1266/thumbnail.jp

Cost-efficient control of wastewater treatment plants to reduce greenhouse gas emissions

IWA World Water Congress and Exhibition, Lisbon, Portugal, 21-26 September 2014This research investigates the potential of improved wastewater treatment plant control for the cost-efficient reduction of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, providing a detailed exploration of the decision variable search space. Key operational parameters identified using global sensitivity analysis are sampled to provide sets of values for testing in two pre-defined control strategies. It is shown that significant reductions in emissions and costs can be realized by improved selection of parameter values. The importance of considering GHGs when selecting a control strategy is also highlighted, as the two strategies tested are shown to produce effluent of a similar quality but with significantly different emissions and operating costs

Graphic criticism and the material possibilities of digital texts

© 2018 The Author(s). Narratives of material loss are often attributed to the process of digitising cultural heritage collections. Not being able to physically hold a literary artefact denies the reader an embodied understanding of the text made possible through tangible and contextual cues. What the artefact feels like-the dimensions, weight, volume, and paper quality-and where it is located-the institution, collection, shelf, or archival box-all play a role in the production of textual meaning. Thus, the argument stands that by removing these cues certain ways of knowing a text are diminished. The process of digitisation, however, is not solely one of loss. Scholars working with digital texts are finding new ways to search, model, analyse, and rearrange written language, and in doing so are benefiting from the interpretive possibilities of textual mutability. While some scholars are taking advantage of digital materiality through computational text analysis, far less attention has been paid to the non-verbal materialities of a text, which also play a role in the production of meaning. To explore the potential of these non-verbal materialities, we take a digitised version of Herman Melville's Moby-Dick; or, The Whale and alter graphic features of the page such as line length, type size, leading, white space, and tracking. Through a critical design practice we show how altering these non-verbal elements can reveal textual qualities that are difficult to access by close reading, and, in doing so, create new, hybrid works that are part literary page, part information visualisation

Multi-objective optimisation of wastewater treatment plant control to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

PublishedResearch Support, Non-U.S. Gov'tThis is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Elsevier via http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.watres.2014.02.018This study investigates the potential of control strategy optimisation for the reduction of operational greenhouse gas emissions from wastewater treatment in a cost-effective manner, and demonstrates that significant improvements can be realised. A multi-objective evolutionary algorithm, NSGA-II, is used to derive sets of Pareto optimal operational and control parameter values for an activated sludge wastewater treatment plant, with objectives including minimisation of greenhouse gas emissions, operational costs and effluent pollutant concentrations, subject to legislative compliance. Different problem formulations are explored, to identify the most effective approach to emissions reduction, and the sets of optimal solutions enable identification of trade-offs between conflicting objectives. It is found that multi-objective optimisation can facilitate a significant reduction in greenhouse gas emissions without the need for plant redesign or modification of the control strategy layout, but there are trade-offs to consider: most importantly, if operational costs are not to be increased, reduction of greenhouse gas emissions is likely to incur an increase in effluent ammonia and total nitrogen concentrations. Design of control strategies for a high effluent quality and low costs alone is likely to result in an inadvertent increase in greenhouse gas emissions, so it is of key importance that effects on emissions are considered in control strategy development and optimisation.Thanks are given for the Matlab/Simulink implementation of the BSM2 from the Department of Industrial Electrical Engineering and Automation, Lund University, Lund, Sweden. Christine Sweetapple gratefully acknowledges financial support provided by the University of Exeter in the form of a studentship

Visualising text-based data: Identifying the potential of visual knowledge production through design practice

An increase in the availability of digitised data coupled with the development of digital tools has enabled humanities scholars to visualise data in ways that were previously difficult, if not impossible. While digitisation has led to an increase in the use of methods that chart, graph and map text-based data, opportunities for visual methods that are non-aggregative remain underdeveloped. In this paper we use ‘Writing Rights’, a collaborative project between design and humanities scholars that examines the process of writing the ‘Déclaration des Droits de l’Homme et du Citoyen’ (1789), to explore this issue. Through a series of visual experiments we discuss how the production of knowledge is enacted textually, within the written language, and graphically with the visual arrangement of the text. We argue that by drawing on the domain expertise of design, with its commitment to the semantic potential of the visual, practices that more wholly account for the qualitative nature of humanities data can be developed

Does carbon reduction increase sustainability? A study in wastewater treatment

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Elsevier as an open access article via the DOI in this record.This study investigates the relationships between carbon reduction and sustainability in the context of wastewater treatment, focussing on the impacts of control adjustments, and demonstrates that reducing energy use and/or increasing energy recovery to reduce net energy can be detrimental to sustainability. Factorial sampling is used to derive 315 control options, containing two different control strategies and a range of sludge wastage flow rates and dissolved oxygen setpoints, for evaluation. For each, sustainability indicators including operational costs, net energy and multiple environmental performance measures are calculated. This enables identification of trade-offs between different components of sustainability which must be considered before implementing energy reduction measures. In particular, it is found that the impacts of energy reduction measures on sludge production and nitrogen removal must be considered, as these are worsened in the lowest energy solutions. It also demonstrates that a sufficiently large range of indicators need to be assessed to capture trade-offs present within the environmental component of sustainability. This is because no solutions provided a move towards sustainability with respect to every indicator. Lastly, it is highlighted that improving the energy balance (as may be considered an approach to achieving carbon reduction) is not a reliable means of reducing total greenhouse gas emissions.Thanks are given for the Matlab/Simulink implementation of the BSM2G from the Department of Industrial Engineering and Automation, Lund University, Lund, Sweden. This work forms part of a 5-year fellowship for the last author funded by the UK Engineering & Physical Sciences Research Council (EP/K006924/1)

Long Bay : prison, abortion and women of the working class

University of Technology Sydney. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences.In 1909 Rebecca Sinclair and her husband Donald Sinclair were found guilty of manslaughter in Sydney’s Central Criminal Court. She was sentenced to three years Hard Labour at Long Bay Women’s Reformatory and he to five years penal servitude. Rebecca and Donald Sinclair had been performing illegal abortions with Epsom Salts and a syringe when their patient – a mother of three children – died. After six months in prison Rebecca was taken to the Royal Hospital for Women in Paddington where she gave birth to a daughter. When her daughter was two weeks old, they returned to prison together. Long Bay is the story of how Rebecca Sinclair became involved in the burgeoning illegal abortion racket and how she was drawn into Donald Sinclair’s world. Her husband’s mother was a known abortionist called Nurse Sinclair who advertised her services in the back of the newspapers, and always managed to escape conviction. The creative portion of my Doctorate of Creative Arts is an 86,000 word novel Long Bay, based on Rebecca and Donald Sinclair’s story. The exegesis consists of an introduction (including an examination of my research process) and three separate essays about aspects of Rebecca Sinclair’s experience. The first essay details the rise of the Women’s Reformatory movement within the conceptual framework of Foucault’s work on prisons, and the creation of Long Bay Women’s Reformatory as the first purpose built women’s prison in Australia. The second looks at the demand for abortion in the early twentieth century and the medicalisation of abortion as traditional midwife providers were legislated against and replaced by doctors profiting from the illegal market. The essay examines how this also led to inexperienced criminal abortionists with no medical training (like Rebecca and Donald Sinclair) filling the gap left by experienced midwifes. The final essay examines the representation and expectations of working class women, and how often the most vivid representations of working class women at the time exist because their subjects have failed to fulfil traditional expectations and have come under public scrutiny as a result