Decolonising the curriculum: using graduate qualities to embed Indigenous knowledges at the academic cultural interface

The context of this paper is a strategy at a large Australian university that involves embedding a new graduate quality ‘cultural competence’ and lifting the profile of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultures, experiences and histories. It has been argued that the inclusion of Indigenous knowledges is essential for the decolonisation of our higher education institutions. Decolonisation involves removing the barriers that have silenced non-Western voices in our ‘multi-cultural’ higher education system and combatting the epistemic injustices of a system dominated by Western thought. In this paper, we suggest that our university’s suite of graduate qualities can provide a locus for work at the cultural interface between Indigenous and non-Indigenous knowledges. While these qualities may be firmly embedded within Western ways of knowing, being and doing, they can nonetheless be used to interrogate and revisit Western disciplinary knowledge construction and pedagogy so as to help bring about institutional change.     

From a Distance: A Grounded Theory Study of Separation Anxiety Among Filipino Incarcerated Elderly

Despite numerous studies that examined the impact of separation and separation anxiety on the emotions and behavior of young individuals, little is known about separation anxiety in the elderly population. This grounded theory study purports to describe the process of separation anxiety among incarcerated Filipino elderly men. Individual interviews and participant observations were conducted with 25 incarcerated elderly Filipino men who are first-time prisoners and sentenced to lifetime imprisonment. Following Strauss and Corbin's (1998) coding protocol, a four-part process emerged to describe the studied layer of human experience. The Tectonic Model of Separation Anxiety among incarcerated Filipino elderly men comprises four phases: Winkling, Wilting, Weeding, and Weaving. Findings of this study invite nurses and other clinicians to identify developmentally appropriate strategies and interventions for this vulnerable and neglected sector of society.     

My Place: Exploring children's place-related identities through reading and writing

This paper considers how children perceive and represent their placed-related identities through reading and writing. It reports on the findings of an 18-month interdisciplinary project, based at Cambridge University Faculty of Education, which aimed to consider children's place-related identities through their engagement with, and creation of, texts. This paper will discuss the project, its interdisciplinary theoretical framework, and the empirical research we conducted with two classes in primary schools in Eastern England. A key text used in our research was My Place by Nadia Wheatley and Donna Rawlins. Drawing on our interdisciplinary theoretical framework, particularly Doreen Massey's notion of place as a bundle of trajectories, and Louise Rosenblatt's notion of the transaction between the reader and the text, this paper will examine pages from My Place, children talking about how this text connects with them, children talking about their sense of place, and maps and writing the children produced based on their place.     

The Evaluation Scale: Exploring Decisions About Societal Impact in Peer Review Panels

Realising the societal gains from publicly funded health and medical research requires a model for a reflexive evaluation precedent for the societal impact of research. This research explores UK Research Excellence Framework evaluators’ values and opinions and assessing societal impact, prior to the assessment taking place. Specifically, we discuss the characteristics of two different impact assessment extremes – the “quality-focused” evaluation and “societal impact-focused” evaluation. We show the wide range of evaluator views about impact, and that these views could be conceptually reflected in a range of different positions along a conceptual evaluation scale. We describe the characteristics of these extremes in detail, and discuss the different beliefs evaluators had which could influence where they positioned themselves along the scale. These decisions, we argue, when considered together, form a dominant definition of societal impact that influences the direction of its evaluation by the panel.     

Anatomical Sciences Education Vol. 5, Issue 1, 2012 Cover Image

Medical students at Durham University, United Kingdom receive instructions using ultrasound echocardiography . In this issue of ASE Dr. Finn and her colleagues compare the efficacy of ultrasound and cadaveric prosections for teaching gross anatomy of the heart.