Research Review: Whole school approaches to sustainability: An international review of whole-school sustainability programs

Education for sustainability is an emerging concept encompassing "a new vision of education that seeks to empower people of all ages to assume responsibility for creating a sustainable future" (UNESCO, 2002). With the development of a number of national whole-school initiatives, including in Australia, this report reviews, documents, and identifies lessons from some of these programs to inform future Sustainable Schools initiatives

Creating cultural change @ campus kindergarten: The sustainable planet project

This article highlights how the Campus Kindergarten community has confronted the challenge of sustainability. It has done this by creating a ‘learning organisation’ where a culture of sustainability is continuously recreated by taking advantage of, rather than resisting, the natural power of complexity. This centre is a model of quality early childhood education for sustainability

Embracing Complexity: Creating Cultural Change Through Education for Sustainability

Campus Kindergarten in Brisbane, Australia, is a community-based organisation for children and families that has embraced change through the evolution of its internationally acclaimed ‘Sustainable Planet Project’. The centre initiated the project in 1997, introducing a range of new curriculum and pedagogical processes - always with young children at the heart - that have led to improvements in play spaces, reduced waste, lowered water consumption and improved biodiversity. This child-focussed approach is reflected in the way that children’s ideas provide much of the motivation and inspiration for changing to more sustainable practices. A whole centre project on water conservation, for example, was sparked when preschoolers (aged 4 years) articulated their concerns to staff about water use in the sandpit. This paper overviews a recent research project designed to document, examine and highlight the Sustainable Planet Project, to assist centre staff, researchers and others with a commitment to sustainability, to understanding the change processes. An important feature has been the project's slow, sometimes erratic, development that has always added complexity to the teachers’ work. Such change, however, has not been viewed negatively. Complexity theory has helped to explain the project’s evolution and complexity has been embraced as a vehicle for creativity, engagement, critique and ongoing change in this learning organisation. As a consequence, a culture of sustainability now permeates the centre where a strong vision has been translated into small but realistic goals and achievements

Engaged learning in MOOCs: a study using the UK Engagement Survey

This study sets out to answer the question: how can we know what learning is taking place in MOOCs? From this starting point, the study then looks to identify MOOCs’ potential for future use in HE? Using a specially-adapted version of the HEA’s UK Engagement Survey (UKES) 2014, the research team at the University of Southampton asked participants who had completed one of two MOOCs delivered through the FutureLearn platform and designed and run at the university about their experiences as learners and their engagement with their respective MOOC. The results also show that both of the MOOCs were successful in enabling many participants to feel engaged in intellectual endeavours such as forming new understandings, making connections with previous knowledge and experience, and exploring knowledge actively, creatively and critically. In response to the open access approach – in which no one taking part in a MOOC is required to have a minimum level of previous educational achievement - the report shows that persistent learners engaged, regardless of prior educational attainment

Prelude to the Great Society: Cultural Change in the 20th Century America

The decades immediately following World War II were prosperous but filled with great inequalities. Many social change movements, including the War on Poverty, attempted to eliminate these inequalities. Yet, programs as large and far reaching as these required many changes to the society itself. President Lyndon Johnson and Dr. Julius Richmond, director of Head Start, agreed that certain societal factors were necessary before social change could occur. Johnson felt that these conditions were a recognition of need, a willingness to act, and someone to lead the effort (Johnson The Vantage Point 70). The widespread existence of poverty in Post World War II America\u27s affluence helped America recognize the need that existed among its poor. Books such as John Kenneth Galbraith\u27s The Affluent Society, Harry Caudill Night Comes to the Cumberlands, and the most influential of all, Michael Harrington\u27s The Other America showed the affluent society the existence and the need of their poor counterparts. Many changes had to occur before the American people were willing to help the poor. These changes began in the 1930s with the programs of the New Deal. The acceptance of the concept of structural poverty, poverty that was intertwined within the system and not the fault of the individual, increased the public\u27s willingness to help the underprivileged. The inequalities brought to light by the Civil Rights movement raised social consciousness about many oppressed groups, including the poor. Finally, President John F. Kennedy\u27s assassination touched the hearts of the American people and made them more willing to help their fellows. Lyndon Johnson saw himself in the role of strong leader, his final requirement. He felt that his poor background and work with poverty-stricken children helped qualify him for this task. His work with the National Youth Administration also prepared him to fight poverty. Gallup polls showed that before the War on Poverty began many people favored fighting poverty over balancing the budget (Schwarz 159). As the programs expanded, support for them grew. Statistics show that these programs significantly reduced poverty in America

Locational factors determining the distribution of nesting sites for a colony of wedge-tailed shearwaters, puffinus pacificus, on West Wallabi Island, Houtman Abrolhos, Western Australia

West Wallabi Island in the Houtman Abrolhos, Western Australia, provides significant breeding habitat for the largest colony of Wedge-tailed Shearwaters, Puffinus pacificus, in the Eastern Indian Ocean. The Department of Conservation and Land Management (CALM) surveyed the Island in 1992 and estimated the population to be in excess of 1,117,000 pairs of breeding birds. Recent proposals to open the Abrolhos area to a larger number of visitors has identified the need for more detailed investigations into the relationship of birds and habitat. An understanding of this relationship provides a means of determining the ways in which populations will respond to human exploitation and environmental change. The design and implementation of appropriate management strategies must utilise this information if sustainable development is to be achieved. This study involved a detailed survey of a habitat area on West Wallabi Island as means of identifying the locational factors, such as topography, climate, soil and vegetation structures that influence the distribution of nest Sites, and to complete a population census as a means of monitoring population trends over time. Field research was carried out over a 10 week period from 18th March 1998 to 23th May 1998 when census and observational data were collected. The results of this survey indicate that for the 1997/98 breeding season the population of Wedge-tailed Shearwaters breeding on West Wallabi Island is approximately 370 000 pairs of birds, approximately one third of the previously published data

Engineering the Structure of the Human Acidic Fibroblast Growth Factor to Enhance its Stability and Cell Proliferation Activity

Human acidic fibroblast growth factor (hFGF1) is a protein well known for its role in cell growth and differentiation. To elicit these cell-signaling processes, hFGF1 non-selectively binds to any one of the seven cell surface hFGF receptor isoforms. Due to its significant involvement in tissue repair activity, hFGF1 is a prime candidate for novel wound healing therapeutics. However, one drawback toward its use as a novel wound healing therapeutic is the poor inherent thermal stability of hFGF1, as it has been found to unfold near physiological temperature. The cause of this instability is strong electrostatic repulsion created by a dense cluster of positively charged amino acids near the c-terminus. This instability leads to proteolytic degradation of the unfolded protein, which severely limits the bioavailability of hFGF1. To counteract this instability, hFGF1 binds with high affinity to the heavily sulfated glycosaminoglycan, heparin, which eliminates the charge-charge repulsion via electrostatic interactions with the positively charged residues near the c-terminus in the region known as the heparin-binding pocket. However, recently several disadvantages have been acknowledged with the use of heparin in hFGF1 wound-healing therapeutics. Thus, to address these issues, we have genetically engineered several rationally designed point mutations within and near by the heparin-binding region of hFGF1 to modulate the heparin-binding affinity and to increase the thermal stability and cell proliferation activity of the protein. Study of each mutation is performed with biophysical experiments as well as molecular dynamics simulations (which are found as supplementary files)

“For The Homeland”: Die Deutsche Hausfrau and Reader Responses to World War I

When the Great War broke out in the summer of 1914, many German Americans living in the United States expressed renewed support and loyalty for Germany in the German-language press. While scholars have thoroughly examined the collective experiences and sentiments of German Americans in the U.S. during World War I, particularly in their press, German-American women and their press have remained largely underrepresented. Notably, however, as evidenced by the largest nationally circulated monthly women’s journal of the time, Die Deutsche Hausfrau (The German Housewife), German-American women did indeed use their press as well to convey increasingly pro-German rhetoric in support of their “old homeland” through their letters to the editor. Readers’ letters reveal that they expressed their support for Germany in two distinct ways: by embracing and sharing in the politics of the war and by advocating for the importance of the multiple facets of their German heritage, such as language, homeland, relatives, and culture. Through this use of the press to express themselves, readers strengthened their role as active members of their local and international communities, merged their private and public spheres, and reinforced ties to their German cultural and political identity. Although the legislative restrictions placed on the press after the U.S. joined the war shifted the pro-German and transnational tone of the magazine to focus more on American interests in the war, Die Deutsche Hausfrau continued to emphasize the role of German-American women in society and their contributions to their communities