Simulation in Higher Education: A sociomaterial view

This article presents a sociomaterial account of simulation in higher education. Sociomaterial approaches change the ontological and epistemological bases for understanding learning and offer valuable tools for addressing important questions about relationships between university education and professional practices. Simulation has grown in many disciplines as a means to bring the two closer together. However, the theoretical underpinnings of simulation pedagogy are limited. This paper extends the wider work of applying sociomaterial approaches to educational phenomena, taking up Schatzki’s practice theory as a distinctive basis for doing so. The question ‘What is being simulated?’ is posed, prompting discussion of multiple bodies, performances and experiences. The potential of adopting such a framework for understanding simulation as a pedagogic practice that brings the classroom and workplace together is illustrated with reference to clinical education in nursing.     

The Scottish Credit and Qualifications Framework: what's academic practice got to do with it?

National Qualifications Frameworks (NQF) are a globally established and expanding phenomenon. They are increasingly merging and being mapped onto meta-qualifications frameworks. One key NQF in both these roles is the Scottish Credit and Qualifications Framework (SCQF). Much research categorises the different types of NQF, details their success and failure, and there is a steadily expanding body of critical research into NQF. Despite this, little research has focused on how NQF are used in day to day academic practice in the very institutions whose qualifications they frame. This article begins to redress this by focusing on the SCQF as an exemplar. It presents a synthesis between contemporary literature, a documentary analysis of SCQF literature and the data from interviews with 15 stakeholders in different educational roles. The findings show that, despite the claims of the SCQF literature and contemporary literature regarding the success of the SCQF, its diffusion and the extent of its use amongst these stakeholders are limited. Instead, it is used more as a symbolic tick box exercise and largely ignored. We discuss the implications of this and posit questions that challenge the focus of existing research into NQF and argue for a shift in the criteria by which they are judged from educational to market based ones.     

Cop talk,police stories,and the social construction of organizational drama

This essay examines how police officers socially construct a sense of organizational drama when they label, valorize, and narrate their work experience. This social construction of organizational drama is illustrated with data collected from a four month observational study of a small police force, fictitiously named the “Valley View Police Department.”     

Educating and Training the Workforce to Work with People with Dementia: Two Projects from the United Kingdom

Educating and training the dementia workforce is a global challenge, given the expected increasing number of people living with dementia across the world as the population ages. Two projects from the UK (one regionally and one locality based) investigated courses available to the workforce and mapped the content of identified courses against a locally developed dementia care pathway. The locality project included a survey of what percentage of staff time was spent with people living with dementia, and what percentage of staff caseloads were devoted to people living with dementia. There was a great variation in the extent of education and training available, with some stages of the dementia care pathway poorly addressed. An educational strategy for the dementia workforce in the UK might include four categories of education and training: basic dementia awareness, intermediate level, advanced level, and dementia awareness for managers. Staff requiring education and training might be divided into three groups: those employed to work specifically with people living with dementia and their families; those working with people who have other conditions but some of whom will have a coincidental dementia; those working with other conditions but in settings where a high proportion of their patients have a comorbid dementia. To improve workforce skills in dementia care will require actions across the whole of education and training for professionals and untrained workers who provide services to this group.     

Mapping public support for innovation: A comparison of policy alignment in the UK and France

This paper proposes and tests a three-dimensional model of public support design as a framework to compare public incentives for innovation in firms through time and across countries, and consequently to compare forms of policy alignment of innovation objectives in an economy. Using data on 149 French and British policy programmes from the early 1980s to 2002, this paper shows that policy-makers implement programmes within a different three-dimensional design space in order to align several distinctive objectives and consequently strengthen the impact of governmental measures. Moreover, as the objectives of the national players and policy-makers evolved, the portfolio of innovation policies also evolved in their separate ways. Nevertheless, some similar trends are also observed.     

Cognitive and Neural Development of Individuated Self-Representation in Children

Processing the self-relevance of information facilitates recall. Similarly, processing close-other-related information facilitates recall to a lesser degree than processing self-relevant information. This memory advantage may be viewed as an index of the degree to which the representation of self is differentiated from representations of close others. To test developmental hypotheses concerning the self, this study examined the relation of memory for self- and mother-referentially processed information in participants age 7–13 years (Experiment 1: N  = 37; Experiment 2: N  = 14). Memory for words encoded with reference to oneself increases with age, relative to memory for words encoded with reference to one's mother. When used as an individual difference measure, the difference in self versus mother memory correlates with regions of the rostral anterior cingulate associated with affective salience.     

Student engagement in neo-liberal times: what is missing?

Quality teaching is increasingly prioritized in higher education. One reason is that government funding requires students to succeed in their studies and be ready for employment. In response, educators throughout the Western world have generated large quantities of evidence-based, practical, often uncritical research about what works to improve teaching, learning and student success. Much of this research carries the label student engagement. But student engagement is a complex construct used to identify what students do, think and feel when learning and how teachers can improve that doing, thinking and feeling in instructional settings. Despite its extensive coverage of learning and teaching, the paper asks whether something is missing from student engagement. It recognizes the complexity of the engagement construct and examines its key ideas but identifies three missing elements: critique; learning agency/democracy; as well as purposes, knowledge and values that transcend powerful political discourses in neo-liberal times.