A Process Approach to the Teaching of Philosophy and Theory of Education

The problems which are associated with the teaching of educational philosophy and theory are well known to those in the field. Issues relating to appropriateness, relevance, content, and course structure raise particular problems for those who teach in this area in the context of pre-service teacher education programmes. This article is an attempt to describe, in personal terms, an approach which evolved over a fifteen year period of teaching educational theory as a compulsory unit in an initial teacher education programme at the University of New England. In our experience it has solved many of the problems initially encountered when we began teaching this course and may therefore be of interest to others who have met similar problems

Reconfiguring Resilience for Existential Risk: Submission of Evidence to the Cabinet Office on the new UK National Resilience Strategy

This submission provides input on the UK Government's National Resilience Strategy Call for Evidence, which sought “public engagement to inform the development of a new Strategy that will outline an ambitious new vision for UK National Resilience and set objectives for achieving it.” In response, an interdisciplinary team of experts at the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk worked to prepare a concrete response to this call. In this document, we aim to share the contents of our submission for public deliberation. While we laud the UK government's inititiative to develop a new National Resilience Strategy, we argue that more work can and should be done to categorize and identify catastrophic, and existential risks; we emphasize the importance of taking a long-term perspective on mitigating and responding to the challenges these pose; and we encourage the development of a more comprehensive strategy, as these risks are all intertwined in an interconnected and complex environment. In our responses, we focus on the six broad thematic areas of the National Resilience Strategy (Risk and Resilience, Responsibilities and Accountability, Partnerships, Community, Investment, and Resilience in an Interconnected World), and provide key recommendations for improving UK national resilience, both from a general perspective on existential and global catastrophic risks, as well as with regards to policies in key risk domains such as in biorisk, climate risk, or emerging technologies within critical national infrastructure & - defence systems. While we laud the UK government's initial to develop a new National Resilience Strategy, we argue that more work can and should be done to categorize and identify catastrophic, complex, and existential risks; we emphasize a long-term perspective on mitigating and responding to the threats these pose; and we encourage the development of a more comprehensive strategy, as these risks are all intertwined in an interconnected and complex environment. In our responses, we focus on the six broad thematic areas of the National Resilience Strategy (Risk and Resilience, Responsibilities and Accountability, Partnerships, Community, Investment, and Resilience in an Interconnected World), and provide key recommendations for improving UK national resilience, both from a general perspective on existential and global catastrophic risks, as well as with regards to policies in key risk domains such as in biorisk, climate risk, or emerging technologies within critical national infrastructure & - defence systems

Lessons from COVID-19 for GCR governance: a research agenda [version 2; peer review: 2 approved]

The Lessons from Covid-19 Research Agenda offers a structure to study the COVID-19 pandemic and the pandemic response from a Global Catastrophic Risk (GCR) perspective. The agenda sets out the aims of our study, which is to investigate the key decisions and actions (or failures to decide or to act) that significantly altered the course of the pandemic, with the aim of improving disaster preparedness and response in the future. It also asks how we can transfer these lessons to other areas of (potential) global catastrophic risk management such as extreme climate change, radical loss of biodiversity and the governance of extreme risks posed by new technologies. Our study aims to identify key moments- ‘inflection points’- that significantly shaped the catastrophic trajectory of COVID-19. To that end this Research Agenda has identified four broad clusters where such inflection points are likely to exist: pandemic preparedness, early action, vaccines and non-pharmaceutical interventions. The aim is to drill down into each of these clusters to ascertain whether and how the course of the pandemic might have gone differently, both at the national and the global level, using counterfactual analysis. Four aspects are used to assess candidate inflection points within each cluster: 1. the information available at the time; 2. the decision-making processes used; 3. the capacity and ability to implement different courses of action, and 4. the communication of information and decisions to different publics. The Research Agenda identifies crucial questions in each cluster for all four aspects that should enable the identification of the key lessons from COVID-19 and the pandemic response

Triaxiality and non-thermal gas pressure in Abell 1689

Clusters of galaxies are uniquely important cosmological probes of the evolution of the large scale structure, whose diagnostic power depends quite significantly on the ability to reliably determine their masses. Clusters are typically modeled as spherical systems whose intracluster gas is in strict hydrostatic equilibrium (i.e., the equilibrium gas pressure is provided entirely by thermal pressure), with the gravitational field dominated by dark matter, assumptions that are only rough approximations. In fact, numerical simulations indicate that galaxy clusters are typically triaxial, rather than spherical, and that turbulent gas motions (induced during hierarchical merger events) provide an appreciable pressure component. Extending our previous work, we present results of a joint analysis of X-ray, weak and strong lensing measurements of Abell 1689. The quality of the data allows us to determine both the triaxial shape of the cluster and the level of non-thermal pressure that is required if the intracluster gas is in hydrostatic equilibrium. We find that the dark matter axis ratios are 1.24 +/- 0.13 and 2.02 +/- 0.01 on the plane of the sky and along the line of sight, respectively, and that about 20% of the pressure is non-thermal. Our treatment demonstrates that the dynamical properties of clusters can be determined in a (mostly) bias-free way, enhancing the use of clusters as more precise cosmological probes.Comment: Accepted for publication in MNRA

Radio continuum observations of Class I protostellar disks in Taurus: constraining the greybody tail at centimetre wavelengths

We present deep 1.8 cm (16 GHz) radio continuum imaging of seven young stellar objects in the Taurus molecular cloud. These objects have previously been extensively studied in the sub-mm to NIR range and their SEDs modelled to provide reliable physical and geometrical parametres.We use this new data to constrain the properties of the long-wavelength tail of the greybody spectrum, which is expected to be dominated by emission from large dust grains in the protostellar disk. We find spectra consistent with the opacity indices expected for such a population, with an average opacity index of beta = 0.26+/-0.22 indicating grain growth within the disks. We use spectra fitted jointly to radio and sub-mm data to separate the contributions from thermal dust and radio emission at 1.8 cm and derive disk masses directly from the cm-wave dust contribution. We find that disk masses derived from these flux densities under assumptions consistent with the literature are systematically higher than those calculated from sub-mm data, and meet the criteria for giant planet formation in a number of cases.Comment: submitted MNRA