Spoken Argumentation in the Adult ESOL classroom

This thesis is a discourse analysis of spoken argumentation in the Adult ESOL classroom. It investigates the ways in which it emerges and unfolds and also how teachers and students position themselves and each other in argumentation and how they are positioned by pedagogy and policy as well as by their histories. The principal focus is on verbal argumentation but some attention is also given to a more multimodal analysis. Argumentation is conceptualized in terms of competing and consensual voices (Costello and Mitchell, 1995). These voices are further conceptualized as situated speaking positions and, therefore, as identity positions. The study explores the ways in which argumentation unfolds, the ways it seeks to persuade and the identity work this involves. Argumentation is connected to wider questions of citizenship and democracy, with the Adult ESOL classroom seen as the agora for the wider enactment and modelling of full democratic citizenship

Death and organization: Heidegger’s thought on death and life in organizations

Mortality has not been given the attention it deserves within organization studies. Even when it has been considered, it is not usually in terms of its implications for own lives and ethical choices. In particular, Heidegger’s writing on death has been almost entirely ignored both in writing on death and writing on organizational ethics, despite his insights into how our mortality and the ethics of existence are linked. In this paper, we seek to address this omission by arguing that a consideration of death may yield important insights about the ethics of organizational life. Most important of these is that a Heideggerian approach to death brings us up against fundamental ethical questions such as what our lives are for, how they should be lived and how we relate to others. Heideggerarian thought also reconnects ethics and politics, as it is closely concerned with how we can collectively make institutions that support our life projects rather than thwart or diminish them

Understanding the influences on successful quality improvement in emergency general surgery: learning from the RCS Chole-QuIC project

Abstract: Background: Acute gallstone disease is the highest volume Emergency General Surgical presentation in the UK. Recent data indicate wide variations in the quality of care provided across the country, with national guidance for care delivery not implemented in most UK hospitals. Against this backdrop, the Royal College of Surgeons of England set up a 13-hospital quality improvement collaborative (Chole-QuIC) to support clinical teams to reduce time to surgery for patients with acute gallstone disease requiring emergency cholecystectomy. Methods: Prospective, mixed-methods process evaluation to answer the following: (1) how was the collaborative delivered by the faculty and received, understood and enacted by the participants; (2) what influenced teams’ ability to improve care for patients requiring emergency cholecystectomy? We collected and analysed a range of data including field notes, ethnographic observations of meetings, and project documentation. Analysis was based on the framework approach, informed by Normalisation Process Theory, and involved the creation of comparative case studies based on hospital performance during the project. Results: Chole-QuIC was delivered as planned and was well received and understood by participants. Four hospitals were identified as highly successful, based upon a substantial increase in the number of patients having surgery in line with national guidance. Conversely, four hospitals were identified as challenged, achieving no significant improvement. The comparative analysis indicate that six inter-related influences appeared most associated with improvement: (1) achieving clarity of purpose amongst site leads and key stakeholders; (2) capacity to lead and effective project support; (3) ideas to action; (4) learning from own and others’ experience; (5) creating additional capacity to do emergency cholecystectomies; and (6) coordinating/managing the patient pathway. Conclusion: Collaborative-based quality improvement is a viable strategy for emergency surgery but success requires the deployment of effective clinical strategies in conjunction with improvement strategies. In particular, achieving clarity of purpose about proposed changes amongst key stakeholders was a vital precursor to improvement, enabling the creation of additional surgical capacity and new pathways to be implemented effectively. Protected time, testing ideas, and the ability to learn quickly from data and experience were associated with greater impact within this cohort

Synthesis and cycloadditions of 9H-furo[3,4-b][1]benzo(thio)pyran-9-ones: furan ring formation by a novel hydrolytically induced cycloreversion

C-2 lithiation of acetals 2 followed by trapping with aldehydes gives 3. Subsequent unmasking of the acetal function provides furobenzo(thio)pyrans 4, cycloadditions of which have been investigated

The directed lithiation of some 3-acylchromone acetals

3-Acylchromone acetals are lithiated at C-2. Subsequent electrophilic trapping gives chromones 4 together with a ring-contracted dimer 6. During the formation of some acetals, an acid-catalysed rearrangement to a 2-substituted 3-formylchromone acetal is observed

Virus-Like Particle Facilitated Deposition of Hydroxyapatite Bone Mineral on Nanocellulose after Exposure to Phosphate and Calcium Precursors

We produced and isolated tobacco mosaic virus-like particles (TMV VLPs) from bacteria, which are devoid of infectious genomes, and found that they have a net negative charge and can bind calcium ions. Moreover, we showed that the TMV VLPs could associate strongly with nanocellulose slurry after a simple mixing step. We sequentially exposed nanocellulose alone or slurries mixed with the TMV VLPs to calcium and phosphate salts and utilized physicochemical approaches to demonstrate that bone mineral (hydroxyapatite) was deposited only in nanocellulose mixed with the TMV VLPs. The TMV VLPs confer mineralization properties to the nanocellulose for the generation of new composite materials