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Chew
Get PDFChew is a series of playful interventions involving multi-sensory, participatory approaches that were interspersed throughout the session ‘Distracted Pedagogy' at the conference. The interventions encourage focus to oscillate from the mind to the body and from thought to action. The interventions draw attention to materials and bring ‘process’ into the space of theory through embodied cognition.
Chew aims to tackle the impact of material processes on pedagogical practices; developing research through embodied learning and critical methodologies in relation to subversion, diversion and repetition.
Chew asks whether material engagement can help to divert passive thinking into research. It aims to provide a space in which material can draw attention to the individual’s sensual, intellectual, and subconscious thinking through embodiment, subversion, diversion and repetitive actions. It involves four x 3-minute prompts of multi-sensory approaches that are designed to encourage focus to shift from the mind to the body, and from thought to action. Participants are given gum to chew and Playdough to manipulate throughout the interventions.
Chew highlights issues of student-centred learning within hybrid and material pedagogical methodologies. The activities allow a chewing through making. The interactions are intended to enable a material processing of theory; a constant oscillation between making and language
Immersion in digital theatre for remote audiences
No full textThe recent surge in remote theatre experiences has challenged theatres and theatre practitioners to think more than ever about remote audiences, their behaviours, their needs, the way they engage with and access work and the role they play in shaping a virtual performance. This paper seeks to understand how a remote theatre experience can be experienced by audiences, how they can be curated by theatre practitioners and explores emerging findings around liveness, hybridity and embodiment for remote audiences.
To do so, the paper presents a recent case study developed as part of MyWorld, a project supporting the development of the creative technology industry in the West of England. This case study follows the development of a remote performance of Nobel Prize winning author Olga Tokarczuk’s novel Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, involving collaboration between the international touring company Complicité, Bristol Old Vic and several universities in the UK. In this project, audience data, including heart rate, was gathered by a team of psychologists, led by University of Bristol, to track long-form continuous immersion measures of audiences and analysed to understand audience experience.
This paper presents key findings from a case study that documented and reflected on the process of this research project. It reflects on how we can seek to understand the experiences of remote audiences through the use of technologically-led audience research, examines the concepts of liveness and immersion and explores their impact on remote experiences
3D imaging of roadside and underground railway particulate matter structures
Get PDFAir pollution in cities is associated with adverse health conditions; however, the underlying reasons are poorly understood. Previous particulate matter (PM) imaging studies have mostly used 2D microscopic techniques. In this study, the 3D appearances of roadside and underground railway station airborne PMs and the elemental characteristics of underground station PM were examined. Roadside and underground station PMs were collected using a cyclone particulate matter collection system. The 3D structures of the PMs were examined using an Olympus LEXT OLS4100 confocal microscope. Elemental characteristics of underground railway station PM were evaluated with a Zeiss EVO 50 scanning electron microscope (SEM) in backscattered electron (BSE) mode. Confocal microscopy of both PM sources indicated some particles can have sharp appearing edges. The longest axis length of roadside particles had a median (range) of 4.0 (1.3 to 6.6) μm and height of 1.4 (0.3 to 2.1) μm. SEM imaging of underground railway station PM was consistent in appearance and size with confocal imaging; BSE mode indicated compositions primarily of iron, calcium, and silicon. In conclusion, we observed that some roadside and underground railway station PMs can have sharp appearing surfaces from 3D confocal microscopy. SEM imaging of underground railway station PM was consistent with confocal microscopy and enabled elemental analysis
Sustainable positive psychology interventions enhance primary teachers’ wellbeing and beyond – a qualitative case study in England
Get PDFPositive psychology interventions (PPIs) have become an influential approach to foster teacher wellbeing; however, little research addresses the critiques and sustainability of PPIs. This study investigated teacher experiences of PPIs and the impact on their wellbeing in professional and personal contexts. Qualitative data were collected using multi-methods in a primary school in two settings: staff-meetings with 21 teachers and a self-interest group with 9 teachers. Results showed practising PPIs enhanced teachers' wellbeing multidimensionally and produced positive impacts on others. The challenges experienced and plans for sustainable actions were identified. Insights into sustainable teacher wellbeing programmes and professional development are offered
Accelerate [website]
Get PDF‘ACCELERATE: Accessible Immersive Learning for Art and Design’ bought together art and design lecturers, educational researchers, and learning technologists from the UK, Ireland, Poland, and Ukraine to reflect on the impact of COVID-19 on higher education teaching to explore new possibilities for pedagogy and digital innovation.
The project focused on the potential transformative role of immersive technologies (augmented, virtual, and extended reality) in the teaching of art and design while recognising that many learners face significant challenges in engaging effectively with XR technologies: disabilities; complex personal circumstances; low quality devices; poor and unreliable internet access.
This 2-year Erasmus + ‘Strategic Partnership’ (2021-23) had a simple but ambitious aim: to improve the teaching of art and design at higher education in a post-pandemic Europe through the development of innovative methodologies, tools, platforms, and resources for accessible immersive learning.
Drawing on the spirit of practice-led creative innovation, ACCELERATE created a new prototype platform for accessible immersive teaching in art and design that aimed to democratise XR technology. The collaborative development of this immersive ecosystem—open-source, scalable, sustainable—as a gateway for art and design lecturers and students with little or no previous experience of XR technologies was informed by a considered evaluation of the impact of COVID-19 on art and design teaching at the partner universities, the co-drafting of a Methodological guide, and a standalone online training course for lecturers populated with teaching materials, including co-created case studies that draw on the shared expertise and perspectives of all the project partners.
By engaging with the layered complexities of XR accessibility and immersive learning, ACCELERATE has the capacity to be genuinely pioneering in its pedagogical and technological outcomes and find new ways of engaging with art and design students from disadvantaged and underrepresented groups
Misfitting and social practice theory: incorporating disability into the performance and (re)enactment of social practices
Get PDFThis paper applies social practice theories, which focus on the pattern of everyday activities, such as studying at university or playing music. Some theorists analyse practices by looking at the different elements from which they are formed, and that has helped us to gain insights into how disabled people can get included and excluded from ordinary activities. We focus firstly on common strategies for adjusting practices, namely providing another social actor and allowing more time. Secondly, we turn to ways in which social practices can be re-designed for everyone. Thirdly, we explore practices in a more restricted and ‘specialised’ setting, such as a centre for disabled people. We conclude that social practice theory has not given a full account of the effect of exclusions. Disabled people’s inclusion can change the shape of a practice, but it is important to recognise and embrace such changes in the mainstream of social life
Working conditions and well-being across the COVID pandemic in UK social (care) workers
Get PDFPrior to the COVID-19 pandemic, social work and social care practitioners had some the worst working conditions of any sector in the UK. During the pandemic, data revealed that social care occupations had higher COVID infection and mortality rates than the general population. The article reports the changing working conditions (measured via the Work-Related Quality of Life scale) and well-being (measured via the Short Warwich–Edinburgh Mental Well-being Scale) of UK social care and social workers across three timepoints between May 2020 and July 2021 through an online cross-sectional survey of working conditions and well-being. Analysis of variance demonstrated that both well-being and working conditions were significantly poorer in July 2021 (phase 3 [n = 1,606]) than the previous two phases (n = 2,523 and n = 2,424, respectively), suggesting that both working conditions and well-being worsened within the social care and social work workforce across the pandemic. Furthermore, each of career satisfaction, working conditions, control, general well-being and home–work interface predicted poorer well-being at Time 3. Whilst chronically poor working conditions can lead to poorer individual psychological and physiological health outcomes, our findings highlight continually poor conditions in this sector, with potential further impacts on organisations and the service users that social care workers support. It is therefore important that individuals, organisations and government develop mechanisms to support these critical workers during and following the pandemic
'She appears a promising child': the role of the c19th orphanage in categorising young care leavers in terms of productive labour. A critical case study of Muller's new orphan homes' Dismissal Books 1830s-1890s
Get PDFThis thesis uses Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) to address the ways in which an evangelical
Christian orphanage evaluates the potential productivity of its young people. Plymouth Brethren
founder George Muller’s nineteenth century orphan homes, Bristol, were in their day, ‘a wonder
even in this age of wonders’, housing over 2,000 orphans in five large institutional buildings.
Orphans left around age 14 (boys) and 18 (girls), generally destined to work in labouring jobs as
apprentices or in the domestic sector as servants. Covering the latter half of the nineteenth
century, the study focuses on the language present in the institution’s Dismissal Books. These
were ledgers listing the leaving date and destination of each young person, categorising them as
‘recommendable’ or ‘unrecommendable’ for work. These archive materials have not been used
in scholarly research before now, and are not generally available to the public. The findings
discussed in this thesis thus focus on this hitherto untold story.
I start by using CDA to extend the existing archigraphic approaches to archival analyses, in order
to answer calls for more epistemological clarity in archival practice (Moore et al 2016). In doing
so I make more transparent the process between archival retrieval, and the eventual,
interpretive analysis of materials. My findings reveal that the orphans who were deemed
‘unrecommendable’ were either expelled, or deemed unable to or unfit for work, or were
categorised as failing to reach the standard of the Muller institution. These young people were
not always returned to family members as the conventional history of the institution states, but
could be sent to the workhouse. I use CDA to map out the classifications of these
unrecommendable orphans into discursive patterns and themes. I go on to identify how these
themes link to wider, ideological discursive formations present in nineteenth century thinking. As
the theoretical underpinning for this analysis, I draw on Guery and Deleule’s (1972/2014)
concept of the ‘productive body’ in nineteenth century capitalism, as used by Foucault (1977), as
the thesis’ theoretical framework. In doing so, this thesis also rectifies the current
marginalisation of education in Foucauldian ideas around discipline and dividing practices.
This study contributes to wider dialogue, about class, power and the working body in the
nineteenth century. The concept of the productive body enables me to show how the institution,
whilst exhorting its evangelical rhetoric, works along lines of capitalist efficiency. Whilst the
orphans’ souls are saved and their ‘characters’ converted, made respectable, through the
institution’s drive for social reform and evangelical conversion, their bodies are judged in terms
of productivity. Whilst some are judged fit, reformed and refined, the unrecommendable are
deemed ‘spoiled’ products, excluded and marginalised. I go on to argue that such
categorisations are ideologically and discursively entwined with the racialised perspectives of
imperialist administration, eugenicist rhetoric and pseudo-scientific themes, which operate as
nineteenth century, normative common sense. I suggest that the discourses present in the
Dismissal Books create norms which bind together those who are ‘normal’ and productive into
an imagined community (Anderson 2006) , and portray the unrecommendable, unproductive
orphan, as ‘polluted, dangerous, taboo’ (Hall, 1997, p.258).
Thus in this thesis’ account of the history of institutionalised care, the orphans are not perceived
as ‘rescued’, but are instead conceptualised as fragmented subjects (Guery and Deleule 2014).
They are not all saved, but selected. The orphanage, in its role as mediating authority,
discursively invites the orphan to accept this process of selectivity and judgement of their
working potential as inevitable, factual and true. Their categorisation is ‘proved’ by both the
expert scientific observation of their body’s potential productivity by the institution authorities,
and by the institution’s assertion that this is ‘the way things are’, and ‘God’s will.’ The child
returned to the workhouse is thus conceptualised as belonging there.
In setting out this account of the Muller New Orphan Homes in this way, it is acknowledged that
this research has not been undertaken in order to denounce or accuse Muller, but in order to
understand the discursive processes of the institution’s categorisations. This thesis is not
undermining the good of these ‘good works’. Rather, it is locating Muller – for the first time - in
the complex social, economic and cultural contexts of nineteenth century Britain, and mapping
out, discursively, the ‘messier mingling of good intentions and blinkered prejudices’ (Koven 2004,
p.3) which informed such works, as demonstrated in the Dismissal Books.
This thesis illustrates how using critical methods of analysis can be used to deconstruct archival
materials. It defines the institution as conceptualising, managing and educating the young
people in care within the dominant values and ideologies of the time. In doing this, my research
enables us to move away from the ‘grand narrative’ of the individual, pioneering reformist in
history, and instead trace more critical and contextualising paths through the largely hidden
histories of welfare and care