CLE Writing Retreat 2015: 8-10 April 2015: Hitchin Priory

The Writing Retreat process began in 2009 when the first retreat was held at Streatley, Oxfordshire. This retreat and that held at Highgate Hall in Northants in 2010 were organised by the University's Centre for Excellence in Teaching and Learning to produce two internally published books charting different departmental perspectives on the significant curriculum changes introduced during that time. Since 2011 and up to the current event, Writing Retreats have had a different purpose: to produce individually authored articles for externally published academic journals. The three‐day Writing Retreat is the end of a nine‐month, fully supported process. Calls for expressions of interest go out in July, and participants must then pass certain milestones by specific dates. (For example, the abstract must be submitted by a certain date; a first draft must be completed by a certain date.) By adhering to these milestone dates we are able to keep a check on the numbers who apply, but it also serves the function of ensuring that everyone is aware of his or her own target when it comes to the event itself. The Writing Retreat objective forms part of the CLE’s strategy to support the University's ethos of scholarship by encouraging academic writing for publication. Writing Retreats allow particpants the opportunity to dedicate time and concentration to a specific piece of writing with the support of their colleagues. By taking the colleague away from his or her more customary work patterns and rhythms of the working week, the Writing Retreat provides space to focus. Although the three days are busy with activities, workshops and tasks, the focus is very much on completing the paper in question

Reading students' expectations: a talking point

Paper delivered at 'Academic Literacies: Reading in the Academy', Institute of Education, Friday 17 June 2011. This brief paper addresses the issue of graduate and postgraduate learners who have been educated in a language other than English, who subsequently relocate to England to study English. Whether this relocation is for work reasons or for leisure, the challenge of English language acquisition can lead to learner anxiety and a range of issues, including inadvertent peer racism. Using a reflective method and drawing on my own experience of working in FE colleges, HE institutions, privately-owned language schools, and a maximum security prison, I will argue that it is frequently an institution's practice to build a class solely by the existing language attainment of each individual learner (to make a class up of students of approximately the same level of English); and that while this may work well in many cases, the fact that no notice is taken of the individual student's prior attainment in his/her original language can lead to tension if the class is not managed by the tutor. For example, there is often a challenge presented to the tutor of a class comprised of graduates from elsewhere in the world and students of the same level of English who have had no formal education and are in the UK (perhaps) seeking asylum

Key pedagogic thinkers: Arlie Russell Hochschild

Professor Emerita of Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, Arlie Russell Hochschild is the author of The Time Bind, So How's the Family?, The Second Shift and The Commercialization of Intimate Life, among many other writing achievements, and the co-editor of Global Woman: Nannies, Maids and Sex Workers in the New Economy. Her area of expertise is what might be called the sociology of emotion, and her influential work has been translated into sixteen languages. Having written at length about 'emotion work' and how it affects the crossover points between professional engagement and family life, the author was recognized critically in 2011 with a collection entitled At the Heart of Work and Family: Engaging the Ideas of Arlie Hochschild – a volume that explores the conceptual frameworks that Hochschild has developed since her groundbreaking work, The Managed Heart (1983). A second festschrift – Pathways to Empathy: new studies on commodification, emotional labor and time binds – appeared in 2013

Key pedagogic thinkers: Jacques Lacan

The French psychoanalyst, psychiatrist and teacher Jacques Marie Émile Lacan was born on April 13, 1901 and died on September 9, 1981

Project 150: High School is Tough Enough

https://digitalscholarship.unlv.edu/educ_sys_202/1117/thumbnail.jp

Investigating a narrative based approach to leader development: Life stories, middle managers and the leader-follower paradox : A thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the postgraduate degree of Master of Advanced Leadership Practice at Massey University, Albany, New Zealand

There is a small amount of emergent leadership literature recommending people incorporate a narrative based approach into their leader development. This approach involves the identification and reflection on experiences and events from ones’ life so a story can be told about who they are as a leader (life stories). To date, life stories research has yet to account for the fact leaders must also follow. Middle managers embody this paradox. This study was an investigation into the potential for life stories to contribute to middle managers’ leader development. This study also looked at how life stories might contribute to middle managers understanding of themselves as followers and how they might use life stories in negotiating the leader-follower paradox. The overall aim was to make a further contribution to understanding the potential for life stories in leader development. A case study of five Auckland New Zealand based middle managers was conducted. Life history interviews were thematically analysed using life stories as a sensitizing concept. Participants demonstrated little to no previous knowledge, skill or experience in life stories as a development process. They told stories as leaders that generally implied existing life stories self-development themes but they did not explicitly identify them. They told stories as followers that were somewhat at odds with general opinions they held on following. There was little correlation with existing life stories self-development themes. Overall, Participants’ life stories base intrapersonal leader and follower self-narratives had potential to be coherent, but were instinctive and under-developed. Participants’ ability to draw on life stories to identify, discuss and negotiate the leader-follower paradox matched their existing integration of life stories and intrapersonal leader-follower identities. Overall, participants had potential to produce a coherent and integrated leader-follower narrative, but this potential was under-developed. More research is required. A narrative based framework for further leader-follower life stories development processes is offered as a starting point

Quantum issues with structured light

Descriptions of optical beams with structured wavefronts or vector polarizations are widely cast in terms of classical field theory. The corresponding fully quantum counterparts often present new insights into what is physically observed, and they are especially of interest when tackling issues such as entanglement. Similarly, when determining angular momentum densities, it appears that the separate roles of photon spin and beam topological charge can only be satisfactorily addressed within a quantum framework. In some such respects, the quantum versions of theory might be considered to introduce an additional layer of complexity; in others, they can clearly and very substantially simplify the theoretical representation. At the photon level, the fully quantized descriptions of topologically structured and singular beams nonetheless raise important fundamental questions and puzzles, whose resolution continue to invite attention. Many of the mechanistic interpretations and predictions (those that appear to be supported by a true congruence between classic and quantum optical descriptions, essentially conflating electromagnetic field and state wavefunction concepts) can lead to theoretical pitfalls. This paper highlights some physical implications that emerge from a fully quantum treatment of theory

Writing for publication workshop: 12 November 2015

A free ‘writing for publication’ workshop for healthcare professionals was run on the 12th November 2015 at the University of Bedfordshire’s Putteridge Bury Campus. The workshop attracted 18 clinical practitioners from a variety of clinical backgrounds and included Doctors, Nurses, Physiotherapists, Pharmacists, Social Workers and Biomedical Scientists from NHS Trusts from around the East of England and Thames Valle