Higher education and employabilty: developing a critical conversation with students

Understanding the notion of employability as constructed through competing, and variously powerful, policy discourses allows us to understand that employability skills are not a neutral and unquestioned category, or a ‘subject’ to be learnt or taught as a functional curriculum. Undertaking focus groups and interviews with part-time learners shed light on the way that these learners understood HE learning in relation to their working and social lives, and helped us to understand how their personal motivations intersected with HE learning and changing economic circumstances. Engaging with student understandings about employability helped to develop the notion of a critical conversation about employability that centres around students’ intentions, the labour market environment and the value placed on HE learning. We will be seeking to trial this ‘critical conversation’ approach with careers advisors over the next year

"We think that’s the future": curriculum reform initiatives in higher education

This research report, considering curriculum reform initiatives in higher education, explores the nature of whole institutional curriculum reform undertaken by universities in the UK, and beyond, in response to the globalised world and global economy of the 21st Century. The key questions addressed in the report considered: What self-scrutiny, strategies, planning and processes do universities who have successfully reformed the curriculum undertake? How do these universities measure and evaluate the impact of whole curriculum reform in relation to learning and teaching and the student experience? Eighteen universities expressed interest in the research and provided details of their reforms. Each university judged their reforms as successful against their own expectations. An initial in-depth interview took place with ten of these universities and follow-up case study research took place at three universities: Kingston University, London; Curtin University, Perth, Australia and the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland. The thematic analysis focusses on higher educational leadership, the process and evaluation of curriculum reform initiatives and explores staff and student engagement with curriculum change in higher education. The research concludes that these initiatives can lead to a realignment of the curriculum with a clearly articulated mission for the individual universities taking part in such activities

Between Sheds Migration: establish whether, and if they do how far birds migrate between field sheds on the Sheepdrove Organic Farm silvo-poultry production system

Sheepdrove Organic Farm was concerned about the possibility of birds of different ages mixing within their silvo-poultry system resulting in variation in the bird weights at depletion. A trial was established to investigate whether birds did migrate and if so how many and how far

SUMMARY OF SHEEPDROVE ORGANIC FARM SILVO-POULTRY PRODUCTION SYSTEM

Sheepdrove Organic Farm (SOF) introduced a silvo-poultry enterprise in 2002. This report describes the system as observed by Vanessa Pegg and makes recommendations for improvements to the system. Specific ad hoc reports will also be produced on specific issues as Vanessa’s work progresses

Does the Source of Chicks have an Impact on Performance of Birds within Organic Table Bird Production Systems ?

Sheepdrove Organic Farm wanted to know whether the source of day old chicks and brooding and production period would have an impact on their enterprise. Sheepdrove Organic Farm wanted to know whether the source of day old chicks and brooding and production period would have an impact on their enterprise. An experiment was undertaken using two different sources of day old chicks and on two sites. 1000 day old chicks from Maurice Millard were exchanged with 1000 organic chicks from Devon Foods. These chicks were then put through the Sheepdrove (SOF) and Devon Foods Bradbury Barton (BB) organic production systems and weighed every week until depletion. The two systems were not identical and there were slight variations between the SOF and BB systems. BB had 500 bird flocks compared to SOFs 1000, BB had a brooding period of four weeks to SOFs three and BB total production period was 11 weeks to SOFs 10 weeks. There is no significant difference between the performances of the birds from the two different sources, although the experiment has highlighted the importance of high stockmanship at all times. There is no overall benefit in brooding the chicks for four weeks but there does appear to be short-term benefits in not brooding for four weeks as the three week brooded birds performed better over the weeks they were introduced to the field (there is a caveat to this that the experiment was undertaken under warm summer conditions). Increasing the production period from 10 to 11 weeks could be beneficial as the final weights of the birds at 11 weeks on the BB site were at or above SOFs optimum weight

The Effect of Removing Synthetic Amino Acids from the Poultry Ration on the Final Live and Dressed Weight of Birds from the Sheepdrove Organic Farm Organic Silvo-Poultry System

Organic standards and aspirations are moving towards the removal of synthetic amino acids from organic poultry rations. Sheepdrove Organic Farm has already removed synthetic amino acids from the rations fed to its chickens. Data was collected on live and dressed weight of processed birds, before, during and after the removal of synthetic amino acids from the ration. There does appear to be a detrimental effect on the final weight (both live and dressed) of birds raised without synthetic amino acids although this loss of weight has been overcome with the increase in production time from 10 to 11 weeks

The Effects of Selective and Indiscriminate Repression on the 2013 Gezi Park Nonviolent Resistance Campaign

We investigate the differential effects of selective and indiscriminate repression on the rate of protest actions during the nonviolent resistance campaign in Gezi Park, Turkey, in 2013. After deriving theoretical expectations about how and why these forms of repression will influence protest actions, we test them with protest event data that were collected from a major local newspaper and subsequently validated through a comparison with two other independent Twitter datasets. Utilizing a Poisson autoregressive estimation model, we find that selective repression, as measured by the number of arrested activists who were detained while they were not demonstrating, decreased the rate of protest actions. Meanwhile, indiscriminate repression, as measured by the frequency of the government’s use of lethal and nonlethal violence against protesters during demonstrations, increased the rate of protest actions. Our findings support prior research on the influence of indiscriminate repression on backfire outcomes. They also provide evidence for the impact of selective repression on movement demobilization through the removal of opposition activists. Finally, the targeted arrest strategy of selective repression that was employed in the Gezi campaign has implications for the feasibility of the strategic incapacitation model of protest policing

Narrating unfinished business: the accumlation of credentials and re-imagined horizons across the life-course

This paper examines the relationship between lifelong learning and the lifecourse and draws on the findings from interviews with part-time mature learners who are either completing previous studies from another institution or returning to higher education to study further undergraduate level qualifications. In this work we position past learning as institutional cultural capital and explore the role of this past capital in enabling students to orient towards their future self (Stevenson and Clegg,2011) and realise imagined career horizons (Hodkinson, 2008). Adopting a narrative analysis, the paper outlines three emerging narrative themes, travelling, exploring and unfinished business. We need to understand a range of possible narratives that students draw upon to support successful learning and to move forward the flexibility of our student centred curriculum