‘It’s not what it looks like. I’m Santa’: Connecting Community through Film

The lived experiences of young people are becoming increasingly marginalised within the narrowly defined curricula of neoliberal contexts. Many young people are also cast within the media according to deficit discourses of youth, which contributes to the fragmentation of communities and the limitation of interaction between generations. This article describes a film project in which young people living in an ex-mining community in the Midlands of England worked in and with their community to create a representation of where they live. As part of the process, the young filmmakers did more than connect to other people’s memories as repositories of information; both as process and as product, their film can be seen to connect shared narratives of people and place, across time and space. We argue that this project offers a timely opportunity to reflect upon the ways in which we understand learning in and out of English classrooms.     

Creativity in the Bronze Age: Bringing Archaeological Research into Contemporary Craft Teaching and Learning through a Live Project

The CinBA Live Project sought to engage students of contemporary craft courses in the UK with Bronze Age creativity. We aimed to explore the ways in which the creativity inherent in prehistoric craft may be used as inspiration in contemporary making. It simultaneously offered institutions a unique opportunity to offer a practice‐led, research‐based live project which was distinct to those generally known to be available to art and design institutions. It offered a different experience within this established pedagogical model in art and design education by using the Bronze Age as a source of inspiration for creative practice through practice‐based research in contemporary craft within the framework of an international academic research project, and suggesting new roles for the interpretation of the prehistoric past through creative work. This article reports on the CinBA Live Project. It outlines the context of the opportunity, details our methods of facilitation, describes the activities undertaken by the students and considers the outputs and post‐project impact of the activity.     

Evening electronic device use: The effects on alertness,sleep and next-day physical performance in athletes

The aim of the present study was to investigate the influence of different types of tasks performed with or without an electronic device (tablet) on pre-sleep alertness, subsequent sleep quality and next-day athletic performance. Eight highly trained netball players attended a sleep laboratory for pre-sleep testing, polysomnographic sleep monitoring and next-day physical performance testing on 5 separate occasions (1 familiarisation and 4 experimental sessions). For 2 h prior to bedtime, athletes completed cognitively stimulating tasks (puzzles) or passive tasks (reading) with or without a tablet. Sleepiness tended to be greater after reading compared to completing puzzles without a tablet (d = 0.80), but not with a tablet. Melatonin concentration increased more so after reading compared to completing puzzles on a tablet (P = 0.02). There were no significant differences in sleep quality or quantity or next-day athletic performance between any of the conditions. These data suggest that using a tablet for 2 h prior to sleep does not negatively affect subsequent sleep or next-day performance in athletes.