Justice-sensitive education: the implications of transitional justice mechanisms for teaching and learning

ABSTRACT

This article introduces the notion of ‘justice-sensitive education’ – derived from the ideals and practices of transitional justice (TJ) in countries emerging from conflict. It describes three mechanisms for this: structural reforms (relating to inequity and division); curriculum change (the treatment of history, human rights and citizenship) and institutional culture (critical thinking and democratic, participatory pedagogy). A case study of Sri Lanka provides fresh illustrations of actual or potential work in these three areas. There appear five challenges to a justice-sensitive education: the wider context of schooling; willingness of educators to confront the past; barriers to introducing the critical thinking required for new norms and values to take root; programming and planning; and difficulties in measuring the impact of TJ measures in education. Yet however imperfect, TJ mechanisms indicate a society that wants to learn from past mistakes and show that some form of justice is possible in the future.     

Children's Vulnerability to Interparental Conflict: The Protective Role of Sibling Relationship Quality

This study tested whether the strength of the mediational pathway involving interparental conflict, adolescent emotional insecurity, and their psychological problems depended on the quality of their sibling relationships. Using a multimethod approach, 236 adolescents (M_age = 12.6 years) and their parents participated in three annual measurement occasions. Tests of moderated mediation revealed that indirect paths among interparental conflict, insecurity, and psychological problems were significant for teens with low, but not high, quality bonds with siblings. High-quality (i.e., strong) sibling relationships conferred protection by neutralizing interparental conflict as a precursor of increases in adolescent insecurity. Results did not vary as a function of the valence of sibling relationship properties, adolescent sex, or gender and age compositions of the dyad.     

Mapping the Final Frontier: A Publisher’s Experience Launching an Open Access Journal in the Burgeoning Mixed Access Economy

This article describes a program session that focused on publishers’ experiences launching Open Access (OA) journals and lessons learned. The speakers discussed the current journal marketplace, current journal business models, and the possible shape of the OA landscape and marketplace in the future.     

Contradictions of control: Lessons from exploring teachers' work in Botswana

Using the concept of teaching as a labour process, this paper explores the relationship between the work of teaching and the control of education by the state. Ethnographic data from Botswana is used to discuss emergent themes of teachers' certainties and uncertainties; staff divisions and cultures; accommodations and resistances to control; teachers as storekeepers of knowledge; and occupational rewards and addictions. The meaning and forms of ‘centralisation’ appear as important issues, and contradictions emerge in the exercise of control, with teachers able to recreate significant areas of professional and personal autonomy.     

Process Re-Design For Enhanced Human Performance Originally published in 1994, PIQ 7.3

Faced with sophisticated global competition, companies are busily reinventing“themselves. This offers an opportunity for performance technologists to re-think the value added component of their contribution to enhancing human performance. In this evaluation, the four values of speed, simplicity, stretch, and self-confidence assume a central role. Design, as in the past, is key, but design must be founded on the assumption that all human performance involves a process or combination of processes. Furthermore, processes are subject to variability of one kind or another, variability that is either predictable or random. It is argued that a process orientation, rather than a focus on inputs and outputs, offers performance technologists a more direct way of contributing to the realization of key business goals and more effectively focuses training and development on performance issues. Process re-design is a key strategy in the realization of these two goals.     

Whole blood pumping with a microthrottle pump

We have previously reported that microthrottle pumps (MTPs) display the capacity to pump solid phase suspensions such as polystyrene beads which prove challenging to most microfluidic pumps. In this paper we report employing a linear microthrottle pump (LMTP) to pump whole, undiluted, anticoagulated, human venous blood at 200 μl min(-1) with minimal erythrocyte lysis and no observed pump blockage. LMTPs are particularly well suited to particle suspension transport by virtue of their relatively unimpeded internal flow-path. Micropumping of whole blood represents a rigorous real-world test of cell suspension transport given blood's high cell content by volume and erythrocytes' relative fragility. A modification of the standard Drabkin method and its validation to spectrophotometrically quantify low levels of erythrocyte lysis by hemoglobin release is also reported. Erythrocyte lysis rates resulting from transport via LMTP are determined to be below one cell in 500 at a pumping rate of 102 μl min(-1).