Category / REF Subjects

Request for your paper: A historical perspective

Any publishing academic will irregularly receive emails for copies of their papers, usually for papers which researchers or students can’t access through their own institution.  Different universities have different expensive deals with publishers, and especially for universities in low-income countries this can be very limiting.  Apart from requests for papers I also receive email requests for book chapter which are part of commercial textbooks, or people asking for a PDF, i.e. a free electronic copy, of the whole textbook.  Recently I have also had a couple of requests for papers which are already freely available as Open Access publications.  I assume the latter are simply requests from lazy students, who searched a bibliographic data base found several (many?) relevant papers.  Without too much thinking they send quick automated email through ResearchGate, which is less work that searching for each actual Open Access paper online.

It did not always use to be that easy to approach an academic for a copy of their scientific paper.  When I started as a PhD student, before the widespread use of the internet, if your university library did not have a subscription to the journal you were looking for, you would write a short letter to an academic author, post the letter, and if your were lucky, receive a printed copy of the requested paper in the post a few weeks later. The more established academics would have pre-printed postcards to speed up the process of requesting an academic paper.  The photo of the 1959 (for the record this was before I was born!) shows one of such cards from a doctor based in the Netherlands.  The effort involved meant you asked only for papers you were pretty sure where central to your research, you would not do the equivalent of sending out 40 emails, hoping to get PDFs of six or seven papers relevant to your essay topic.

 

Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen

CMWH

‘Snowflakes of Steel’: Creative pedagogy, reflective learning and student engagement

Is innovation and creativity in teaching and learning actually important?  Innovation is certainly mentioned in the BU 2025 Vision in respect of desirable graduate qualities, accompanied by the intriguing statement that ‘the BU learning experience is personalised, inter-disciplinary and consistently excellent.’  The Centre for Fusion Learning, Innovation and Excellence (FLIE) also refers to teaching ‘innovations’ as an indicator of pedagogic excellence. This leads to the question:  can an educator promote innovation without creativity? Conceivably it may be possible but it’s hard to see how.  So, assuming that creativity is part of what makes teaching innovative, let’s, for argument’s sake, assume it is so. What then might constitute those inspired creative turns that result in pedagogic innovation to produce an excellent, personalised learning experience for students in their opinion? For after all, as we have learned over recent years in the modern corporate university, it is the student as ‘consumer’ who is the final judge of what is a quality learning experience.  As a group of students and pedagogues, we argue that creative pedagogy is both inter-relational and transformative. Inter-relational in its ability to break down hierarchies whilst respecting the experiential subjective account in assignments in personal and human, as well as academic levels.  Transformative in understanding the developing and learning student self and the generation of that future self with knowledge and skills for continuous learning.

In this blog, five second-year social science students and two academics explore what creative pedagogy can look and feel like, based on our co-creation study of student engagement in creative assignments. The assignments were part of the second-year social science unit ‘Growing Up and Growing Old’ (GUGO), currently an option unit for students in the Faculty of Health & Social Sciences as well as the Faculty of Science & Technology. The multidisciplinary nature of students opting for the unit is equally reflected in the rich interdisciplinary focus of its teaching content where a psychosocial perspective underpins the use of sociological, anthropological, psychology and historical concepts, perspectives and theorisation.

In GUGO, and in keeping with a feminist pedagogy, a democratisation of the learning experience through the personal is promoted. Students are enabled to develop an emerging reflective praxis by connecting pedagogic classroom content to actual lived lives through a biographical narrative, often choosing personal and family histories. Innovative assessment models have always been integral to GUGO in facilitating this praxis process to unfold. Here the generational lives and themes the students choose to thread together is elevated from the purely descriptive by a socio-historical, socio-cultural and socio-spatial geographical analysis of people, place and position. Within the assignments students may include photographs/images, genograms, culturagrams, diary extracts, official documents, recorded memories and artefacts of family significance. The completed work frequently become cherished family mementoes.

This year a short addendum was added to the Biographical Narrative – a ‘critical incident analysis’ (CIA), entitled ‘My Life So Far’, where students reflected on an incident in their lives they had identified as significant to their personal and cognitive development. CIA are used as learning devices in professional courses, such as social work, where the identification of the mundane/ubiquitous in the professional context is encouraged rather than the pivotal/exceptional personal incidents that students chose to highlight in GUGO.

For the co-creation study, volunteered anonymised assignments were used post-marking. The request for volunteered work was expected by the class having been informed about the study at the beginning of the semester, along with an invitation to become a co-researcher. Eventually fourteen CIA were volunteered, representing roughly half the class’s work.

The results of the study were fascinating: diverse and surprising, poignant and powerful, stories of such marked resilience emerged from a generation often vilified as self-entitled and emotionally fragile, offering fine examples of deep reflective learning by students.  The findings of the study are now in the process of being written up for submission to international peer-reviewed journals, which we know will help the future careers of our five intrepid student co-researchers, while the veteran academics in the team step happily into a well-earned semi-retirement.

We in the team are all evangelical about the rich benefits of embracing creative assignments as educators and learners. Yet we recognise that some academic colleagues will not feel comfortable with innovative pedagogy of this sort; preferring instead to remain with conventional assignments, which clearly have their established (and to-date hegemonic) place in the limited HE assignment repertoire. That these established forms are generally far easier to devise and to mark than a move to innovative, creative assignments may well be a point in their favour in time-poor academic environments.

Yet in the face of any academic scepticism, it must be noted that External Examiners have always been very complimentary about the GUGO unit, as led by the first author, noting how well students engage with its assessments.  This year was no different, despite the complexity of adding the CIA, with one External Examiner reporting, ‘I really like this assessment design as this allows for the students to connect academia and theoretical frameworks with reality and see the impact on their own lives or that of family members’.

Meanwhile, the co-research study, developed from the CIA, has added a new strength to GUGO in enabling the inter-relational and the transformative to emerge even more strongly in assignments than even previously.

That said, while GUGO is undoubtedly a very rewarding unit to develop and teach, and its popularity among students is apparent, more importantly, the worth of the unit and its innovations is ultimately measured by students themselves. Our student co-researchers provided some candid comments:

Aimee:   ‘My Life So Far has been one of my favourite university assignments to date. It required me to consider a pivotal moment in my life in a way that I never had before, and to express my experience of it in a way that would make sense to an outsider. …I had never had to complete a creative writing assignment focused on my lived experience. It was so unfamiliar that I wondered whether my lecturer genuinely cared about my critical incident and how it made me feel, or if I was simply misinterpreting the brief. It was such a welcome change of pace from traditional university assignments. I feel that creative assignments are much easier to engage with as a student, and I would love for them to become more commonplace in university settings.’

Here we see an example of how the inter-relational aspects of the teacher-learner can be turned into a dyad of equality and respect rather than one of just simple hierarchies of authority and power. The intimacy of the accounts offered and the trust put in the educator to honour the messages in them, while fairly marking assignment efforts, was emancipatory and revitalising to everyone. Furthermore, unlike Aimee, not everyone found the assignment easy, for some it was surprisingly hard, discomfiting even, and yet also intriguing.

Ella:   ‘ In the beginning, I felt out of my comfort zone as it felt very unnatural compared to all my other assignments, but this also excited me and made me feel very interested and engaged with the unit due to it being different and more creative.’

GUGO’s ability to pluck students out of their lumpen ‘comfort zone’ was something several students referred to. It jolted them into an initial disorientation, to questioning, then realisation to the possibilities presented and finally full immersion into the assignment.

Becky:   ‘In my personal experience of creative assignments, specifically in GUGO, my comprehension and enjoyment of the unit content was much higher when compared to other units on my course. The creative assignment awakened me academically and allowed me to break out of the routine of regurgitating information from readings and lectures into a standardised essay assignment. … The CIA element of the assignment offered challenges and benefits. In my educational experience, my writing style is my main strength and writing essays has become my comfort zone. The GUGO assignments forced me out of this comfort zone and I feel that this, overall, benefited my academic ability. It has allowed me to see a different side of academia, a more creative side, relying less on standardisation, with less focus on the idea of pass or fail, instead focusing on ensuring the learning is innovative. This challenged my ability to approach assignments and I feel that this has had positive impacts on my professional and personal development.’

One criticism that is levied against non-conventional, creative assignments is that they are intellectual lightweights in comparison with the standard and indeed standardised formats of essays and exams we all grew up with.  The familiarity of the known form can be helpful to students, as Becky says, being a tried-and-trusted technique. Harder and more challenging still is the unfamiliar that requires a new set of cognitive-emotive skills in keeping with the developmental changes of accepting child to questioning youth to reflective adult (the very domain that GUGO as a unit is preoccupied with in fact).  That some students found these different assignments harder to master than more conventional ones speaks to any dismissiveness that creative assignments are potentially facile, unintellectual exercises.

Poppy:   ‘At first it was daunting as we don’t get taught on how best to express ourselves and be creative, as we (us Uni students) know the basic elements/structure of a more formal assignment. It is still hard to write those, but you know what to put in and how to write it. But as we don’t get many creative ones it always comes as a surprise and more nerve racking as you don’t know the best place to start and don’t know how creative to be or how this will get marked compared to formal essays… As a second-year student going into her third I have only had 2 creative assignments and they really are a breath of fresh air compared to the standardized conventional ones. In the conventional ones you don’t get much choice, so you know you are being compared to everyone else’s assignment and as an ALS student it is really hard to stand out.’

Poppy has a point: for students with diverse learning abilities, the conventional assignment formats may prove a disservice to them, while dampening down any real passion for learning as opposed to merely doing and passing.

Back to Ella, for a summing up of the potential of creative pedagogy for all students.

‘I feel that this would be very beneficial for a lot of students, as it would allow them to express themselves, instead of just formal writing about a certain topic that they might not feel as inspired or engaged towards. I feel like you learn more and engage better with creative assignments, so overall you get more out of it.’

To conclude then, the transition from school/college to university marks a big change in standards, as any lecturer marking first-year assignments and subsequently dealing with glum faces thereafter, will know.  However, if the conventional assignment format remains the same exam/essay fare, then pedagogically an opportunity may be missed to ignite that fire for authentic, deep learning we long to cultivate in our HE students. Creative assignments shake that old model down for dusting, replacing it with something that yes, may initially worry students owing to its unfamiliar form, but will capture their interests, light the fuse of their imagination, and ultimately can produce work that will surprise academics with the quality and power of liberated, unleashed minds. We believe that students are owed transformative learning opportunities. They are, for sure, a demanding joy to develop for educators. Yet given our very positive experiences it seems overwhelmingly clear, students really do thirst for these creative educational opportunities, and when they get them they flourish most wonderfully.

Sara Ashencaen Crabtree, Becky Warner, Ella Smith, Poppy Harris, Aimee Evans, Asha Smith, and Jonathan Parker –  the ‘Snowflakes of Steel’ co-research team.

Delegation in Healthcare book: BU writing opportunity

BLOG delegation

Rowena Slope and Lucy Stainer are leading a unique writing opportunity for BU staff to join their writing team for the Delegation in Healthcare book, which has a publishing agreement with the Taylor & Francis Group. Your contribution could make a significant difference in the field of healthcare delegation.
 – Do you have case studies/ experiences that can be used in this book?
 – Do you have research/ literature on delegation?
If it’s ‘yes’ to either of these questions and you would be willing to share or would like to join our writing team (current membership is Teresa Burdett, Emily Brooks, Joanna Cleall, Chantel Cox, Alex Hull, Ursula Rolfe & Clare Shearer), please get in touch with us via email: lstainer@bournemouth.ac.uk
We’re excited about the possibility of including your work and expertise in our book, and we would love to hear from you.
(more…)

Third INRC Symposium: Interdisciplinary Computational and Clinical Approaches at the Edge of Brain Research

Last month, we celebrated the third symposium of the Interdisciplinary Neuroscience Research Centre at the Inspire Lecture Theatre, entitled “Interdisciplinary Computational and Clinical Approaches at the Edge of Brain Research”.

This year, our symposium revolved around two linking themes: applied machine learning for understanding neuroscientific data and translational neuroscience. We choose to contrast these two themes because they show the breadth of areas of the centre and steer the debate on potential synergies.

The event started with an exciting talk by Prof. Miguel Maravall (director of the Sussex Neuroscience Centre of Excellence, Sussex University).  Dr Maravall presented new experiments testing the idea that the function of the somatosensory cortex -beyond processing input information about an object’s features- represents the decision to act and even the outcomes of such actions. The recording of this lecture is available here.

Next, the first session concentrated on computational approaches. In this focused session, we enjoyed three talks. The opening talk by Michak Gnacek (Emteq Labs Emteq Labs, Brighton and Centre for Digital Entertainment, BU) showcased his appealing results on affect recognition in Virtual Reality leveraging multimodal physiological recordings and continual machine learning. The second speaker was Dr Géza Gergely Ambrus (Department of Psychology, BU). Dr Ambrus presented gripping new findings that extend the application of multivariate pattern analysis beyond face perception to other facial characteristics to explore underlying neural mechanisms. Finally, Dr Matteo Toscani (Department of Psychology, BU) discussed a series of intriguing studies over the recent years on unsupervised learning approaches -such as avant-grade deep autoencoders- for inferring haptic material properties.

After this first session, Prof. Jonathan Cole (University Hospital Dorset, NHS) opened the second session centred on clinical neuroscience. In his inspiring talk, Dr Cole discussed his research on patients with congenital and acquired complete absence of touch and movement/position, showing how the absence of these senses leads to different alterations in proprioception. Next, Prof. Caroline Edmonds (Department of Psychological Sciences, University of East London) presented a fascinating study on real-life implications of co-occurring memory impairments in children with neonatal hypoxic-ischaemic encephalopathy. The study evaluated memory function in school-aged children with this condition who received hypothermia treatment and survived without extensive neuromotor impairment.

To conclude the symposium, Prof. Birgit Gurr (Community Brain Injury and Adult Neuropsychology Services Dorset at Dorset HealthCare University, NHS) and Dr Ellen Seiss (Department of Psychology, BU) introduced a compelling evaluation of the dynamic information processing programme, encompassing mental exercises fostering the recovery of patients from a stroke.

After the symposium, we visited the Multimodal Immersive Neuro-sensing lab for natural neuro-behavioural measurement (MINE), led by Dr Xun He.

All in the INRC would like to wholeheartedly thank the speaker and the attendees for the fascinating talks and exciting debates we had. If you are interested in getting in touch, contributing or joining the Interdisciplinary Neuroscience Research Centre, please do not hesitate to contact Ellen Seiss (eseiss@bourenmouth.ac.uk) or Emili Balaguer-Ballester (eb-ballester@bournemouth.ac.uk).

Thank you again for your interest, and we are looking forward to seeing you in our upcoming activities.

Kind regards,

Ellen and Emili, on behalf of all of us at the INRC

 

Prize awarded for paper on rural tourism transport use in Bali

BUBS PhD student Rama Permana was awarded the Smeed Prize runner-up at the 56th Universities’ Transport Study Group (UTSG) Annual Conference 2024 held at University of Huddersfield earlier this month. Rama presented a paper entitled Sustainability Transitions in Rural Tourism Travel: Who are the ‘Switchable’ Visitor Segments? The paper draws on surveys at 3 rural sites in Bali following qualitative interviews on the first stage of his PhD study. Utilising hierarchical and non-hierarchical cluster analysis, this paper discovers traveller segmentation in the tourism destination based on their own rural travel practices.  (Image source: Huddersfield Business School)

MRes studentship opportunities – application deadline extended to 14th August, 2024

Update about the NIHR INSIGHT programme MRes studentship eligibility which impacts on the current recruitment round.

Following consultation with the 12 regional leads for the NIHR INSIGHT programme, NIHR has agreed to Research Masters studentships being open to applicants with up to five years’ experience of practice in the health or care profession for which they hold the required registration. It is still possible to provide flexibility for instances such as career breaks or time out for caring responsibilities so long as experience of practice fits with this guidance.

In light of the above changes, the deadline for applications for the Research Masters Studentships for South West Central have been extended to Wednesday 14th August 2024 to allow for applications for those who may now meet the eligibility criteria.  Information about how to apply is available on our webpage: https://insight-southwestcentral.net/

There was also discussion about health and care professionals working on skilled worker visas and the requirements for Research Masters studentships in line with all applicants, only those with up to five years’ experience of practice (UK and international practice) will be considered. Those on skilled worker visas will need to be employed on a full-time basis and given clinical release to undertake the MRes programme (0.4FTE). The studentship stipend can be paid to employers to offset the cost of clinical/care release. However, this will mean that employers will need to subsidise the difference in salary costs. This will need to be discussed and negotiated on an individual basis where employers deem it appropriate.

If you have any queries, please contact  Carol Clark (cclark@bournemouth.ac.uk) or Theo Akudjedu  (takudjedu@bournemouth.ac.uk) or Les Gelling lgelling@bournemouth.ac.uk

New Book and Web Toolkit: Practice-led Research and Inclusive Media Representations

Documentary and Stereotypes: Reducing Stigma through Factual Media (Palgrave 2023) and its accompanying web toolkit by Principal Lecturer Catalin Brylla are available.

This book studies how social stigma and prejudice can be reduced through factual media, including documentaries, news, reality TV, advertisements and social media videos. It is intended for researchers and media makers who want to increase social inclusion and diversity through strategic on-screen representations. Using models from social psychology, media studies and cultural studies, it explains how harmful social boundaries can be reduced in relation to ethnicity, culture, age, disability, gender, sexual orientation, religion and many other social categories.

The first part explains the function of stereotypes in social perception and cognition, whether we meet a person in real life or watch a TV documentary. The second part establishes a classification system for stigmatising media stereotypes, and it proposes a methodology to analyse these in narrative and audio-visual representations. The third part introduces a framework of methods to reduce stigmatising stereotypes and foster social inclusion. These are based on experiencing the perspective of screen characters and the strategic intersection of multiple social identities.

The book and web toolkit have been widely disseminated:

Society of Cognitive Film Studies Conference 2024 (University of North Carolina, Wilmington)

Masterclass: Catalin Brylla and Edward Schiappa in conversation about Reducing Prejudice through Documentary: The Parasocial Contact Hypothesis (University College London)

Intersectional Media Representation Workshop at the Festival of Media Production 2024 (Bournemouth University)

Inclusive Filmmaking Workshop (School of Creative Practice, Queensland University of Technology)

Reducing Prejudice through Documentary Practice (Steve Tisch School of Film and Television, Tel Aviv University)

Reducing Disability Stigma through Intersectional Media Representations (Centre of Culture and Disability Studies, Liverpool Hope University)

New sociology paper Freedom from Academentia

Congratulations to Laura Favaro, Lecturer in Social Science in the Faculty of Health & Social Sciences, who published the paper ‘Let us be free from “ACADEMENTIA”’ this last weekend of June [1].   “Survivor of academentia” is how one former lecturer in sociology described herself when to Laura interviewed her for her ethnography of academia. In particular, the research explored the “gender wars”, namely the disputes around sex and gender that have escalated dramatically since the mid 2010s in Britain and increasingly also in many other countries. This article builds on feminist and other critical uses of the term academentia with original insights from interview and document data about the detrimental impact of queer theory and politics. The hope is to stimulate further inquiry into the push towards queering at universities, and beyond, as well as into the connections between the
transgender and mad movements.

The content of this paper has been covered by writer Victoria Smith in  The Critic  and Laura will be presenting about this exciting topic at a conference this summer.

Well done!

Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen

Centre for Midwifery & Women’s Health

 

Reference:

Favaro, L. (2024) Let us be free from “Academentia”, Cuestiones de género: de la igualdad y la diferencia. Nº. 19: 659-92.

 

Positionality in qualitative research

At the online editorial board meeting today [Saturday 29th June] of the Dhaulagiri Journal of Sociology and Anthropology I had the pleasure of seeing Bournemouth University’s latest paper ‘The Importance of Positionality for Qualitative Researchers’ ahead of publication [1].  The lead author of this paper is Hannah Gurr and this methodology paper is part of her M.Res. research project in Social Work.  Hannah is supervised by Dr. Louise Oliver, Dr. Orlanda Harvey and Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen in the Faculty of Health & Social Sciences (FHSS).

Dhaulagiri Journal of Sociology and Anthropology is a Gold Open Access journal so when it appears online it will be free to read for anybody across the globe.

 

Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen

Centre for Midwifery & Women’s Health

Reference:

  1. Gurr, H., Oliver, L., Harvey, O., van Teijlingen, E. (2024) The Importance of Positionality for Qualitative Researchers, Dhaulagiri Journal of Sociology and Anthropology 18 (forthcoming)