Registered nurses' constructed meaning of concepts of solution and their use in clinical practice

Since the introduction of nursing into tertiary institutions in Australia in 1975, there has been increasing interest in the teaching of physical science to nurses. Various courses in physical science for nurse students have been developed. They vary in length and content but there is agreement that concepts taught should be closely related to nursing applications. The choice of relevant concepts tends to be made by individual curriculum developers. This paper reports an examination of the use of physical science concepts and their relevance from the perspective of registered nurses practising in general ward areas. Inherent in this study is the premise that for registered nurses to have ideas of the physical science underlying their practice they must have constructed meaning first for these concepts. Specific chemical concepts related to solutions are discussed in these terms. Specializations: phenomenology, thinking, caring, euthanasia and palliative care, curriculum development for nurses. Specializations: thinking, science curricula for nurses, isotope geochemistry, mass spectrometry.     

Enhancing postgraduate learning and development: a participatory action learning and action research approach through conferences

As supervisors who advocate the transformational potential of research both to generate theory and practical and emancipatory outcomes, we practice participatory action learning and action research (PALAR). This paper offers an illustrative case of how supervision practices based on action learning can foster emancipatory and lifelong learning within a university context that is becoming ever more focused on throughput of students, rather than on the quality of their learning. Conference attendance offers an excellent opportunity for postgraduate students to develop as researchers and lifelong learners, yet anxiety often prevents them from making the most of the learning experience. We explain how we encouraged the development of capabilities in students through a PALAR support programme that assisted postgraduate students prepare for a conference to make overall participation, presenting a paper and subsequent publication a true learning experience. We generated and analysed data from the written reflections of 11 postgraduate students who participated in the programme. The findings suggest that action learning, specifically PALAR, can be used to enable a rich learning experience for postgraduate students attending conferences through fostering relationships, building trust, a supportive environment, collaboration, communication and competence among them. Postgraduate students who experienced our PALAR support programme developed not only skills, knowledge, confidence and deeper appreciation of learning opportunities through conferences, but also understanding of the principles of PALAR that apply not just to the conference context but across all aspects of learning and research and life at large.     

Implementing information technology at the Border Technikon in South Africa

The mission of Border Technikon in South Africa is to provide the best vocational and career education to students of all racial and cultural backgrounds in the East London area. The staff believes that an important component of this mission includes giving students marketable skills for the information age. Therefore, in 1996, the Technikon undertook an extensive program to implement new information technologies that would help fulfill the institution's mission. Implementing information technology at academic institutions in developing countries must address a special set of problems, some of which are technology gaps, educational deficits, and lack of adequate facilities. This paper describes some of the more unique problems the Technikon encountered, and a few solutions. During 1996, she served as a Senior Librarian at Border Technikon, East London, South Africa, under the Educators for Africa Program of the International Foundation of Education and Self-Help.     

The Commerce of Utility: Teaching Mathematical Geography in Early Modern England

The teaching and learning of geographical and mathematical knowledge in early modern England was a complex interaction among scholars, practitioners, merchants, and gentry. Each group had different values and goals associated with geographical knowledge and therefore different educational venues and different topics to be investigated. This paper argues that the alternate educational sites of the universities of Oxford and Cambridge and the more entrepreneurial site of London and the merchant halls were both important to the development of geographical knowledge and produced an important synergy of practical and esoteric interests and concerns.     

Reimagining the purpose of VET – Expanding the capability to aspire in South African Further Education and Training students

This paper applies the capabilities approach to the broader debate of the role of vocational education and training (VET) in poverty alleviation. The capabilities approach provides an approach for conceptualising and evaluating VET which differs in orientation from dominant productivist conceptions. It does so by shifting the focus from economic development to human development. By placing the well-being of VET students at the centre of our concern it shifts the lens from income generation and with it employability to a lens on capability expansion which includes but is not limited to the capability to work. The paper is based on interviews with 20 South African Further Education and Training (FET) college students. The central argument is that VET has an important role to play in poverty alleviation, but only if located in a multi-dimensional view of poverty which understands poverty as capability deprivation across multiple human functionings. In this broader notion of poverty, the role that VET plays includes training for employability, but also includes the expansion of other important capabilities such as, and in the voice of a FET student interviewed in this study, ‘the ability to dream’, or in the language of the capabilities approach, the capability to aspire.     

Supporting Lesotho teachers to develop resilience in the face of the HIV and AIDS pandemic

HIV and AIDS threaten to erode the wellbeing of teachers who are faced with an increasing number of children rendered vulnerable by the pandemic. This article explores the usefulness of a supportive group intervention, Resilient Educators (REds), in supporting Lesotho teachers to respond to the HIV and AIDS-related challenges. A time-series pre- and post-intervention design was used to evaluate the programme. The findings indicate that the intervention led to an increase in the sense of agency of participating teachers both on a personal and community level. The findings have international significance for teachers working in similar contexts characterised by extreme adversity.     

Charter school authorizers and student achievement

In this paper we analyze the relationship between charter school authorizers and student achievement. We perform this analysis using a 10-year panel dataset from Minnesota, a state that permits four distinct types of authorizers—local school boards, postsecondary institutions, nonprofit organizations, and the Minnesota Department of Education. The results of the analysis indicate that there is no statistically significant relationship between charter school authorizing type and mean levels of student achievement. However, the analysis also reveals that schools authorized by nonprofit organizations exhibit substantially more variability in achievement than schools authorized by local school boards.     

Information Sources and the Coverage of Social Issues in Partisan Publications: A Content Analysis of 25 Years of the Progressive and the National Review

An extensive research literature concludes that, in the United States, mainstream media tend to present a remarkably narrow, homogenous and centrist conservative view of political life that tends to support maintenance of the status quo. This is often attributed to heavy media reliance on government officials, leaders of political groups, and large bureaucratic organization as routine, predictable sources of information. In this context, it is important to understand how explicitly partisan publications construct their accounts of public affairs that provide citizens with alternatives to this perspective proffered by the dominant media. A content analysis of 25 years of 2 of America's leading partisan magazines, the conservative National Review and the liberal Progressive, provides data that raise questions about the extent to which information sources do influence the partisanship of media content.     

Visual materials on local television news programs

When sight was added to sound, the problems of presenting the news of the day multiplied, as did the cost of such coverage. Nevertheless, few news directors are satisfied with the strict “man‐on‐camera” approach; they prefer to use the additional information channel for a certain amount of visual augmentation of the audio channel's content. Beacuse television stations in a given market rarely have a chance to examine the output of stations in other markets, the survey reported in the following article was made'. Both the sources of visual news materials and their uses are studied in a sample of midwestern stations. It is interesting to examine this report after a review of William Hazard's study for the Radio‐Television News Directors Association, “Adequacy of Coverage by Still Picture and Film Services” published in the Journal of Broadcasting, Vol. IV, No. 1, pp. 64–76, Winter, 1959–60.