The dialogic aspects of Mantle of the Expert pedagogy used to teach devising at NCEA Level 2 in a Year 12 classroom "I don't think it's about credits- definitely not about credits"

This inquiry sets out to gather and consider student and teacher perceptions about the affordances and constraints of using Mantle of the Expert pedagogy, to support teaching and learning, through the process of devising drama at NCEA Level in a Year 12 classroom. Questions about the role of the teacher in a senior secondary drama classroom, and the epistemological frames used in the exploration of creative drama making formed the basis of the inquiry. The notion of a “learning community” (Ministry of Education, 2007, p.34) in which everyone “including the teacher, is a learner” is identified and the idea of “shared learning” is explored in contrast to traditional transmission models of teaching. The case study was conducted in a North Island secondary school where teachers and students were positioned together as members of THEATRON, a fictional professional theatre company. THEATRON, commissioned by an artistic director of a national arts festival, were to develop original, devised drama for festival audiences which captured the essence of “What it means to be human”. This qualitative study generated data from interviews with the class teacher and the students, observations of the lessons throughout the devising process and student documentation developed in both electronic and hard copy formats. Findings from the study, considered in the light of Bakhtin’s theory of dialogism, indicated that the dialogic aspects of the core elements of the Mantle of the Expert pedagogy could provide rich opportunities for purposeful creative collaboration, through student autonomy, to develop more effectively in the performance groups

Farmers' Management Strategies and the Conservation of Farmland Passerines

Over the last quarter of the 20th century, population size and range of farmland bird species has declined more than those associated with other habitats. There has been a simplification of the farmland landscape in Britian, and in African areas used by migratory birds in winter. In Britain, game shooting has influenced farm management. Changes in bird numbers and nesting success were monitored in relation to game management in Leicestershire. Bird abundance increased during the period of game management. Nationally declining species showed the greatest increases in abundance. Hedge height had a negative influence on whitethroat abundance, while herbaceous vegetation had a positive influence on whitethroats and yellowhammers. Survival of yellowhammer nests in herbaceous vegetation was higher than that in hedges. Herbaceous vegetation also has benefits for crop management. Farmers’ management of field boundary vegetation was studied in Wiltshire. Only farmers with game and conservation interests claimed to adopt field boundary management that would benefit whitethroats, but across all farms, actual habitat management was generally not suited to whitethroats. In Senegambia, the management of shrubby vegetation by farmers, and their motivation for that management, were explored using participatory techniques. Whitethroats were associated with shrub species supporting invertebrates. Farmers reported declines in shrubs, soil fertility and crop yields since the 1950s, and increases in the use of fire for clearing fields. Some trees used by whitethroats have potential for restoring soil fertility. Improving habitat for whitethroats could have both agronomic and wider conservation benefits and provision of information that accommodates farmers’ cultural and economic incentives could benefit both farmers and wildlife. This thesis has identified conservation benefits for farmland birds arising from the management of multifunctional farmland landscapes. A better understanding of farmers’ motivation is likely to result in wider adoption of conservation management. </br

When is a cattle feedlot profitable?

THE current surge of interest in feedlots stems from low coarse grain prices and comparatively low early summer baby beef prices. Cattle raisers sense the opportunity for higher prices by holding the cattle on the farm over summer and autumn, and grain producers see better returns from barley and oats fed to cattle than sold as grain. This article examines the profitability of cattle feedlots and presents sample budgets for two typical situations—the farmer who produces his own cattle but buys grain, and the cereal grower who produces grain but buys in cattle for finishing in a feedlot. A ready reckoner gives the probable margins for feedlotting cattle at various buying and selling prices

West Midlands development : sources of credit for farmers

RAPIDLY increasing costs associated with land development and farm improvement have placed heavy financial burdens on farmers. At the very least such burdens must often slow the rate of development, increase family hardship and lower farm profitability. Many farmers however, are unaware of the sources of loan money which could help them overcome their problems. This article outlines some of the credit sources available

Survival feeding of cattle during drought

TO obtain adequate returns from the grazing of developed land, which has involved considerable capital investment, farmers may carry stock at rates which, though normally satisfactory, are too high in exceptionally poor seasons. A look at some slternatives and their costs to maintaine the herd in drought

Reading cyberspace : fictions, figures and (dis)embodiment

My thesis tracks the human body in cyberspace as a popular cultural construct, from its origins in cyberpunk fiction in the 1980s to the pervasion of cyberspatial narratives in contemporary fictions, along with its representations within wider cultural texts, such as film, the mainstream media, and on the Internet. Across the two respective sections of the thesis, I focus upon six recurring literal-metaphorical characters, entities or motifs which serve as points of collision, entanglement and reiteration for a wide variety of discourses. These figures—the avatar, the hacker, the nanotechnological swarm, the fursona, the caring computer, and the decaying digital—have varying cultural functions in their respective representations of the human/technological interface. Informed by theorists such as Donna Haraway (1991, 2008), N. Katherine Hayles (2001) and others, I trace both their origins and their shifting and (often increasingly prolific) representations from the 1980s to the present. This allows me to uncover these figures’ registering of contextual discourses, and permits, in turn, an interrogation of the extent of their normative character, along with measuring how and to what extent, if any, these figures may offer alternative visions of human (and other) subjectivity. It also permits a rethinking of “cyberspace” itself. Section One analyses three figures that depict the human/technological interface as a space for reinscribing and reifying Cartesian dualistic views of human subjectivity, along with the exclusive and marginalising implications of the remapping of that dualism. The figures in Section One—the avatar, the hacker, and the nanotechnological swarm—have their roots in the 1980s, and have stratified over time, commonly deployed in describing the human/technological interface. These figures function in first evoking and then managing the threats to the unified masculine subject posed by the altering human/machine relationship, policing rather than collapsing the subjective boundaries between them. They maintain and reiterate their attendant logics of identity, recapitulating an image of technology as the object of human invention, and never a contributor to the substantiation of the human subject. Science fiction–especially cyberpunk—has at least partially set the terms for understanding present-day relationships between humans and technologies, and those terms are relentlessly humanistic and teleological, despite their putatively postmodern and fragmentary aesthetic. The threat of the technological other is almost invariably femininecoded, and my work in this section is explicated particularly in the light of Haraway’s work and feminist theories of embodiment, including the work of Elizabeth Grosz (1994) and Margrit Shildrick (1997, 2002). Section Two analyses three emerging figures—ones not so clearly and widely defined in fiction and popular culture—that depict the human/technological interface as fundamentally co-substantiating, rather than the latter being the product of the former. Acting as nodes of connection and constitution for various phenomena both depicted in fiction and enacted/performed at the human/technological interface itself, these three figures—the fursona, the caring computer, and the decaying digital—demonstrate potential ways to understand the human/technological interface outside of conventional, dualistic discourses of transcendental disembodiment of a bounded subject-self. Deploying theoretical work on concepts such as Alison Landsberg’s notion of prosthetic memory (2004) and Brian Massumi’s reading of the “real-material-but-incorporeal” body (2002), as well as Haraway’s later work on companion species (2008), I position these figures as representative visions of technologically-mediated subjectivity that allow us to imagine our relationships with technology as co-operative, open and materially co-substantiating. I argue that they recover the potential to rupture the unified and dualistic mind-subject that is both represented and contained by the figures seen in Section One, while reflecting a more recognisably prosaic, ongoing transformation of subjective participants in human/technological encounters. In opening up these two respective clusters of human-technological figures, I map two attendant visions of cyberspace. The first is the most common: the smooth, Euclidean grid into which the discrete unified consciousness is projected away from the body, which is conflated with (a reductive understanding of) virtuality, and to which access is allowed or denied based on highly conventional lines of gender, race, sexuality and so on. The second vision is emerging: it is possible to view cyberspace as less of a “space” at all, and more of a technologically-mediated field of material implication—one which is not discrete from the putatively offline world, which is implicit in the subject formation of its users and participants, and accounts for, rather than disavowing, the physical, bodily substrate from which it is explicated.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceArts and Humanities Research Council, Research Fellowship : Newcastle University, School of English : AHRCGBUnited Kingdo

The Effect of self-efficacy manipulation on the efficiency, rate of perceived exertion, and affective state of runners

Objectives: To determine the effect of self-efficacy manipulation on the movement efficiency, rate of perceived exertion (RPE), and affective state of runners while running on the treadmill at a constant submaximal pace. Methods: 20 trained male and female runners were randomly assigned to experimental (self-efficacy manipulation) and control groups. Participants first filled out a pre self-efficacy questionnaire and the positive affect negative affect schedule (PANAS), and then completed a 20 minute run on the treadmill running at 75% of their peak treadmill running speed. After 10 minutes, their oxygen consumption (VO2), heart rate (HR), and RPE was recorded. Participants (n=10) in the experimental group were then given motivational feedback in the form of verbal persuasion, which was recurrent every 2 minutes onwards. No feedback was given to the control participants. VO2, HR, and RPE were recorded for all participants at 10, 12, 14, 16, 18, and 20 minutes. A post-test questionnaire measuring the participant\u27s level of self-efficacy and the PANAS was filled out. Results: Successful manipulation if self-efficacy (p \u3c .05) led to significant interaction between groups and measurement times in VO2 (p \u3c .001), with the control group showing an almost significant (p = .027) increase and the experimental group a significant decrease (p \u3c .01) in VO2 across times. No differences were found in HR or RPE (p \u3e .05). Positive affect tended to increase and negative affect to decrease more from pre- to post-test in the experimental relative to the control group (p = .055). Conclusions: Verbal persuasion is an effective measure of altering one\u27s self-efficacy which results in greater movement efficiency

Together or apart: Modelling the inter-agency workings of emergency response multiteam systems

This thesis is concerned with the sub-optimized performance of emergency response systems in the UK. These emergency response systems come together during large scale civil emergencies to try and minimize the consequences of such events, with specific attention paid to protecting human welfare, the environment and the security of the UK. Such systems are comprised of individuals (referred to as agents throughout this thesis) from multiple agencies (i.e. fire service, health services, local authorities, private organizations, science advisors etc.) organized into multiple levels of command (i.e. operational at bronze level, tactical at silver level and strategic at gold level). In numerous past major incidents the emergency response system sub-optimized and did not perform as effectively or efficiently as it could. Inquests into these events have revealed that sub-optimization typically results from breakdowns in communication, collective understanding, coordination and decision making between the different agencies involved in the response. The aim of this thesis was thus to gain a greater understanding into why such sub-optimization occurs in emergency response systems – an organizational design I conceptualize as a multilevel multiteam system. Multiteam systems are a relatively novel concept to the organizational and management literatures, and thus our understanding of the functioning of such designs are currently still limited and worthy of further study. Computer simulation techniques were utilized within this thesis, specifically a relatively novel simulation technique known as agent-based modelling, in which agents with specific behavioural rules for acting and interacting are modelled with a view to determining the effect on aggregate level outcomes. I empirically tested the effects of theoretically derived generative mechanisms that could explain this system sub-optimization: social identity processes. These processes were isolated from the social identity approach (comprised of both social identity theory and self-categorization theory), which explains how people come to see themselves through their group membership, and interact with others on the basis of these memberships. The approach suggests that individuals have a bias towards favouring people within the same group, whilst treating those from ‘out-groups’ in a more derogatory fashion, and thus helps explain antagonism in intergroup contexts such as emergency response. Specifically, I considered how the level of commitment agents have to specific categorizations in conjunction with intergroup biases influence system-level communicative outcomes (specifically time taken, propagation and accuracy). The multilevel multiteam system design adopted in emergency response provides two salient groupings with which agents can categorize themselves that have not been considered in previous research: their originating organizational agencies (e.g. fire service, police service, local authority) and their level of command (e.g. bronze, silver or gold command), referred to in this thesis as horizontal categorizations and vertical categorizations respectively. It was found that high levels of commitment to horizontal categorizations and intergroup biases, both in isolation and in interaction, explain system sub-optimization in terms of communicative outcomes. Counterintuitively, it was also found that if agents had high commitment to their vertical categorization, then this could protect the system from sub-optimizing. The theoretical and practical implications of these findings are discussed including implications for designing interventions to prevent future communication breakdowns

Thermal protection of the new born during carrying: an evaluation of parents’ practices [Abstract]

Public health guidelines on how to ensure babies’ thermal protection are available (e.g. dressing with 1 extra layer of clothing than the adult); yet little is known on the strategies that parents adopt to ensure their babies’ thermal protection when these are carried in a sling (i.e. babywearing). The aim of this study was to survey parents’ practices during babywearing with regards to baby dressing and thermal monitoring in the heat and cold

Farmers' attitudes, perceptions and the management of field boundary vegetation on farmland

Boundary vegetation is an important resource for farmland wildlife, for biodiversity and as a landscape component. However, the management of such areas has been generally neglected over recent years. This paper draws on the findings from two studies of farmers' and others' perceptions of field boundary management, to suggest ways of ameliorating this. The studies used complementary techniques - a detailed questionnaire survey and in-depth interviews. Management of field boundaries varied, depending on the way farmers perceived and valued them and on a range of external influences. While commercial aspects generally dominated field boundary management, both farmers, professionals and the wider public also appreciated hedgerows as landscape or countryside features. The study suggests it may be useful to build on or influence these attitudes to maintain or enhance the conservation value of field boundary vegetation