Exploring Sign Use in Two Settings

Nicola Grove, speech/language therapist, and Sine McDougall, psychologist, from the Division of Psychiatry of Disability, Department of Mental Health Sciences, St. George's Hospital Medical School, London, explore use of Makaton signs in teacher-directed and free play settings by children with severe learning difficulties.     

Environmental jolts, institutional change, and the creation of entrepreneurial opportunity in the US electric power industry

The relationship between institutional change and entrepreneurship is poorly understood. We build the theory in this area by tracing institutional change in the US electric power industry over a 40-year period. Our analysis shows that environmental jolts mobilize actors to reformulate institutions, resulting in increased entrepreneurial opportunity. When the institutional environment is stable, we find that incumbent organizational forms and embedded logics present formidable obstacles to entrepreneurial activity. Environmental jolts, however, catalyze search processes and motivate the evaluation of current institutional logics. Specifically, in the case of the electric power industry, environments of abundance and regulation resulted in homogeneity of organizational structures and strategies, and few entrepreneurial opportunities. Environments marked by scarcity and crisis, however, witnessed heavy scrutiny of existing institutional arrangements that eroded their taken-for-grantedness and symbolic value, resulting in opportunities for entrepreneurial action.     

Listening to students’ silences – a case study examining students’ participation and non-participation in physical education

Background: For years researchers have been engaged in revealing the impact of the hidden curriculum in physical education (PE) on students’ participation and non-participation. The hidden PE curriculum encompasses the knowledge, the relations, the assumptions, the norms and the beliefs that students unconsciously and unintentionally learn through the process of education. As the hidden curriculum reinforces particular values and attitudes among students in a very subtle and often unnoticed fashion, it limits students’ possibilities for becoming aware of, and thus reporting, how the tacit messages communicated through the hidden curriculum impact on their position of participation and non-participation. Thus, in this article, we argue that examining students’ silences, that is the things students do not voice, is significant for the understanding of the impact of the hidden curriculum on students’ participation and non-participation in PE.

Purposes: In this article, we aim to develop insight into students’ silences in order to elucidate how aspects of the hidden curriculum serve to reinforce some students’ non-participation in PE. Much attention has been devoted to particular values and attitudes unintentionally transmitted by teachers in PE. However, in this article, we examine how the everyday exchanges between the students themselves may also convey a hidden set of meanings, that impact on students’ actual experiences of the PE curriculum, and thus mitigate the intended effects of students’ participation.

Research design: The backdrop for this article is a single-case study carried out in a multi-ethnic and co-educational secondary school in Denmark from January to December 2014. The article draws on material collected through focus group interviews with 7th grade students (including participant-diagrams filled out by students) along with observations of their PE classes. The observations took place once a week throughout the whole calendar year.

Findings: In the article, we point to students’ intentional silences that are highly reflective of the normative expectations negotiated within the peer group. In addition, we show that the pressures toward social conformity have a direct impact on the positions of non-participation intentionally taken up by some of the less socially respected students in PE. These students were highly aware that how they behaved in PE and what they voiced in the interviews might have consequences for their peer group connections within PE and for their social reputation among peers outside of PE. In addition, we add to the current literature on student silence by pointing to a category of non-privileged silences. These silences revealed that a minor group of students were not aware of or had not recognized their position as non-participants in PE. Moreover, they appeared unable to imagine that things could be different and to voice a desire for change.

Conclusions: We argue that our findings reveal critical aspects of students’ non-participation that would be difficult to access if we did not listen to, hear and attempt to understand students’ silences. In order to extend the knowledge base on students’ participation and non-participation in PE, we hope that this article may also encourage other researchers to let students’ silences breathe and speak.     

Learning across silos: Design Factories as hubs for co‐creation

Collaboration through innovation is central to the discussion of how today's universities can respond to new interdisciplinary challenges, competitive environments and stakeholder complexity. Innovation hubs represent a dynamic example of how the public sector, including higher education, is responding to the need for new methods and perspectives that foster desired intra‐institutional change. This study examines one of these types of platforms, the Design Factory Global Network originating at Aalto University, in order to shed light on key enablers and barriers to furthering collaborative efforts within higher education. Based on 25 in‐depth interviews with 17 Design Factories, including perspectives from students, staff and educators, the findings show that institutional policy fostering flexibility, securing a physical cross‐disciplinary and multi‐purpose collaborative space, upper level support and building community are all vital in ensuring design‐driven experimentation that contributes to the effectiveness of higher education.     

Understanding implementation and change in complex interventions. From single- to multi-methodological research on the promotion of youths’ participation in physical education

Abstract

Existing studies on complex interventions aiming to promote youths’ participation in physical education (PE) appear to be predominantly single-methodological. The aim of this article is to examine the benefits and challenges of evaluating an intervention to increase youths’ participation and experiences of social inclusion in the PE context using a multi-method approach integrating quantitative and qualitative approaches. The multi-method approach allowed an integration of the findings with regard to the implementation as well as the effect of the intervention. First of all, standardized questionnaires provided a manipulation check of the delivery of the intervention, while qualitative observations and interviews identified the diversity in pupils’ reactions thereto. Secondly, quantitative findings on the effect of the intervention were related to qualitative findings pointing to ambiguities in the pupils’ observed behaviour and interview responses. Thus, a more complete understanding of the implementation processes and effect of the intervention developed.