A Bioethos for Bodies: Respecting a Priceless Resource

The value that willed body donors provide to medical education is priceless. Their precious gift helps to teach anatomy, spatial relationships between morphological structures, anatomical variation, and professionalism to medical students in a way that plastic models, podcasts, and lectures cannot. They are also an important resource for medical research and a wide variety of postgraduate training opportunities. While many body donation programs throughout the world are nonprofit organizations, there are body donation companies in the United States that sell donors for-profit. These “body brokers” have accumulated large profits from this business. It is incongruous that others would profit from such a priceless, freely donated gift. To prevent this incongruity, it is proposed that the international anatomical community develop a normative culture (a bioethos) for body donation programs. This would involve the conscious and systematic development of ethical principles for the day-to-day policies and practices of institutions that collect and use human bodies. With the development of this bioethos, a cultural shift in how donors are treated would occur and, over time, this would become the normal practice. These principles would become fundamental and foundational for the procurement and use of priceless human tissues.     

Does the Model of Language in the National Literacy Strategy Create Failure for Pupils from Differing Language Backgrounds?

The National Literacy Strategy (NLS) was introduced by the government in the wake of the hotly debated issue of falling educational standards in the UK. All schools were required to adopt the NLS Literacy Hour unless they could show their preferred programme would result in raised levels of achievement. My experience of delivering the Literacy Hour has been a process of adaptation to the needs of my pupils, who are drawn mainly from groups whose language backgrounds differ from that which is dominant in school. I have found that the requirements of NLS, together with many of the commercial resources used to teach it, are not appropriate for pupils from these groups and a question arose: is it the pupils who are in some way deficient or is it the approach and the resources being used? This article takes a case study of the use of a commercially produced resource to explore the model of language implicit in NLS, the kinds of resources it generates and the ways in which this creates failure in pupils from different language backgrounds. It then considers the New Literacy Studies and their implications for an alteration in our approach.     

Themenheft: Datenintegration

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