980 research outputs found
Sort by
Climate change and the role of education
No full textA review of the global policy environment for climate change and sustainable development education is contextualised with a case study from the Pacific region. The case study details how Pacific island nations have opted for a regional education response to improve their prospects of adapting to climate change - their most pressing contemporary issue. The case study then details what this means in practice using a bottom-up examples of successful disaster risk reduction in Tuvalu and Fasi village, Tonga led by Anglican youth
Applying psychological type and psychological temperament theory to the congregations at cathedral carol services
No full textPsychological type theory and temperament theory provide lenses through which the distinctive appeal of different forms of Christian worship may be interpreted. Studies of regular Sunday congregations in Anglican churches in England and Wales find strong representation of sensing types and feeling types and of the Epimethean Temperament. In order to explore whether the very distinctive provision of cathedral carol services attracted a different psychological profile among those who attended, 193 individuals attending Christmas carol services at Bangor Cathedral completed the Francis Psychological Type Scales. The data demonstrated that, compared with congregations attending Sunday services at Anglican churches, the carol service attracted significantly higher proportions of intuitive types, of thinking types, and of the Promethean Temperament
Animal-Assisted interventions for school-aged children with autism spectrum disorder: a meta-analysis
No full textResearch has indicated beneficial effects of Animal-Assisted Interventions (AAIs) for children with Autism. However, there is a dearth of meta-analyses and the findings are often contradictory. The current meta-analysis assesses the effectiveness of AAIs on social interaction, communication and global Autism symptoms. A total of 1447 studies were returned, of which 16 (n = 489) met the inclusion criteria. The meta-analyses indicated small effect sizes related to improvements in social interaction and communication and reduction in ASD symptoms. Additionally, there was little evidence for a relationship between dosage and effect size. In conclusion, AAIs appears to offer small improvements in social interaction and communication for children with Autism, which may be comparable to activities used in active control condition
A visit to the Brontë parsonage: metamorphoses of Charlotte Brontë in Michèle Roberts’ the mistressclass
No full textIn “Haworth, November, 1904” (1904), Virginia Woolf maintains a literary pilgrimage “is legitimate when the house of a great writer or the country in which it is set adds to our understanding of his books. This justification you have for a pilgrimage to the home and country of Charlotte Brontë and her sisters .” A hundred years later, Michèle Roberts, a British writer whose work has been inspired by the Brontë sisters and Woolf, pays homage to them in The Mistressclass (2003), a novel that reinvents the parsonage at Haworth in 1855 to resurrect Charlotte Brontë. This novel is the focus of this chapter that investigates Roberts’s metamorphosis of the Victorian writer. It studies how Roberts reclaims the unreliability of auto/biographical writing and affirms the alternative, diverse, multiple visions of the past fiction provides. In The Mistressclass, I suggest, Roberts conceives a literary class that unravels the conflicting dichotomy between a woman’s imaginative power and her domestic life by granting Charlotte Brontë the same power of vision her heroines Jane Eyre and Lucy Snowe possess. Following in Woolf’s steps, I argue, Roberts imagines a literary, textual pilgrimage to reinvent the Brontë parsonage as a space of female self-realisation. In The Mistressclass, the Victorian past and the present day coexist so that both protagonists, Charlotte and Vinny, have their vision
Using an arts-based design to explore the experience of shared reading: a pilot study
No full textThis pilot study explores the use of an art-based design to record the experience of a Shared Reading workshop. There is considerable evidence of the effectiveness of Shared Reading as a support for well-being across a wide range of situations and settings and studies have suggested that this literature-based intervention may have the potential to supports both thinking and feeling. However, describing the personal and emotional responses that provoke the impact of Shared Reading is a challenge. The capture of the discussion occurring during this pilot workshop is made visual using both words and pictures, and this ‘capture’ is then synthesised and an evocation is created using the medium of film. This paper discusses the process and the effectiveness of this arts-based approach as evidenced during data collection, in interpretation and again in dissemination, and implications for further use of this methodology are explored
'Uncertainty and Mortality: Two Stubborn Particulars of Religious Education' in Franck, O and Thalén, P (eds) (2021) Religious Education in a Post-Secular Age: Case Studies from Europe; Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave, chapter 7, pp 123-138.
No full textIn an education context in which ‘knowledge’ is seen as ‘powerful’ and as having ‘impact’, religious education is – or should be – at the forefront of understanding how people are and will always be living in uncertainty, whilst also searching for truth. The one human certainty – mortality – is, happily, also addressed by the best religious education. This chapter presents uncertainty and mortality as two ‘stubborn particulars’ of post-secular, non-confessional, religious education: its distinctive features and its distinctive contribution to the curriculum. A ‘post-secular’ world recognises the value of insights gained from religious traditions, not least, insights into our mortality. ‘Non-confessional’ (and some ‘confessional’) religious education recognises the inherent uncertainty that can drive curiosity and care for the full range of traditions studied
Florence Nightingale at home
No full textHomes can be both comforting and troubling places. This timely book proposes a new understanding of Florence Nightingale’s experiences of domestic life and how ideas of home influenced her writings and pioneering work. From her childhood homes in Derbyshire and Hampshire, she visited the poor sick in their cottages. As a young woman, feeling imprisoned at home, she broke free to become a woman of action, bringing home comforts to the soldiers in the Crimean War and advising the British population on the home front how to create healthier, contagion-free homes. Later, she created Nightingale Homes for nursing trainees and acted as mother-in-chief to her extended family of nurses. These efforts, inspired by her Christian faith and training in human care from religious houses, led to major changes in professional nursing and public health, as Nightingale strove for homely, compassionate care in Britain and around the world. She did most of this work from her bed after contracting the debilitating illness, brucellosis, in the Crimea, turning her various private homes into offices and ‘households of faith’. In the year of the bicentenary of her birth, she remains as relevant as ever, achieving an astonishing cultural afterlife
Monsters: interdisciplinary explorations in monstrosity.
No full textThere is a continued fascination with all things monster. This is partly due to the popular reception of Mary Shelley’s Monster, termed a ‘new species’ by its overreaching but admiringly determined maker Victor Frankenstein in the eponymous novel first published in 1818. The enduring impact of Shelley’s novel, which spans a plethora of subjects and genres in imagery and themes, raises questions of origin and identity, death, birth and family relationships, as well as the contradictory qualities of the monster. Monsters serve as metaphors for anxieties of aberration and innovation (Punter and Byron, 2004). Stephen Asma (2009) notes that monsters represent evil or moral transgression and each epoch, to speak with Michel Foucault (Abnormal: lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–75, 2003, p. 66), evidences a ‘particular type of monster’. Academic debates tend to explore how social and cultural threats come to be embodied in the figure of a monster and their actions literalise our deepest fears (Gilmore, 2009; Scott, 2007). Monsters in contemporary culture, however, have become more humane than ever before. Monsters are strong, resilient, creative and sly creatures. Through their playful and invigorating energy they can be seen to disrupt and unsettle. They still cater to the appetite for horror, but they also encourage us to feel empathy. The encounter with a monster can enable us to stop, wonder and change our attitudes towards technology, our body and each other. This commentary article considers the use of the concepts of ‘monsters’ or ‘monstrosity’ in literature, contemporary research, culture and teaching contexts at the intersection of the Humanities and the Social Sciences
Resilience in education: An example from primary school in Fiji and technical vocational education and training
No full textIn the Pacific, the capacity of curriculum writers for integrating the content of climate change into their curricula and/or taught Resilience [Climate Change Adaptation (CCA) & Disaster Risk Reduction (DRR)] in education is limited. This paper described the findings of a 2018 study on the integration of climate change into primary and secondary schools’ curricula and taught resilience in education in TVET. It involves teachers (n = 30) from Kadavu and Levuka islands, curriculum writers and editors from the Ministry of Education, GIZ, SPC, and USP—in Fiji. An exploratory design was used to explore the curricula for Fiji and the EU PacTVET project at SPC. Information was collected from workshops and training events, interviews and project documents. Using BEKA (Benchmarking, Evidencing, Knowing, Applying) and the concept of ako (e.g. to study or educate), a model of climate change and resilience in education was designed as part of this research to help Pacific schools with their curricula. These results indicate how behavioural changes may shape Resilience, thus placing them in a better position to achieve the UNFCCC, the SDGs, the Sendai Framework and the Framework for Resilient Development in the Pacific (FRDP) targets and objectives by 2030 and beyond
Self-determination theory as a theoretical framework for a responsive approach to child feeding
No full textSupporting positive childhood eating behaviours is a central and ongoing priority for healthcare providers, encompassing both health outcomes for typical eaters and best practice in relation to pediatric feeding challenges. Building on existing work, this perspective draws on literature from multiple fields to recommend the use of Self-Determination Theory as a framework for responsive feeding. Additionally, it contributes to the definition and conceptualization of responsive feeding. The three basic needs proposed by Self-Determination Theory (autonomy, relatedness and competence) have significant implications for both professional practice and the direction of future research