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How understanding teacher learning as a complex process can support school improvement
Get PDFThis dissertation presents the findings of my Practitioner Enquiry into teacher learning. As a headteacher in a Scottish primary school, there is an expectation that I will bring about ongoing school improvement by supporting teachers’ learning. My study explored teacher learning through the lens of the Dynamic Systems Model of Role Identity (DSMRI) (Kaplan and Garner 2017)
I contextualise the study by exploring literature and policy. I pay particular attention to Graham Donaldson’s 2011 Report, Teaching Scotland’s Future, which set out expectations for teachers and school leaders around professional learning. To explore perceptions of teacher learning in Scotland, I conducted eight semi-structured interviews of teachers and others responsible for teacher learning both in person and on-line. Following transcription, I used a hybrid approach to coding data involving both deductive and inductive methods, drawing on the work of Braun and Clarke (2006) to undertake thematic analysis. Analysis led to key findings relating to teachers’ identity, collaboration, and the role of leaders in creating school cultures which support learning.
Using the DSMRI as a lens through which to interpret the data showed that it captured the complexity of teachers learning enabling me to develop a depth of understanding of the personal nature of teacher learning and how this can be supported or hindered within a school. I developed my understanding of the complexity of the processes that teachers go through as they apply learning in their own classrooms. The findings have influenced my approach to teachers’ learning and school improvement in my own practice. I encourage all staff to complete a Practitioner Enquiry each year in an area of interest to them and have limited the number of whole school improvement priorities to ensure there is a balance of whole school and teacher directed learning
The suicide narratives of Silius Italicus
Get PDFIn this dissertation, I examine the theme of suicide in Silius Italicus’ Punica through the following case studies: Saguntum (Punica 2), Capua (Punica 11, 13), Hannibal (Punica 2, 13, 17), Scipio (Punica 4), and Solimus (Punica 9). I analyse recurrent literary features and motifs –civil war, human/object/divine agency, bodily disfigurement, elemental imagery in loci horridi, exile, haunting memory, fides, and pietas– and their connections to Silius’ suicide ideology. I use frameworks provided by Narrative Exposure Therapy to connect these features with textual allusions to Silius’ contemporary Rome and other Latin epics. I observe that Silius portrays suicide as a powerful weapon and instrument for moral action, a form of internal civil war, a form of escape and exile, and a transformative boundary threshold. I conclude that Silius presents an epic ideology of suicide that enabled readers to contemplate the emotional experiences of suicide, and the effects of suicide on one’s physical/cultural identity and environment. These reveal a duality of Silian suicides as desperate acts amid uncontrollable and impossible situations, and as means of reclaiming personal power and control of one’s fate
Wellbeing in the UK PRS: a longitudinal analysis of outcomes for families and children
Get PDFThe housing system in the United Kingdom has seen substantial shifts over the last century, with its position amongst the policy priorities of government remaining consistently prominent. However, government ambitions regarding housing have taken different shapes and are reflected in those changes to the housing landscape, whether that be the clearances of poor-quality housing or the sale of vast swathes of social housing. There have been concurrent shifts in the demography of the private rented sector (PRS), also. In contrast to the common conception of the sector as a home to young people saving for a mortgage deposit, or those seeking mobility to access employment opportunities, the PRS now houses many who would prefer to live in other tenures. This includes those priced out of home-ownership and those who would have, in the past, been housed in social housing (SH). Increasingly, families and children have come to represent larger proportion of private tenants, while many renters are staying in the sector further into their lives.
These changes represent a marked shift in the use of the PRS and one that is argued to have not been reflected in policy relating to it. This is of particular consequence for families, who lack the long-term security and agency in housing decisions that they need. Indeed, the UK’s lightly-regulated PRS is argued to be one that embodies insecurity. Alongside poor housing conditions and high housing costs, much qualitative research has found tenants face negative health effects owing to or exacerbated by the particular conditions of renting privately. This research does not show the scale of any effects, however. There is also little focus on families and children. While quantitative research on the effect of poor conditions on physical health has come to be well-represented in the literature, the impact on mental wellbeing remains little-studied in the UK context.
To meet these evidence needs, this thesis has sought to answer the following research questions: Do wellbeing outcomes differ between tenure groups across the life course? Does exposure to the UK PRS in childhood impact mental wellbeing in later life? Do PRS tenants with children exhibit different mental wellbeing outcomes than those without? To answer these questions, the thesis analyses data from two of the UK’s largest cohort surveys, the 1970 British Cohort Study (BCS70) and the Millenium Cohort Study. Generalised Linear Mixed Models (GLMMs) are estimated on the BCS70 data in order to make robust estimates of effects over time. Generalised Linear Models (GLMs) and are also estimated to investigate effects in middle-age, while linear models are estimated on MCS data to investigate effects for a younger age cohort.
The research finds generalisable effects across the life-course of PRS tenants, adding important evidence to the literature. Controlling for a range of influential factors, tenure-wide disparities in wellbeing are found to persist and even grow as tenants age, while parents in the PRS facing significantly worse outcomes than owner-occupiers approaching middle-age. Importantly, the research finds significant negative effects across the life course for those who have early-life exposure to the PRS. Young people in the PRS are also estimated to have poorer wellbeing in the younger age cohort, implying that the negative effects of living in the sector are being replicated for a younger generation. In light of these results, recommendations are made to ameliorate the negative consequences of living in the PRS and to make it a more secure and livable sector, as well as for further research to explore the effects found
Health systems factors in advanced stage diagnosis of head and neck cancer
Get PDFBackground: Globally, head and neck cancer (HNC), comprising of squamous cell carcinomas of the oral cavity, oropharynx, larynx, and other sites of the head and neck, is the 7th most common cancer grouping by incidence and 9th by mortality. People with HNC have poor overall survival, with an estimated 50% 5-year survival. One of the key prognostic factors is stage at diagnosis, with people diagnosed with advanced stage HNC at diagnosis, categorised as stage III or IV in the Tumour, Nodes, Metastases (TNM) classification, having poorer outcomes than those with early-stage disease (stages I and II). The burden of advanced stage HNC in the UK is not quantified and factors associated with advanced stage at diagnosis, particularly health systems factors, not well researched or understood. There is a paradigm shift happening in health services research with the understanding that pragmatic approaches embracing complexity are needed. With advanced stage HNC presenting a public health challenge in the UK and internationally, ascertaining the full nature of the burden of advanced stage HNC and the factors associated with advanced-stage diagnosis are key to prepare system changes and interventions to improve early detection rates.
Aims: This thesis is split into three separate studies each focussing on specific aims:
i) Chapter Three: To quantify the burden of advanced stage HNC across the countries of the United Kingdom through analysis of routinely collected cancer registry data, and to begin to assess the distribution of stage of HNC by socio-demographic factors.
ii) Chapter Four: To identify health systems factors associated with stage at diagnosis through a novel benchmarking survey of international HNC centres.
iii) Chapter Five: To explore the role of health systems factors in advanced stage diagnosis of HNC through qualitative analysis of two HNC centres: Glasgow, Scotland and Montevideo, Uruguay.
Methods: A mixed-methods approach was undertaken in this thesis. Each study had specific methodological approaches:
i) Chapter Three: Collecting routinely collected, aggregated cancer registry data from the four Cancer Registries of the UK via detailed specification of HNC data requests (2009-2018). Data were collated and harmonised. Descriptive epidemiological analysis of trends and the burden of advanced stage across the four countries was performed by HNC overall and subsite groupings. Additional, analysis was undertaken for the Scottish Cancer Registry stage of HNC and subsites by age grouping, sex, and area-based socioeconomic status measured by the Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivation (SIMD) of home postcode.
ii) Chapter Four: A bespoke health systems questionnaire was sent to 18 international HNC centres, to the Head and Neck Cancer in South America and Europe (HEADSpAcE) Consortium centre leads. The questionnaire included items on various health system domains capturing both quantitative and qualitative data on the local pathways to diagnosis of HNC and burden of advanced stage HNC. These data were collated and categorised into health systems factors and HNC centres were then benchmarked according to the local proportion of advanced stage HNC and the presence/absence of these factors within their local HNC diagnostic pathway. Analysis for each health system factors was undertaken to assess the impact of each factor on the
proportion of advanced stage HNC through least square means tests. Qualitative descriptions of the patient pathways to HNC diagnosis for all centres were collated and harmonised into an adapted diagnostic interval model.
iii) Chapter Five: A qualitative follow-on study to the research undertaken in Chapter Four was conducted in two centres (Glasgow, UK and Montevideo, Uruguay) and comprised 29 semi-structured, in-depth interviews undertaken with a range of stakeholders across both sites, including surgeons, oncologists, primary care practitioners, and HNC patients. The interviews used specifically created topic guides; and were undertaken by trained and standardised interviewers. Interviews were recorded, transcribed, and translated where required to enable analysis. A thematic template analysis was undertaken with 16 key health system themes and 45 sub-themes identified across the different intervals of HNC diagnosis and subsequently applied to the framework of the systems engineering initiative for patient safety (SEIPS) 3.0.
Results: Key findings from each study were:
i) Chapter Three: Descriptive analysis revealed that in the UK 59% of HNCs where stage is recorded were found to be at advanced stage at diagnosis in 2016-2018, with stage IV the most common stage at diagnosis for all HNC. Cancer Registry data on stage at diagnosis had improved year on year and was 87% complete by 2018. Further analysis of the Scottish Registry data found males to have higher odds of having advanced stage HNC than females (odds ratio (OR) 1.24, 95% Confidence Interval (CI) 1.05, 1.46), and those who are diagnosed with HNC from the 20% most socioeconomically deprived areas had greater odds of having advanced stage at diagnosis when compared to those in the 20% least socioeconomically deprived areas, although the association was not as strong (OR 1.14, 95% CI 0.89, 1.48).
ii) Chapter Four: Health systems factors were shown to be associated with a lower proportion of advanced stage HNC including formal referral triaging (14%, 95%CI-0.26, -0.03), routine monitoring of time from referral to diagnosis (16%, 95%CI-0.27, -0.05), and fully publicly funded systems (17% 95% CI-0.29, -0.06). Several health system factors were found to have a lack of routinely collected data at HNC centre, including routine reporting of proportion of advanced stage locally, workforce numbers and whole-time equivalent of different specialties and grades, HNC referral source, routine reporting of referrals leading to confirmed HNC diagnosis, and performance indicators relating to referral/pre-diagnosis. Additionally, the variance in pathways to HNC diagnosis across the HNC centres in this study were harmonised into a universal pathway to HNC diagnosis.
iii) Chapter Five: Key health system themes identified included public awareness and ability to act on HNC symptoms (i.e. navigate into and through pathways to diagnosis), the underlying role of socioeconomic/geographic inequalities, and the disconnect/communication barriers between care teams – specifically primary and secondary care. In applying the thematic results to the SEIPS framework, a systems understanding of how the themes relate to the various elements and processes of HNC diagnostic pathways was formed, illustrating the complexity whilst highlighting how these factors may be navigated (through focus on people, tasks, environment, or organisations).
Conclusions: This thesis presents and describes a high burden of advanced stage HNC across the nations of the UK, identifies important health systems factors in advanced stage HNC across international HNC centres, develops a harmonised HNC diagnostic pathway, and further explores the main factors associated with stage at diagnosis of HNC from two HNC centres, Glasgow in Scotland and Montevideo in Uruguay.
This research undertaken in this thesis includes the first fully focused health systems factors investigation into advanced stage diagnosis of HNC through a systems approach to international HNC diagnostic pathways. The findings from this research present key considerations for health system/service change to improve earlier diagnosis of HNC internationally
The impact of autistic traits on emotional prosody and gesture perception: the behavioural and fMRI studies
Get PDFThis thesis combines behavioral and fMRI methods to investigate the neural and behavioral mechanisms of emotional processing in individuals with high-autistic traits (HAQ) compared with those with low-autistic traits (LAQ). The research focuses on the perception and processing of emotional information from prosody, gestures, and audiovisual displays of speech and gesture. It emphasized the study of specific brain regions and compensatory mechanisms that mediate the social communication difficulties commonly observed in those with high-autistic traits. The research involved several experimental studies, each aimed at a different aspect of emotional processing. Participants were divided into two groups based on their scores from the Autism Spectrum Quotient (AQ), which classified them as having high or low autistic traits. This grouping provided a structured approach toward understanding how trait severity impinges upon emotional processing.
In the prosody experiment, the participants were required to recognize emotions solely by the tone of voice. The results showed that the HAQ group showed reduced accuracy and slower response times, particularly in angry and happy emotional cues. The results of fMRI experiment also pointed out that HAQ participants showed less neural activation-indicative of a greater recruitment of cognitive control areas, such as the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) and the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), suggesting more effortful processing to perform one or another type of processing related to emotional content compared with LAQ participants.
The experiment involving with the gesture showed participants with HAQ had an impaired recognition of emotions from body language, especially under congruence or incongruence conditions. Neuroimaging data revealed a greater reliance on brain regions involved in processing information of self-reference, namely the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) and insular cortex, implying compensatory strategies that do not fit the efficiency observed in LAQ group. This divergence in the neural pathways underlying the processing indicates the nature of the extra effort and special challenges taken by individuals with high autistic traits to interpret non-verbal social cues.
The audiovisual congruence study investigated how HAQ and LAQ groups integrate multisensory emotional signals. Behavioural results showed participants with HAQ to be significantly less accurate and slower to recognize emotions on trials presenting incongruent signals, such as mismatched body movements and vocal tones. Neuroimaging showed that HAQ individuals activated a wider number of neural structures when processing these emotionally complex situations, including prefrontal regions supporting cognitive control and conflict resolution. In contrast, results from LAQ participants indicated automated neural processing in typically responsible for perceptual integration sites such as the superior temporal gyrus (STG) and fusiform gyrus (FG), consistent with faster and more accurate emotional identification.
Specifically, the multisensory integration fMRI experiment investigated how visual and auditory emotional cues are integrated in individuals with HAQ. Results showed increased activation for the HAQ participants in areas of the brain that are involved in multisensory integration, including the posterior superior temporal gyrus (pSTG) and the ventrolateral prefrontal cortex (vlPFC.). These regions were more strongly activated in HAQ participants than in LAQ participants, in whom congruent emotional stimuli elicited more automatic processing. Further, the results suggest that HAQ individuals engage higher cognitive resources to attain the perception of emotion, emphasizing a basic dissimilarity in the manner of processing emotional information across modalities.
Overall, this thesis provides evidence that individuals with high-autistic traits rely on compensatory neural mechanisms due to difficulties in automatic sensory integration. The findings underpin the relevance of targeted interventions prioritizing enhancement in efficiency regarding emotional processing and reduction of cognitive load during the performance of social communication tasks. Limitations of research include a modest sample size and possible variation in the severity of autistic traits, which could affect generalizability. Larger and more diverse samples would be important to replicate these findings and investigate further the role of individual differences within the HAQ group
Dynamic covalent oximes – tuning formation and exchange kinetics towards dynamic libraries and supramolecular architectures
No full textAbstract not currently available
Water-soluble Naphthalene Diimide-based electrochromic films
Get PDFNaphthalene diimides (NDIs) are a class of small organic molecules that exhibit electrochromic (EC) behaviour, undergoing strong, reversible colour changes in response to an applied electrical potential due to the formation of a radical anion. By modifying the NDI structure with different substituents, the optical and physical properties of the material can be tuned. Incorporating amino acid groups yields water-soluble NDIs with favourable electronic and EC properties, enabling device fabrication without the use of harmful organic solvents. However, their application has largely been limited to solution-based devices, which restricts broader implementation, making the development of solid-state NDI films a desirable goal.
We synthesised a series of water-soluble NDI derivatives with different amino acid substituents and studied how the side chains influenced solubility, self-assembly, and radical anion formation. As pH-dependent self-assembly is known to affect the performance of our materials, cyclic voltammetry (CV) and UV-vis absorption spectroscopy were used to assess the electronic and EC properties of the materials in solution and to identify the optimal pH for device construction. The NDIs were then combined with hyaluronic acid and processed into EC films using doctor blade coating, which were evaluated using CV, chronoamperometry, and absorption spectroscopy. Two of the films showed particularly strong performance, undergoing reversible colour changes upon reduction, and were selected for further investigation. To overcome the limitations of conventional spectroscopic methods, computer vision analysis software was used to monitor the EC response of the films in situ, offering a valuable advancement in the study of EC materials.
Next, we optimised the NDI films by altering the parameters of film construction. Four variables were investigated: solution formulation, film thickness, annealing time, and substrate resistivity. Each parameter was systematically adjusted and the behaviour of the film was then evaluated using CV, chronoamperometry, and absorption spectroscopy to assess redox behaviour. Nanoindentation was used to measure mechanical properties. The optimised films were used to construct flexible EC devices, which were tested following bending. Following this approach, we successfully produced films that underwent a reversible transparent-to-black colour change and remained mechanically robust after multiple bending cycles. Notably, these improvements were achieved without additional synthesis or film additives, offering a cost-effective and streamlined approach to film optimisation.
Finally, we explored the effect of different alkali metal counterions on the EC and mechanical properties of the NDI films. NDI solutions were prepared using various alkali hydroxides, and their self-assembly was investigated using small-angle neutron scattering. The choice of counterion was found to directly influence aggregation, with absorbance measurements indicating that these aggregates persisted into the solid state. Using CV, chronoamperometry, and absorption spectroscopy, we demonstrated that counterion selection significantly impacted the electronic and EC properties of the films, with larger counterions generally yielding improved performance, such as faster redox rates and greater colour changes. Mechanical properties were again evaluated via nanoindentation, where the choice of counterion was found to impact elasticity. These findings further highlight the tunability of amino acid-functionalised NDIs and support the continued development of high-performance, flexible EC devices.
Overall, this work demonstrates the potential of amino acid-appended NDI films for use in EC devices. We emphasise the tunability of our materials, with small alterations to film parameters allowing us to achieve films with properties similar to those of existing EC materials, while also maintaining processability in water. The work described herein presents an environmentally friendly and commercially viable approach to film construction, which we hope will guide future EC device development
Translating with a speculum: ‘womanhandling’ and resistance in francophone feminist literature
No full textThe plurality of feminist movements today (Polla 2019) seems to have resulted in a plurality of feminist translation practices (see Castro, Ergun, von Flotow, Spoturno 2020), which makes it somewhat difficult to define what feminising a translation may imply today (Le Bervet 2019). Whilst the first wave of feminist translation, ‘the Canadian School’, had a clearly defined purpose, to challenge phallocentric discourse by making women and translators visible in language and posited ethics as fidelity towards their ‘writing project’ (reconstructing the difference of the subject in language), the subsequent waves appear somewhat divided (Castro 2009). This thesis thus explores the evolution of feminist translation studies and practice (FTSP). From outlining the influences of the ‘Canadian School’ (Chapters 1 and 2) to contemporary developments (Chapters 3 and 4), this research project aims to retrace FTSP’s history, expand its theoretical framework, and analyse recent applications in French. It specifically focuses on translators and translations in Canada and France (Chapter 4) who, through a shared language, have mutually and reciprocally influenced each other (Bessaïh 2020, Grunenwald 2021). The comparative analysis will contribute to an improved understanding of this transnational flow of thought by yielding two case studies and one-on-one online interviews with local scholars, translators, and publishers that have played or have been playing a crucial role in developing this political approach to translation
Investigating the impact of the legal system on outcomes for infants in care
No full textAbstract not currently available
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