Can aspiration kill local community? Challenges for young people and career practitioners in Sri Lanka

Raising aspiration is a primary focus of careers work. However, in some circumstances enhanced aspirations may create tensions in situations of limited accessible opportunity. Additionally focusing on the autonomy of the individual and their choice can impact more broadly on local community. This article will explore the importance of locating career guidance in context, specifically in relation to some of the issues facing career practitioners working in Sri Lanka. These practitioners seek to inspire young people to a range of careers whilst remaining conscious of the individual and local impacts that may result. It will consider the concept of 'foundation' which encompasses the physical, social, religious and spiritual, cultural and political environment and the role this might play in providing a holistic model for career guidance

Student as producer: a pedagogy for the avant-garde?

I was awarded my National Teacher Fellowship in 2007. The award was, in part, a recognition for my work on developing the undergraduate curriculum at the University of Warwick and Oxford Brookes as the Director of the Reinvention Centre for Undergraduate Research. The Centre sought to connect undergraduate teaching and learning and academic research so that students become part of the academic project of the university: as producers of knowledge and meaning. Since leaving Warwick I have developed this work under the slogan Student as Producer. In this paper I set out the intellectual ideas that lie behind the concept of Student as Producer, and how that idea is being developed across the sector and at the University of Lincoln. The theoretical basis for my work is derived from critical social theory grounded in avant-garde Marxism that developed in Soviet Russia after the Bolshevik uprising in 1917, before being suppressed by Stalin, and a group of modernist Marxists working in Europe in the 1920s and 1930s. A key issue for Student as Producer is that social learning is more than the individual learning in a social context, and includes the way in which the social context itself is transformed through progressive pedagogic practice. This transformation includes the institution within which the pedagogical activities are taking place, and the society out of which the particular institution is derived. At a time when the market-based model for social development appears increasingly untenable, the creation of a more progressive and sustainable social world becomes ever more necessary and desirable. Work on developing the principles and practice of Student as Producer are currently funded through the National Fellowship Project Scheme 2010 – 201

Professional Identity : what I call myself defines who I am

The article explores professional identity and the the contributors that contribute to this. It particularly focuses on the roles of job titles and CPD in contributing to defining how practitioners see themselves within a professional context

A careers adviser? so what do you do exactly?

This paper aims to explore and examine how professional identity is defined within career guidance in England in the wake of ongoing change. It considers the components and the factors that contribute to the formation of professional identity, and the relationship with postgraduate continuing professional development (CPD). The study draws on the perceptions of a group of England-based practitioners broadly representing the sector, but bounded by one common factor; they have all undertaken a postgraduate qualification focusing on CPD within a guidance related discipline

R&D in Developing Countries: What Should Governments Do?

I consider the implications of recent research for R&D policy in developing countries. Typical new growth models, which assume free entry and no strategic behaviour by R&D producers, are less appropriate for policy guidance than strategic oligopoly models. But the latter have ambiguous implications for targeted R&D subsidies, and caution against the anti-competitive effects of research joint ventures. A better policy is to raise the economy-wide level of research expertise. This avoids the need for governments to pick winners, is less prone to capture, and dilutes the strategic disincentive to undertake R&D with unappropriable spillovers.R&D spillovers, R&D cooperative agreements, RJVs (Research Joint Ventures), strategic trade and industrial policy, absorptive capacity

True Multilateral Indexes for International Comparisons of Purchasing Power and Real Income

I consider the problem of choosing index numbers of purchasing power and real income for international comparisons. I show that the desirable properties of methods based on the Fisher "Ideal" index do not extend to multilateral comparisons, except when tastes are homothetic. By contrast, the Geary method, which underlies the Penn World Tables, provides an approximation to a set of "true" exchange rate indexes which have many desirable properties. In particular, if demands exhibit generalized linearity, the true indexes measure real incomes relative to a hypothetical country whose income is an appropriate average of individual countries' incomes.