Addressing Library Anxiety (LA) in student nurses: a study in an NHS Foundation Trust Hospital library and information service

Library anxiety is a concept which has been recognised in academic library circles since the early 1990s. It can result in students actively avoiding the library for the duration of their studies. Madeleine Still is Trust Librarian at North Tees & Hartlepool NHS Foundation Trust and while studying for an MSc, recognised that some student nurses were exhibiting signs of library anxiety. She decided to make it the focus of her MSc dissertation, and this article discusses her research project as well as highlighting the measures she has taken to address the issues she uncovered. Madeleine graduated in July 2013 with an MSc in Information & Library Studies from Robert Gordon University. AM     

Making the Invisible Visible. On Participation and Communication in a Global, Web-based Master’s Programme

This study focuses on the discourse of an intercontinental on-line Master’s programme in adult learning, using English as the lingua franca of the programme and involving four collaborating universities in Sweden, South Africa, Canada and Australia. The programme is highly interactive, emphasising communication between students. Taking the variation in participation as the point of departure, a discourse analysis aiming at analysing the contingencies contributing to the pattern of communication in the programme was undertaken. Data consist of a variety of texts on-line web-documents, written notes, and narratives that participants wrote about their lives related to participation in the programme. The use of English as the lingua franca contributed to a mistake anxiety, which for some students was hampering their communication in the programme. Aspects of the material world such as the vast differences in the efforts and costs for participating in the programme were also highly interrelated to the shaping of socio-culturally situated identities among the students and thereby contributing to the variation in frequency in participation. The results show that the official discourse of the programme as a text, with its emphasis on equity, change and development, gets subordinated to the discourses produced and reproduced by the students in the programme as a discursive practice and social practice. The students’ accounts reveal that there are fragments of an alternative discourse emerging, based on mutual concern and friendship, which might suggest a potential for changing the communicative patterns in the programme.     

Creating Spaces for Collaboration in Community Co‐design

Urgent societal challenges have led to unease in our socio‐cultural interactions and the production systems that underpin our lives. To confront such challenges, collaboration stands out as an essential approach in accomplishing joint goals and producing new knowledge. It calls for interdisciplinary methodologies such as co‐design, an approach capable of bridging multiple expertise. The core activities of co‐design are based on the premise of collaboration and on developing creative social environments. Yet achieving collaboration through co‐design is challenging as people need to understand each other, and develop trust and rapport. We argue that ‘informal‐mutual learning’ is central to building mutual understanding. This article explores how we create spaces for collaboration through co‐design by examining the social environments supporting them. It examines the value of collaboration and its impact upon participants within an action research project conducted in Scotland. We identified Cultural‐Historical Activity Theory (CHAT) as a suitable theoretical framework. It offers support for holistic inquiry into participation and learning. Its strength was in the attention that it pays to multi‐dimensional human interactions within the social environment. This led to an understanding of the concepts of boundary‐crossing and boundary space examined through a CHAT lens. The findings shed light on four designerly conditions supporting informal‐mutual learning when engaged in collaboration during co‐design situations: choreography and orchestration, aesthetics, playfulness, and quality and quantity of participation. The findings enable us to elaborate on the theorisation of boundary space, a theoretical space for the assemblage of multiple levels of expertise to achieve collaboration.     

A study of exploratory behavior as an index of spatial knowledge in hamsters

This experiment investigated the role of exploration in the formation of maps of the environment. The effects of spatial rearrangement of four familiar objects in an open field on subsequent exploratory behavior were studied in hamsters (Mesocricetus auratus). During two exploratory sessions, four groups of subjects were exposed to objects in a particular spatial relation to each other and to a distal pattern. During a testing session, the control group was exposed to the same situation as during the first two sessions, and the three experimental groups were exposed to various object rearrangements. The hamsters in the experimental groups, but not those in the control group, renewed their exploration of the objects during the testing session, as measured by the number of contacts with the objects and the time spent investigating them. Further analyses of the nature of the reinvestigated objects (i.e., displaced or nondisplaced) support the hypothesis that, through exploration, a long-lasting representation of the environment is built up on the basis of the topological relations among the objects, the overall geometric structure provided by the arrangement of the objects, and the relations between the objects and extra-apparatus landmarks.     

Secure Base Representations in Children With Asthma: Links With Symptoms,Family Asthma Management,and Cytokine Regulation

Children's perceptions of caregivers as a secure base have been linked with socioemotional outcomes, but little is known about connections to physical health. We examined whether secure base representations are associated with children's symptoms, family management strategies, and inflammatory processes in children with asthma. Participants included 308 children (ages 8–17) and one parent. Children completed a blood draw to measure asthma-related immune functions and reported on perceptions of their mothers as a secure base and their asthma symptoms. Dyads completed interviews about asthma management. Analyses revealed that children's secure base perceptions were associated with better family asthma management and lower Type 2 T-helper cell cytokine production. These findings suggest that secure base representations may be protective for children with asthma.     

Educational outcomes across the generational and gender divide: the rural family habitus of Pakistani families living in poverty

Education for all as a global agenda has particular repercussions for those living in rural poverty. By adopting a Bourdieusian framework to analyse interview data collected from fathers, mothers, sons and daughters in 10 rural Punjabi households, we expose the intersections of education, gender, poverty and rurality. The concept of a rural family habitus focuses attention on the collective, relational and dispositional worlds of such families. Three dimensions are used to analyse reproduction and transformation in each narrative set: intergenerational educational dynamics; on-going gender dynamics; and, social dynamics within the rural field. The findings challenge the stereotyping and assumed homogeneity of rural families whose gender cultures and positive educational dispositions are diverse and complex. The gendered histories of parental education, their aspirations, and their social status in the rural field intersect with the changing gender relations which result from schooling, and the increasing differentiation between educated and uneducated rural families.     

Psychological developments in high technology teaching and learning environments

The authors discuss some of the psychological effects associated with the increasing capabilities of new technology with a particular emphasis on issues involved with multi-media teaching systems and the development of the self on emotional, intellectual and social levels. It includes a review of technology attitudes and individual differences in relation to the voluntary use of technology and contrasts that with the psychological measures associated with the rejection of technology. Consideration is given to which psychological measures are typically cited by the literature as being associated with emotional, intellectual and social "success" and compares them with those measures that appear to predict successful technology adoption. These different measures and outcomes are compared to see if they are compatible. The authors then summarise the likely effects of the latest trends in technology on the mental world in which a developing self operates. The paper concludes with a discussion of other issues and factors that determine effective design solutions within the paradigm of increasing design spaces and diverse user populations.     

Wasteland revisited: defining an agenda for a sociology of education and migration

Abstract

In 2007, we argued that, when it comes to sociology of education, the lives and education of refugee children were invisible. Sociology of education was ‘a wasteland’ as far as studies of the social effects of migration were concerned. Here, we revisit this argument exploring whether education and migration has been developed into a viable specialism in the discipline, and whether one of the great societal challenges of our age is being addressed. Examining the work published on migration and education since 2005 in BJSE, we see that the majority of studies focus on the global mobility of students and on school experiences of migrant children. While these are valuable foci, what is missing is a more extensive consideration of how ‘the age of migration’ and the characteristics of global migration in the 21st century challenge the values, the policies and practices associated with state education institutions and social order.     

Inter-Life: a novel,three-dimensional,virtual learning environment for life transition skills learning

This paper presents the findings from one of the first empirical research studies which has investigated the impact of Inter-Life; a novel three-dimensional immersive virtual learning environment, on learning and development of social and educational life transition skills in a group of looked after and accommodated children. Drawing on social constructivism in which meaningful learning is related to context and situated in practice, we report on a series of Inter-Life workshops that enabled young people to work together and through the processes of participation in authentic learning activities contributed to the development of life transition skills such as self-confidence, empathy, negotiation and mediation skills, teamwork and active problem-solving skills. The novel affordances of the Inter-Life virtual world which contributed to the development of the learning community included the ability to personalise learner engagement and activities from the outset along with ‘co-presence’ and ‘immersion’ and the flexibility provided by the innovative, technology-enhanced Inter-Life platform. This study presents some empirical evidence to demonstrate the efficacy of new models of learning that are mediated by innovative malleable technologies that can be shaped by the learner in a participatory manner.