3,575 research outputs found
Enquiring Minds: Infiltrating the Curriculum and Challenging the Assessment Agenda
No full textThe paper was co-presented with Alison Pope, and described the research undertaken by the presenters and other Enquiring Minds project researchers (including Geoff Walton). The group had been examining the application of Information Literacy principles and 'standards', including strategies for embedding these in learning outcomes, as a means of improving the research skills and outputs of undergraduate and postgraduate students. The issue of assessment of learning outcomes, including IL requirements, also featured in the presentation. The project's work informed a book that was published in 2010 entitled 'Information Literacy: Infiltrating the Curriculum, Challenging Minds’ (eds.A.Pope and G.Walton)(Oxford: Chandos, 2010), and a co-authored article with Alison Pope entitled ‘The Enquiring Minds Project at Staffordshire University: Integrating Information Literacy into the Curriculum and Assessment’ (with Alison Pope and Geoff Walton), Legal Information Management, 2010 Vol 10(2), 104-108
Integrating Legal Research Skills into the Curriculum and into Life
No full textAlison Pope explains how Staffordshire University Law School has redesigned its legal research module, with emphasis placed on information literacy and with careful timetabling to ensure the module is embedded in the curriculum
Information literacy: infiltrating the agenda, challenging minds
No full textFocusing on important information literacy debates, this new book with contributions from many of the main experts in the field highlights important ideas and practical considerations. Information Literacy takes the reader on a journey across the contemporary information landscape guided by academics and practitioners who are experts in navigating this ever changing terrain.
Key Features: diversity of content from authors with national and international reputations; shows professionals how to operate at a strategic level to engender institutional change and have a direct practical application for their teaching and learning practice; many of the chapters are based on empirical research ensuring innovative approaches to information literacy
Information literacy education in the UK: reflections on perspectives and practical approaches of curricular integration
No full textThis paper has two main aims, to present the current position of information literacy education in UK-based academic institutions and to propose a strategy that ensures the integration of this phenomenon in learning and teaching institutional practices. The first part of the paper offers an insight into the perceptions of information literacy by exploring four distinct perspectives, including the institutional angle and the views associated with faculty staff, library staff and students. What transpires from the findings is that information literacy from an institutional perspective is dominated by the need to measure information skills within the context of information as a discipline in its own right. Another issue that is raised by the data points to a great deal of misinformation regarding information literacy, and that, as a result, a clear marketing strategy must be adopted by information professionals to address the misconceptions held by faculty staff and students alike. We aim to address these points by drawing on recent scholarship and research in the field which demonstrates the validity of information literacy as a process for fostering independent learning. The second part of the paper explains how a Fellowship project has placed information literacy on the pedagogical agenda of the University of Staffordshire in the UK by promoting information literacy education as an integrated element of the curriculum
The Right to Strike under the United States Constitution: Theory, Practice, and Possible Implications for Canada
No full textAnswering critics of the Canadian Supreme Court's judgment in B.C. Health, the author argues that the Court laid the foundation for a principled and durable doctrine protecting constitutional labour rights, one that goes directly to the heart of the matter — the inequality of workers’ power in the employment relation. In the author’s view, two paths could lead from B.C. Health to the recognition of Charter protec- tion for a right to strike: one that treats the right as an accessory to col- lective bargaining, and one that upholds the right directly on the basis of the Charter values of equality and participation. The author supports the latter approach, contending that constitutional rights should be defined in relation to fundamental values, in a way that is not contingent on time-bound or fact-sensitive assessments about the role of strikes within a particular collective bargaining regime. Although a Charter right to strike may involve the courts in difficult choices about when to defer to legislative policy decisions, and courts may lack the institutional capac- ity to deal effectively with labour law issues, the author points out that judges can look to ILO standards for expert guidance. Noting that the U.S. experience in this area might be of considerable use to Canadians, the author concludes by providing an overview of American case law concerning a constitutional right to strike.Peer reviewe
Walton, Geoff and Pope, Alison (Eds.): Information Literacy. Infiltrating the Agenda, Challenging Minds.
No full textReview of the book "Walton, Geoff and Pope, Alison (Eds.): Information Literacy. Infiltrating the Agenda, Challenging Minds
How American Workers Lost the Right to Strike, and Other Tales
No full textAs a veteran labor scholar once said, if you want to know where the corpses are buried in labor law, look for the of course statements in court opinions. This essay traces the historical origins of five such of course statements, each of which has had a devastating impact on the American labor movement. The five statements are: (1) Workers have no right of self-defense against employers that commit unfair labor practices (NLRB v. Fansteel Metallurgical Corporation); (2) Employers enjoy the right permanently to replace economic strikers (NLRB v. Mackay Radio & Telegraph Company); (3) The National Labor Relations Board has no power to deter unfair labor practices (Consolidated Edison Company v. NLRB); (4) Employers may exclude union organizers from their property (Lechmere, Inc. v. NLRB); (5) Employers may close operations out of spite against workers who choose to unionize (Textile Workers Union v. Darlington Manufacturing Company). The essay argues that in each of the five cases, the Court revived Lochner-era constitutional doctrines - supposedly defunct since the switch in time that saved nine in 1937 - and applied them to cut back on statutory labor rights. Although the five statements were not considered especially dangerous at the time, their impact has since been magnified by social and economic change. Taken together, they may account for a substantial proportion of the decline in the American labor movement. As in the pre-New Deal period, then, judges have deprived workers of the rights to organize and strike based on constitutional concerns. This time, however, they have avoided the forthright constitutional reasoning of the pre-1937 period, thereby insulating their rulings against changes in constitutional jurisprudence.Peer reviewe
Enquiring Minds and the Role of Information Literacy in the Design, Management and Assessment of Student Research Tasks
No full textThis chapter was based on workshop papers presented in seminars organised by the editors and members of the Staffordshire University Information Literacy Community of Practice (SUILCoP). SUILCoP includes HE lecturers as well as information specialists from fifty or so participating universities and organisations. It also develops several of the themes explored in an earlier article co-authored for the journal Legal Information Management (Cambridge University Press)in 2010 which was produced with the book's editors, Geoff Walton and Alison Pope. The chapter (chapter 5) discusses approaches to embedding Information Literacy requirements in Law programmes and modules with a view to improving the quality of research-based assessments, particularly small-group projects and individual dissertations and assignments.
The chapter considers the need for HE providers delivering Law programmes to develop better, more effective strategies in order to meet QAA benchmark requirements, including the need for Law students who are about to graduate to be operating at the 'boundaries of knowledge' in the discipline, and to have the research and research-related skills required to be able to work effectively in the legal services market. Among other things, it argues that qualitative improvements in student research require the formal incorporation of IL requirements (or US style 'standards') in assessments' design, and when precribing learning outcomes. Pre-completion guidance also needs to be provided at key stages in the research and writing cycle if discernible improvements are to be made. This is well understood in many US law schools' research and writing skills programmes, as the author observed during his visiting lecturing work at the College of Law, Idaho University. That experience has been helping to inform new approaches to research task-setting, support, and assessment at Staffordshire University - most notably in the case of a number of Level 6/final year Law programmes where project work features strongly in the curriculum (for example in CPE Graduate Conversion Course extended assignments, and LLB Level 6 dissertations). The article draws on the existing literature on IL, particularly in the areas of guidance and assessment
Section 1 of the Thirteenth Amendment and the Badges and Incidents of Slavery
No full textThis Article presents the first comprehensive treatment of the basic and officially “open” question whether Section 1 of the Thirteenth Amendment directly bans the badges and incidents of slavery. Surprisingly, in light of present-day uncertainty, the historical record is relatively clear on this issue. Members of the Thirty-Ninth Congress generally agreed that Section 1 banned at least some of the badges and incidents; they parted company over which ones. The Democrats and their allies, nearly all of whom had opposed the Amendment, claimed that it outlawed only the core incidents of slavery, for example chattelization and physically or legally forced labor. But their Republican opponents, all of whom had supported the Amendment, maintained that it banned a far broader set including—at a minimum—denials of the rights enumerated in the Civil Rights Act of 1866, namely to enjoy the same rights to make contracts, own property, and participate in court as were enjoyed by white citizens. Until 1968, courts also assumed that the issue of badges and incidents hinged on Section 1. Contrary to the received wisdom, Jones v. Alfred H. Mayer Co., decided in that year, announced for the first time that the identification of badges and incidents might be a task for Congress under the Section 2 power to enact “appropriate” enforcement legislation. Although the Court has maintained for nearly half a century that the question is “open,” the practical reality is that courts honor the narrow reading of Section 1 proposed by the unsuccessful Democratic opponents of both the Amendment and the 1866 Civil Rights Act, a reading later introduced to jurisprudence in the now-overruled Jim Crow decisions of Plessy v. Ferguson and Hodges v. United States. It is not too late to resolve the official uncertainty by embracing the Republican reading. This choice would re-start the process, commenced by the Thirty-Ninth Congress but derailed in Plessy and Hodges, of determining what it means to ensure that neither slavery nor involuntary servitude “shall exist.” The Article concludes by exploring some of the basic interpretive issues and their implications for the constitutional law of racially disparate impact, race-based affirmative action, gender equality, and reproductive freedom.Peer reviewe
The Thirteenth Amendment versus the Commerce Clause: Labor and the Shaping of the Post-New Deal Constitutional Order
No full textDuring the twentieth century, Congress's power to regulate commerce grew sensationally while its human rights powers atrophied. This strange phenomenon originated in the choice, made by lawyers and politicians in the early 1930s, to base labor rights statutes like the Wagner Act on the Commerce Clause instead of the Thirteenth Amendment. Unions and workers argued that the rights to organize and strike made the difference between freedom and involuntary servitude. But a bevy of progressive lawyers who styled themselves friends of labor undermined labor's Thirteenth Amendment theory. The article argues that this clash reflected not merely tactical differences among allies, but fundamentally conflicting constitutional goals. It contends that the Supreme Court upheld the Wagner Act not because of the lawyers' Commerce Clause arguments, but because workers staged a series of sit-down strikes that confronted the swing justices with a choice between industrial peace or war. Afterward, unions and workers interpreted the Wagner Act decisions as victories for labor freedom, but the Act's Commerce Clause foundation pointed in a different direction - one leading to fateful distortions in the jurisprudence of congressional powers.Peer reviewe
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