Engaging With Liminalities and Combating Toxicity

The nascent compassionate turn in education demonstrates the importance of contesting market-driven narratives of Higher Education. A key way to position compassion at the centre of Higher Education is through academic development. Compassion is particularly relevant to the training needs of PhD students who teach; they inhabit a liminal position, as both students and teachers. This is one of many stressors and difficulties they are likely to encounter whilst developing their professional identities, and so they are likely to benefit from a focus on both self-compassion and compassion for their own students. This case study describes a new course for doctoral candidates, ‘Establishing a Teaching Persona’, at a UK university; the training focuses on both compassion and identity to better prepare PhD students for teaching in Higher Education. In doing so, it also offers a consideration of the utility of compassion and identity exploration in academic development for all teaching staff in Higher Education

The search for missing pieces: a grounded theory of adult adoptees' experiences of searching and re-engaging with birth families.

The lived experience of adult adoptees in searching and re-engaging with birth families is an under-researched area, and receives limited focus in social work practice and policy. The aim of this study is to explore both the experience and the impact of searching and re-engaging with birth families on the emotional and psychological wellbeing of adult adoptees. The study adopted a constructivist grounded theory methodology, drawing on the principles of phenomenology and symbolic interactionism. The positionality of the researcher was of central importance to the study. Data was gathered from seven in-depth interviews with adult adoptees who were at different stages in the process of searching and re-engaging with their birth families. Saturation was achieved in the core category which had the two dimensions of controlling the narrative and missing pieces. Using constant comparison, the experiences of participants were coalesced around the core category, with elements of the core category being evident through six identified theoretical categories. This thesis has demonstrated the lifelong impact of adoption contained within the unique narratives of adult adoptees. The grounded theory demonstrates the positive impact on emotional and psychological wellbeing of searching for and re-engaging with their birth families. Identification and acquisition of the missing pieces and their ability to control the narrative of both the search and in a broader sense the narrative of their lives, brought feelings of security, increased self-esteem and increased self-confidence. These positive outcomes appeared to have an impact on attachment behaviour, potentially leading to participants achieving an earned secure pattern of attachment. This study has implications for social work practice in the fields of childhood adoption and in adult services with adopted adults. There are clear practice and policy implications for the promotion of identity work with both adopted children and adult adoptees

Re-visioning Australian social realism through a feminine lens

This research explores the unique ways in which female film practitioners in Australia are utilising social realist politics in examining the stories of women in marginalised spaces. The findings add to the much needed gravitas of the female voice in contemporary Australian film

Evaluating Psychometric Properties to Advance Agricultural Education Scholarship

Inquiries on instrument quality offers researchers evidence of the extent measurement attributes were examined, and thereby, assisting the researcher select the best instrumentation tool to use (Dillman et al., 2014). The authors systematically reviewed, using the five steps, all articles from Advancements in Agricultural Development (AAD), Journal of Agricultural Education (JAE), Journal of Extension (JOE), and The Journal of Agricultural Education and Extension (TJAEE) from 2020 to 2022 to answer the research objectives. Authors reviewed five hundred thirty-one (N = 531) articles from the four refereed publications. Authors reported fewer construct items produced lower construct reliability coefficients and thus, producing the potential of higher levels of error (Cronbach, 1951). Results indicated the majority of our published scholarship has not utilized data collection instruments over the last three years. If the researchers who have, chose to implement smaller numbers of items to measure constructs.USDA Hatch Project TEX 0989

Likert Versus Cronbach's Psychometric Thresholds: Reducing Error and Maximizing Agricultural Education's Scholarship Impacts

Instrumentation is a critical function in measuring social and behavioral science impacts on stakeholders, teachers, and change agents. Internal validity and reliability have long been considered social sciences’ quality gatekeepers. A systematic review uses a comprehensive search based on explicit protocols to review existing literature with a synthesis of data focusing on key questions. Systematic reviews are five steps; identify the critical question, formulate search parameters, systematically search databases, analyze data, and data summary interpretation (Lee et al., 2021). Using the five steps, authors systematically reviewed all articles from Advancements in Agricultural Development (AAD), Journal of Agricultural Education (JAE), Journal of Extension (JOE), and The Journal of Agricultural Education and Extension (TJAEE) from 2018 to 2022. The authors reviewed eight hundred ninety-six (N = 896) articles from the four publications. Fewer items produced lower construct reliability coefficients and thus, produced higher levels of error. Much of agricultural education’s, broadly defined, published scholarship has not utilized instruments to collect data over the last five years; when they have, smaller numbers of items measured constructs. Likert’s convention in his quintessential work on measuring social variables suggested that for measurements to be reliable an alpha of .9 should be achieved. Researchers should include a maximum number of statements and questions and eliminate those that do not contribute to reliability and add additional questions when acceptable levels of reliability are not achieved.USDA NIFA Hatch Project 09890 “The Adoption Impact of Food and Agricultural Sciences Curricula on Public Health.

Methodological criteria for the assessment of moderators in systematic reviews of randomised controlled trials : a consensus study

Background: Current methodological guidelines provide advice about the assessment of sub-group analysis within RCTs, but do not specify explicit criteria for assessment. Our objective was to provide researchers with a set of criteria that will facilitate the grading of evidence for moderators, in systematic reviews. Method: We developed a set of criteria from methodological manuscripts (n = 18) using snowballing technique, and electronic database searches. Criteria were reviewed by an international Delphi panel (n = 21), comprising authors who have published methodological papers in this area, and researchers who have been active in the study of sub-group analysis in RCTs. We used the Research ANd Development/University of California Los Angeles appropriateness method to assess consensus on the quantitative data. Free responses were coded for consensus and disagreement. In a subsequent round additional criteria were extracted from the Cochrane Reviewers’ Handbook, and the process was repeated. Results: The recommendations are that meta-analysts report both confirmatory and exploratory findings for subgroups analysis. Confirmatory findings must only come from studies in which a specific theory/evidence based apriori statement is made. Exploratory findings may be used to inform future/subsequent trials. However, for inclusion in the meta-analysis of moderators, the following additional criteria should be applied to each study: Baseline factors should be measured prior to randomisation, measurement of baseline factors should be of adequate reliability and validity, and a specific test of the interaction between baseline factors and interventions must be presented. Conclusions: There is consensus from a group of 21 international experts that methodological criteria to assess moderators within systematic reviews of RCTs is both timely and necessary. The consensus from the experts resulted in five criteria divided into two groups when synthesising evidence: confirmatory findings to support hypotheses about moderators and exploratory findings to inform future research. These recommendations are discussed in reference to previous recommendations for evaluating and reporting moderator studies

Interleukin-22 promotes phagolysosomal fusion to induce protection against Salmonella enterica Typhimurium in human epithelial cells.

Intestinal epithelial cells (IECs) play a key role in regulating immune responses and controlling infection. However, the direct role of IECs in restricting pathogens remains incompletely understood. Here, we provide evidence that IL-22 primed intestinal organoids derived from healthy human induced pluripotent stem cells (hIPSCs) to restrict Salmonella enterica serovar Typhimurium SL1344 infection. A combination of transcriptomics, bacterial invasion assays, and imaging suggests that IL-22-induced antimicrobial activity is driven by increased phagolysosomal fusion in IL-22-pretreated cells. The antimicrobial phenotype was absent in hIPSCs derived from a patient harboring a homozygous mutation in the IL10RB gene that inactivates the IL-22 receptor but was restored by genetically complementing the IL10RB deficiency. This study highlights a mechanism through which the IL-22 pathway facilitates the human intestinal epithelium to control microbial infection