12244 research outputs found
Sort by
A call to action for conducting research with people with profound and multiple learning disabilities
Get PDFPeople with PMLD are marginalised in society. This marginalisation extends to research, and people with PMLD are often the ‘subjects’ of university studies. This means that research is often done ‘on’ people with PMLD rather than ‘with’ them and with those involved in their care. In this article we describe our vision for a new research agenda. We are developing a research network run by disabled people, for disabled people. We want to explore how people with PMLD and their families/carers/allies can be involved in conducting research that matters to them
Attentional biases towards body expressions of pain in men and women
Get PDFThis study investigated whether there are gender differences in attention to bodily expressions of pain and core emotions. Three experiments are reported using the attentional dot probe task. Images of men and women displaying bodily expressions, including pain, were presented. The task was used to determine whether participants’ attention was drawn towards or away from target expressions. Inconsistent evidence was found for an attentional bias towards body expressions, including pain. While these biases were affected by gender, patterns varied across the Experiments. Experiment 1, which had a presentation duration of 500 ms, found a relative bias towards the location of male body expressions compared to female expressions. Experiments 2 and 3 varied stimulus exposure times by including both shorter and longer duration conditions (e.g., 100 vs. 500 vs. 1250 ms). In these experiments, a bias towards pain was confirmed. Gender differences were also found, especially in the longer presentation conditions. Expressive body postures captured the attention of women for longer compared to men. These results are discussed in light of their implications for why there are gender differences in attention to pain, and what impact this has on pain behaviour.
Perspective:- We show that men and women might differ in how they direct their attention towards bodily expressions, including pain. These results have relevance to understanding how carers might attend to the pain of others, as well as highlighting the wider role that social-contextual factors have in pain
What is learner-centered education? A quantitative study of English language teachers’ perspectives
Get PDFThe concept of ‘learner-centered education’ (LCE) continues to be defined inconsistently
across the literature, and very little research has examined LCE from the perspectives of the
teachers themselves. This study addressed this gap by conducting a quantitative survey with
248 English language teachers. The study sought to examine 1) whether or not participants
had heard of LCE; 2) how confident they felt explaining the concept; 3) how they would define
LCE; and 4) how useful they felt the concept was to their practice. Teachers were asked to rate
the extent to which they agreed with 10 potential aspects of LCE that had emerged from a meta-
analysis of the literature. The study found that the teachers interpreted LCE in a broader way
than is typically found in definitions in the literature, generally agreeing that all 10 aspects
should be included in a multi-faceted definition of LCE. Some aspects (such as ‘Active
participation’) were considered important by a larger number of teachers. Moreover, certain
variations were noted based on factors such as participant nationality, further reinforcing the
idea that a more flexible, context-led approach to defining LCE might be more useful than the
numerous contradictory definitions found in the literature
Online opera: an applied collision of opera and web creativity
Get PDFThis practice-based research explores the collision of opera and web creativity through the development and evaluation of a new 'online opera' called "The Village" (2015). Contrasting existing offerings that position the web as a means of disseminating more familiar representations of opera, "The Village" draws on concepts of participatory culture, digital storytelling and co-creativity to advance a culturally novel apprehension of online opera that treats the web as a unique creative space. This interpretation is intrinsically digital, unable to be realised through conventional forms of theatrical presentation, and transformative in its approach to the core elements of opera. "The Village" in additional serves as a vehicle to investigate how the phenomenon of 'liveness' - that is, a feeling of 'now-ness' experienced in live performance - may be reimagined in the context of an entirely mediated opera. A range of theoretical perspectives are drawn on to establish a set of liveness devices that attempt to evoke in visitors to "The Village" a sense of contemporaneity and shared experience. These include temporal alignment between virtual and real-world events and the facilitation of social interaction through a narrative mechanism called the 'Digital Chorus', amongst others. Evaluative activities critique the effectiveness of such devices, and offer means in which they may be modified to better construct 'the live'
Broken Angel [curator]
No full textA new project at Coventry Cathedral, ‘Broken Angel’, will see a sequence of new site-specific works temporarily replace the ‘Angel of the Eternal Gospel’, a figure in John Hutton’s great glass ‘West Screen’ destroyed in an act of vandalism in 2020. Anne Petters will be the first artist to take part in the project, making a new work to be installed in November 2021 until February 2022. The work is called 'Lichtung - Break / Lichtung - White Drift'
Encountering emotions during international fieldwork: using innovative pedagogies to develop emotional intelligence and resilience
No full textInternational fieldwork in Geography offers significant opportunities for experiential learning, however, there are physical and socio-psychological challenges as well. Students are confronted with unfamiliar environments, mild culture shock, challenging physical and climatic conditions, the stresses of group work and intensity of field presentations, or fatigue during fieldtrips, and their influence on the affective domain. This results in differing individual behaviours and performances of
students. This chapter examines how students’ emotional intelligence can be utilised through innovative pedagogies to make sense of the encounters experienced by students (and staff) during international fieldwork. Using a case-study of undergraduate fieldwork in Barcelona, Spain, we
examine how the use of student-led peer teaching and learning, facilitated by tutors, and supported by self-reflectivity exercises, can be harnessed to facilitate students’ geographical learning. This approach also helps students' resilience to cope with the challenges as well as the opportunities. The use of reflective field diaries is a powerful tool not only for enabling students to observe and record the geography that they encounter but also to reflect on the meanings and positionality before,
during and after being immersed in that place. Our studies show how the effective integration of peer learning with self-reflectivity enhances students’ emotional intelligence and resilience, a deeper understanding of the geographies of a place, with the potential to achieve transformative learning
nine labyrinths
Get PDFnine labyrinths (2021) are a set of short pieces for guitar, but can also be played on other instruments. They each comprise a single line of music with a network of lines that link bars in different ways, creating circuitous routes through the material which can be explored at will. Strictly speaking the pieces are mazes as the paths branch, but there is something linear about the basic direction of each piece, and I also preferred the title
"Buddhism is not a religion, but Paganism is": the applicability of the concept of ‘religion’ to Dharmic and nature-based traditions, and the implications for religious education
No full textThis chapter explores the concept of religion in popular, academic and adherent usage, and in particular whether it is at all helpful when applied to Dharmic or Nature-based traditions. Problems include the homogenisation of diversity and the construction of separate and unified systems of beliefs and practices which have affected portrayals of ‘Eastern’ traditions, including in religious education. It concludes by examining the importance for religious education of opening up the debate about what is meant by ‘religion,’ and of including the study of Dharmic traditions, a wider range of worldviews and new forms of ‘being religious’ from an early age
The novel [video essay]
No full textThis video essay offers an introduction to the Romantic-period novel. Beginning with the premise that, until recent decades, Romantic-era fiction suffered a critical neglect due to its association with the category of popular fiction, it seeks to emphasize the formal diversity and the cultural and political resonances of the novel in the period. Beginning with a discussion of the formal origins of the Romantic-period novel, it uncovers its key sub-genres and thematic concerns and its significance as an integral component of Romantic print culture
Local contributions to beta diversity in urban pond networks: implications for biodiversity conservation and management
Get PDFAim:-
An understanding of how biotic communities are spatially organized is necessary to identify and prioritize habitats within landscape‐scale biodiversity conservation. Local contribution to beta diversity (LCBD) identifies individual habitats that make a significant contribution to beta diversity and may have important practical implications, particularly for conservation of habitat networks. In this study, we develop and apply a conservation prioritization approach based on LCBD in aquatic invertebrate communities from 132 ponds.
Location:-
Five urban settlements in the UK: Halton, Loughborough, Stockport, Birmingham and Huddersfield.
Methods:-
We partition LCBD into richness difference (nestedness: RichDiffLCBD) and species replacement (turnover: ReplLCBD) and identify key environmental variables driving LCBD. We examine LCBD at two scales relevant to conservation planning: within urban settlements and nationally across the UK.
Results:-
Significant differences in LCBD values were recorded among the five settlements. In four of the five urban settlements studied, pond sites with the greatest LCBD values typically showed high replacement values. Significant LCBD sites and sites with high taxonomic diversity together supported more of the regional species pool (70%–97%) than sites with high taxonomic diversity alone (54%–94%) or what could be protected by the random selection of sites. LCBD was significantly associated with vegetation shading, surface area, altitude and macrophyte cover.
Main conclusions:-
Conservation prioritization that incorporates LCBD and sites with high taxonomic diversity improves the effectiveness of conservation actions within pond habitat networks, ensures sites supporting high biodiversity are protected and provides a method to define a spatial network of protected sites. Identifying new, effective conservation approaches, particularly in urban areas where resources may be scarce and conflicts regarding land use exist, is essential to ensure biodiversity is fully supported, and detrimental anthropogenic effects are reduced