Considerate,convivial and capacious? Finding a language to capture ethos in ‘creative’ schools

Concepts of school ‘ethos’ or ‘culture’ have been widely debated in education since the 1980s. This is partly as a consequence of marketisation, partly because ethos has been identified as a low-cost route to school improvement. Corporate, authoritarian, and most recently ‘military’ models of ethos have been widely promulgated in the UK. Another significant strand of educational thinking, however, has emphasised ethos for and as learning: how schools might prefigure alternative, more socially just, worlds. This article argues that accounting for such divergent notions of ethos demands greater attention to the intellectual resources mobilised in interpreting educational processes. We discuss schools that used their work with the English creative learning programme, Creative Partnerships, to develop what we describe as ‘considerate, convivial and capacious’ school ethos. We aim thereby to value their achievements, provide tools to contest dominant discourses around ethos, and advocate more critical, reflexive approaches to researching school cultures.     

Antoine Béchamp: pere de la biologie. Oui ou non?

There is an alternative medicine lobby that, in conjunction with antivivisectionists, believes Louis Pasteur to have been a fraud [R. Bottomley's You Don't Have to Feel Unwell! (Newleaf, 1994) is a recent example]. They frame their accusations around a rivalry between Pasteur and a contemporary, Antoine Béchamp, from whom they suggest Pasteur stole his ideas and then distorted them for his own purposes. This article explores some aspects of the controversies between Béchamp and Pasteur.     

Teenage Kicks: Exploring cultural value from a youth perspective

In contemporary accounts of cultural value, young people's perspectives are often restricted to analyses of their encounters with formal cultural institutions or schools or to debates surrounding the cultural implications of new digital spaces and technologies. Other studies have been dominated by instrumental accounts exploring the potential economic benefit and skills development facilitated by young people's cultural encounters and experiences. In this paper we examine the findings of a nine month project, which set out to explore what cultural value means to young people in Bristol. Between October 2013 and March 2014, the Arts and Humanities Research Council “Teenage Kicks” project organised 14 workshops at 7 different locations across the city, with young people aged 11–20. Working in collaboration with a network of cultural and arts organisations, the study gathered a range of empirical data investigating the complex ecologies of young people's everyday/“lived” cultures and values. Young people's own accounts of their cultural practices challenge normative definitions of culture and cultural value but also demonstrate how these definitions act to reproduce social inequalities in relation to cultural participation and social and cultural capital. The paper concludes that cultural policy-makers should listen and take young people's voices seriously in re-imaging the city's cultural offer for all young people.     

The crystallization of enzymes and virus proteins: laying to rest the colloidal concept of living systems

In 1946 three Americans shared the Nobel Prize for Chemistry--James Sumner 'for his discovery that enzymes can be crystallized', and John Northrop and Wendell Stanley 'for their preparation of enzymes and virus proteins in a pure form'. The award made history as the first time that the Chemistry Prize was shared by three individuals. It also doubled the number of Americans that had received the Chemistry award since its inception in 1901.     

Evaluating Evidence‐Based Practice Behaviors in Team Contexts

The article explores the application of the Hall and Hord (2010) levels of use model to the context of interprofessional teams in health care settings. The discussion provides a framework for evaluating the progression of evidence‐based practice behaviors over time. Although several forms of guidance exist for measuring the strength and characteristics of health care teams, there do not appear to be frameworks in place for assessing the evolution of evidence‐based practices in a team context.     

Biochemistry comes of age: a century of endeavour

Biochemistry began as an identifiable, separate discipline at the beginning of the twentieth century. This article traces its early development, focusing on three pioneers--Eduard Buchner, Arthur Croft Hill and Arthur Harden.     

Man of destiny: the life and work of Fritz Haber

'The German physical chemist Fritz Haber was distinguished not only for his researches, but also for his services to industry and to his country. Haber and the research institutes he directed contributed to a wide range of advances in physical chemistry. His most outstanding scientific achievement was his synthesis of ammonia, which solved the urgent problem of meeting the world demand for nitrogen fertiliser'. So begins the entry to Haber in the 1972 Encyclopaedia Britannica. Haber was indeed a great and versatile scientist, but his was also a vigorous and complex personality that interacted in unexpected ways with the social and political circumstances of his time.     

Learning to be a smart citizen

ABSTRACT

The international Smart Cities and the Learning Cities movements are not often linked. However, there are learning questions at stake here. Smart city agendas are often criticised as being technocratic and instrumental, prioritising market-led solutions to urban issues. Such criticism has led to moves to place the citizen at the centre of these discussions. This raises educational challenges: what theories and forms of learning are required for citizens to play a role in the development of digital, urban futures? This paper adopts ethnographic methods to study the assumptions about learning in a Europe-wide smart city project that included a component of citizen-led development. Our argument provides important messages for smart city planners and developers keen to include citizens in smart city development. It suggests that the current ‘banking’ models of learning adopted in relation to citizen participation are not fit for purpose and that a new model is needed. This needs to recognise citizen learning as situated in social and material contexts and embedded in unequal relations of power, knowledge and resources. We make the case for smart city initiatives to offer city inhabitants critical, creative learning opportunities that begin to address the inequalities that constitute the contemporary smart city.