1,313 research outputs found
Beginning Teachersâ Motivations and Aspirations through Teacher Education
ABSTRACT: Much research has focused on what motivates people to take on a teaching career. An open question remains â how do their motivations and aspirations change through their professional education? We sampled secondary teacher education candidates near the end of their qualification (N=72) in Melbourne Australia (age: M=21.44, SD 2.77). Participants rated their responses for âthenâ (recalling their entry to teacher education) and ânowâ for a range of items. They answered open-ended questions regarding future plans and aspirations, and their teaching related abilities. Responses revealed significant changes in most perceived motivations and aspirations, with all changes in an upward direction. Findings are interpreted in light of the current climate of teacher shortages
A nomadic war machine in the metropolis: en/countering Londonâs 21st century housing crisis with Focus E15
This paper builds upon Colin McFarlane's 2011 call in City for an âassemblage urbanismâ to supplement critical urbanism. It does so by mapping the spatio-political contours of London's 21st-century housing crisis through the geophilosophical framework of Deleuze and Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus ([1980] 2013, London: Bloomsbury] and Hardt and Negri's analysis of the metropolis in Commonwealth (2009, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). The paper examines the Focus E15 housing campaign based around a group of young mothers in the East London borough of Newham. In 2013, the mothers were living in the Focus E15 foyer supported housing unit for young people in Newham, but they were subsequently threatened with eviction as a result of welfare cuts. After successfully contesting the mothersâ own prospective expulsion from the city, the campaign shifted to the broader struggle for âsocial housing not social cleansingâ. The paper draws upon participant observation at campaign events and interviews with key members. The Focus E15 campaign has engaged in a series of actions which form a distinctive way of undertaking housing politics in London, a politics that can be understood using a Deleuzoguattarian framework. Several campaign actions, including temporary occupations, are analysed. It is argued that these actions have created âsmooth spaceâ in a manner which is to an extent distinctive from many other London housing campaigns which are rooted in a more sedentary defensive approach based around the protection of existing homes and communitiesââour placeâ. It is such spatio-political creativityâoperating as a ânomadic war machine'âwhich has given rise to the high-profile reputation of the Focus E15 campaigners as inspirational young women who do not âknow their placeâ
Territorial stigmatisation and poor housing at a London âSink Estateâ
This paper offers a critical assessment of Loic Wacquantâs influential âadvanced marginalityâ framework with reference to research undertaken on a London social housing estate. Following Wacquant, it has become the orthodoxy that one of the major vectors of advanced marginality is territorial stigmatisation and that this particularly affects social housing estates, for example via mass media deployment of the âsink estateâ label in the UK. This paper is based upon a multi-method case study of the Aylesbury estate in south-east London â an archetypal stigmatised âsink estateâ. The paper brings together three aspects of residentsâ experiences of the Aylesbury estate: territorial stigmatisation and dissolution of place, both of which Wacquant focuses on, and housing conditions which Wacquant neglects. The paper acknowledges the deprivation and various social problems the Aylesbury residents face, problems that are generally prominent in south-east London. It argues, however, that rather than internalising the extensive and intensive media-fuelled territorial stigmatisation of their ânotoriousâ estate, as Wacquantâs analysis implies, residents have largely disregarded, rejected or actively resisted the notion that they are living in an âestate from hellâ, while their sense of place belonging has not dissolved. By contrast, poor housing â in the form of heating breakdowns, leaks, infestation, inadequate repairs and maintenance â caused major distress and frustration and was a more important facet of their everyday lives than territorial stigmatisation. The paper concludes that more academic attention needs to be paid to material housing conditions in order to provide a fuller understanding of urban advanced marginality
âPress-gangedâ Generation Rent: youth homelessness, precarity and poverty in East London
This paper examines youth homelessness, precarity and poverty via a critical account of âGeneration Rentâ â that young people are living in the private rental sector (PRS) in perpetuity having been locked out of both homeownership and social renting. The paper examines precarity in relation to employment (non-standard contracts) and housing (insecurity and evictions) with reference to in-depth interviews undertaken with 55 young people aged 18-30. This multi-ethnic group of low-income youth were living in temporary accommodation either in East London or in South East England having been displaced there from London. The paper illustrates the interlinkages between employment and housing precarity. The young people experienced the âlow-pay, no-pay cycleâ which contributed towards making the expensive London PRS an insecure and unrealistic housing âoptionâ. Their preferred housing was social renting, but access to this diminished due to austerity-related welfare cutbacks. Despite the young peopleâs well-founded antipathy towards the PRS, they were increasingly being steered towards this tenure destination by housing officials â a case of coerced, âpress-gangedâ Generation Rent
The Function of Hymns in the Liturgical Life of Malcolm Quin\u27s Positivist Church, 1878â1905
The publication of Auguste Comteâs positive philosophy in the 1830s and 1840s took the world by storm and has come to be regarded as one of the principal turning points in nineteenth-century intellectual culture. A particularly large number of disciples and imitators of Comteâs philosophy sprang up all over Europe, especially in the United Kingdom. They established churches and networks in Comteâs memory and wrote tracts, pamphlets and books on history, philosophy, aesthetics, literature, theology and the bourgeoning field of sociology based on Comteâs works. One such disciple was the musician Malcolm Quin. A singer, organist and hymn-writer, Quin was one of Britainâs most eccentric and devout Comtists who preached the positivist cause up and down the country from London to Newcastle upon Tyne. So taken by Comteâs philosophy Quin wrote dozens of tracts and books on positivism as well as hymns. This presentation analyses a number of hymns by Quin and the literary and musical qualities that align them to the positive cause. I argue that Quinâs hymns are not solely manifestations of Comteâs philosophy. They are also imbued with the parlance of utility and moral progress reflecting a particularly late nineteenth century coalescence of positivist and musical discourses
Enhanced recovery after surgery
Enhanced Recovery or Fast Track Recovery after Surgery protocols (ERAS) have significantly changed perioperative care following colorectal surgery and are promoted as reducing the stress response to surgery.
The present systematic review aimed to examine the impact on the magnitude of the systemic inflammatory response (SIR) for each ERAS component following colorectal surgery using objective markers such as C-reactive protein (CRP) and interleukin-6 (IL-6).
A literature search was performed of the US National Library of Medicine (MEDLINE), EMBASE, PubMed, and the Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews using appropriate keywords and subject headings to February 2015.
Included studies had to assess the impact of the selected ERAS component on the SIR using either CRP or IL-6.
Nineteen studies, including 1898 patients, were included. Fourteen studies (1246 patients) examined the impact of laparoscopic surgery on the postoperative markers of SIR. Ten of these studies (1040 patients) reported that laparoscopic surgery reduced postoperative CRP. One study (53 patients) reported reduced postoperative CRP using opioid-minimising analgesia. One study (142 patients) reported no change in postoperative CRP following preoperative carbohydrate loading. Two studies (108 patients) reported conflicting results with respect to the impact of goal-directed fluid therapy on postoperative IL-6. No studies examined the effect of other ERAS components, including mechanical bowel preparation, antibiotic prophylaxis, thromboprophylaxis, and avoidance of nasogastric tubes and peritoneal drains on markers of the postoperative SIR following colorectal surgery.
The present systematic review shows that, with the exception of laparoscopic surgery, objective evidence of the effect of individual components of ERAS protocols in reducing the stress response following colorectal surgery is limited
Developing Real-Time Implementations of Non-Linear Beamformers for Enhanced Optical Ultrasound Imaging
Free-hand optical ultrasound (OpUS) imaging is an
emerging ultrasound imaging paradigm that utilises an array
of fiber-optic sources and a single fiber-optic detector to achieve
video-rate, real-time imaging with a flexible probe that is immune
to electromagnetic interference. Due to the use of only a single
detector, such probes have limited channel counts, resulting in
significant imaging artefacts and limited contrast when imaging
is performed with a conventional Delay-and-Sum (DAS) beamformer. Non-linear beamforming can help improve the imaging
quality by exploiting cross-channel coherence across the aperture,
at the expense of significantly increased computational complexity. In this work, GPU implementations of different non-linear
beamformers were implemented and tailored specifically to OpUS
array devices and tested on both simulated and experimental
data
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Improving a tutorâs feedback assessment tool: transforming Open Mentor following two recent deployments
Evidence shows the vital role that the quality of feedback plays on studentsâ performance and on the overall increase of learning opportunities that good feedback creates for students. Based on this evidence, the Open University developed Open Mentor (OM), a system to support tutors enhance their feedback practice. Open Mentor Technology transfer (OMTetra), a JISC funded project, took OM and deployed it in two Higher Education institutions with the purpose of evaluating the process of transferability and continue the development of the tools available to tutors within the system. This paper describes the original OM and the enhancements identified after use and evaluations from tutors of the institutions involved
Addressing the Challenges of Assessment and Feedback in Higher Education: A collaborative effort across three UK Universities
Assessment has been identified as one of the major challenges faced by Higher Education Institutions (Whitelock, et al, 2007). As a response to the challenge, in a project funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) Open Mentor (OM) was developed as a learning support tool for tutors to help them reflect on the quality of feedback given to their students on assignments submitted electronically. Its development was based on the fundamental theory that there was convincing evidence of systematic connections between different types of tutor comments and the level of attainment in an assignment (Whitelock, et al 2004). OM analyses, filters, and classifies tutor comments through an algorithm based on Baleâs Interaction Process. As a result, tutorâs feedback comments are classified into four categories namely: Positive reactions, Teaching points, Questions and Negative reactions. The feedback provided is analysed against an ideal number of feedback comments that an assignment given a mark of a specific band should have. Reports are provided in OM to support tutors in the task of reflecting on their feedback structure, content and style. The JISC-funded Open Mentor technology transfer (OMtetra) project is continuing the work initiated by the Open University implementing OM at the University of Southampton and Kingâs College London. OMtetra aims at taking up OM and extending its use by developing the system further and ultimately offering better support to tutors and students in the assessment process. A group of tutors from the University of Southampton and Kingsâ College are at present using OM in their teaching and assessment. In this paper, we explore potential improvements to OM in three aspects: user interface, technology implementation and analysis algorithm design. For the user experience aspect suggested additions to OM include the creation of a simple entry form where tutors may validate the results of the analysis of the feedback comments. In addition, enhancements to OM will facilitate uploading of students and modules information into the system. Presently, OM utilises a built-in database of users that needs to be maintained separately from institutional systems. Improvements for this system feature include a more flexible authentication module which would simplify the deployment of the system in new environments and thus promote uptake by a larger number of institutions. In order to reach this goal, the system will be migrated to an open source framework which provides out-of-the-box integration with various authentication systems. The last to improve is the analysis algorithm. Currently, OM classifies tutorsâ comments into four categories by applying an underlying text matching algorithm. This method could be improved if tutors are allowed to confirm commentsâ classification through the OM interface and a free-text classification algorithm. As the number of users grow, so will the algorithm and analysis process, making it more comprehensive and intelligent as the keywords used during analysis are dynamically expanded. OMtetra is an on-going project with a lot of potential. We believe that the outcomes from the development and trial implementations of OM will contribute highly to the area of assessment in higher education
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