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The recruitment and retention 'crises' in US and UK teaching have major and negative implications for the future of education. This pilot study uses extended conversations with Asian and African teaching staff to examine the role of values in helping teachers sustain positive contributions to children's lives and world. In five elementary schools, the researcher asked: "What is the role of personal values in recruiting, retaining, sustaining and building the creative capacity of teachers?" The study found that a close alignment of institutional and individual values generated strong positive impacts on teacher fulfillment and resilience. It further suggests that by using their own autobiographical 'values-stories', teachers could advance personal values and build their capacity to contribute. The article proposes implications for all education departments, universities and schools seeking to address declining rates of teacher recruitment and retention. Recommendations include greater attention to the values that bring individuals to education, a steer towards using values-stories across the curriculum and a focus on 'Big Issues' in Initial Teacher Education.

Introduction: Malawi is one of the world's poorest countries with very limited healthcare spending and a lack of post-graduate training for healthcare workers, including in critical illness management. Critical illness simulation courses have been shown to be an effective training tool and form a key part of training for healthcare professionals in the developed world. However, these courses can be difficult and costly to set. We therefore developed an affordable and simple to run programme for use in a regional hospital in Malawi. Methods: We delivered a series of lectures alongside a simulation course based around critical illness management, including cardio-pulmonary-resuscitation. The course was taught by a visiting physician who trained a local clinical officer to continue running the course in the future. Feedback on candidate confidence in managing acutely unwell patients was collected before and after the course. Results: All staff in the unit attended the course. Median candidate confidence across all seven assessed areas increased significantly. Conclusions: Despite the basic equipment used in our course, we received very positive feedback and feel that this highlights that significant improvements in staff skillset, and therefore patient outcomes, can be achieved using a relatively simple and low cost intervention that can also easily be continued by local members of staff, ensuring sustainability. Introduction of similar courses in other resource poor settings may help improve patient outcomes without the significant financial outlay and lack of future-proofing seen with many healthcare initiatives that are deployed, and are often unsuccessful, in the developing world.

Resilience is essential to the good teacher. This paper summarises research on factors that have sustained one life in education and compares them with narratives from nine other long-serving and fulfilled teachers. It identifies some elements that build teacher resilience and discusses how this knowledge might apply to teacher education and the school experience of children. An original method of auto-ethnography is used to discover sources of the personal values, attitudes, experiences and passions that contribute to resilience. An interpretivist paradigm and multiple perspectives are argued as necessary to discover what builds, preserves and strengthens the ability to withstand the multiple and continuous challenges of the teaching life. The literature review re-analysis writings that directly influenced a single life. Other auto-ethnographic sources include six contrasting personal autobiographies, diaries, letters and transcribed biographical conversations with nine close friends in teaching. The research suggests that teacher resilience is associated with (a) a work-life closely aligned to personal values, (b) plentiful opportunities to develop friendships, and (c) frequent chances to use lifelong interests in creative contexts. The process of research changed the researcher's practice in education. A sample of four teacher education projects founded on the research conclusions, provide evidence for its recommendations: that autobiographical and biographical activity, creative explorations of lifelong interests and personal values should be part of all teacher education programmes. Incorporating these recommendations would, it is claimed, widen inclusion and directly benefit the lives and learning of children.

This article surveys the state of the humanities in English primary schools drawing on evidence from serving head teachers, current literature and policy documents. The findings suggest that whilst the humanities are highly valued in schools, there are serious challenges which threaten the "broad and balanced" curriculum. It is suggested that a greater focus on spiritual, moral, social and cultural (SMSC) education and engagement with subject associations and alternative learning environments can help to rectify this imbalance. Such an approach recognises looming social, cultural and environmental threats, which have the potential to support children's psychological health and well-being.

In a time of increasing ecological anxiety, Ovid's Metamorphoses gains a new relevance for its distinct portrayal of the relationship between humanity and the environment. While the poem has exerted a significant historic influence in the visual arts, the text's importance reemerges for artists today as they explore current preoccupations with anthropogenic climate change, environmental degradation and posthuman futures. The significance of this 21st-century reception of Ovid in the visual arts, however, is yet to be fully examined. In this paper, I consider the work of three contemporary Danish artists, who draw the Metamorphoses into ecological discourse, representing the afterlife of the poem in the Anthropocene. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Low-energy electrons dissolved in liquid ammonia or aqueous media are powerful reducing agents that promote challenging reduction reactions but can also cause radiation damage to biological tissue. Knowledge of the underlying mechanistic processes remains incomplete, particularly with respect to the details and energetics of the electron transfer steps. In this work, we show how ultraviolet (UV) photoexcitation of metal-ammonia clusters could be used to generate tunable low-energy electrons in situ. Specifically, we identified UV light–induced generation of spin-paired solvated dielectrons and their subsequent relaxation by an unconventional electron transfer–mediated decay as an efficient, low-energy electron source. The process is robust and straightforward to induce with the prospect of improving our understanding of radiation damage and fostering mechanistic studies of solvated electron reduction reactions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It has been 49 years since the last discovery of a new virus family in the model yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae. A large-scale screen to determine the diversity of double-stranded RNA (dsRNA) viruses in S. cerevisiae has identified multiple novel viruses from the family Partitiviridae that have been previously shown to infect plants, fungi, protozoans, and insects. Most S. cerevisiae partitiviruses (ScPVs) are associated with strains of yeasts isolated from coffee and cacao beans. The presence of partitiviruses was confirmed by sequencing the viral dsRNAs and purifying and visualizing isometric, non-enveloped viral particles. ScPVs have a typical bipartite genome encoding an RNA-dependent RNA polymerase (RdRP) and a coat protein (CP). Phylogenetic analysis of ScPVs identified three species of ScPV, which are most closely related to viruses of the genus Cryspovirus from the mammalian pathogenic protozoan Cryptosporidium parvum. Molecular modeling of the ScPV RdRP revealed a conserved tertiary structure and catalytic site organization when compared to the RdRPs of the Picornaviridae. The ScPV CP is the smallest so far identified in the Partitiviridae and has structural homology with the CP of other partitiviruses but likely lacks a protrusion domain that is a conspicuous feature of other partitivirus particles. ScPVs were stably maintained during laboratory growth and were successfully transferred to haploid progeny after sporulation, which provides future opportunities to study partitivirus-host interactions using the powerful genetic tools available for the model organism S. cerevisiae. Author summary: This article describes the discovery and characterization of multiple strains and species of viruses from the family Partitiviridae in the brewer's and baker's yeast S. cerevisiae. These novel viruses have bipartite genomes packaged in spherical viral particles with structural homology to members of the family Partitiviridae. Strikingly, yeast partitiviruses are most closely related to viruses from human pathogenic protozoa and not partitiviruses of other fungi. As partitiviruses can positively and negatively contribute to a host's physiology (including important human and plant pathogens), the presence of partitiviruses in S. cerevisiae offers a unique opportunity to study the biology of these viruses in a well-developed model system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Infants attune to their birth language during the second half of infancy. However, internationally adopted children are often uniquely required to attune to their birth language, and then reattune to their adoptive language. Children who were adopted from India into America at ages 6-60 months (N = 8) and had minimal further exposure to their birth languages were compared to age-matched American non-adopted controls. Without training, neither group could discriminate a phonemic contrast that occurs in their birth language but not in English. However, after training on the contrast, the adopted group (N = 8) improved significantly and discriminated the contrast more accurately than their non-adopted peers. While English had explicitly replaced the birth language of the adopted sample, traces of early exposure conferred privileges on subsequent learning. These findings are consistent with behavioral and neurophysiological data from animals that have identified some of the mechanisms underlying such a "retention without further use" phenomenon.

The role of the emotions in learning has long been acknowledged but is often overlooked. This article considers the impact one particular emotion, happiness, has on learning and the school curriculum. Recent reports have drawn attention to the importance of happiness (or the lack of it) by highlighting concerns about childhood well-being. At the same time, there is increasing evidence from psychology and neuroscience to suggest that periods of happiness are linked to personal growth, health and development. When we are happy it seems we are more likely to be receptive to outside stimuli than when we are sad or distressed. Happiness also makes us more disposed to engage in creative endeavour, which is itself another source of fulfilment. Positive psychologists argue that rather than being fixed, happiness, optimism and other positive traits can be learnt. We offer evidence from our own professional experience in teaching to corroborate these claims and to extend the debate about the relevance of affective neuroscience to education. In conclusion, we consider how a focus on happiness might underpin a positive approach to curriculum reform.

This report summarizes GENERATE, a pilot research project conducted by 12 artists and their children 3-14. Simply put, these artist/art educator/parents allowed their own children unlimited access to their studios, materials, equipment and workspaces for two years. During that time the children were able to work alongside their parents on making combined and separate art works and contribute to a series of public exhibitions. The project was sponsored by The Turner Contemporary in Margate and the University of the Creative Arts (UCA). The artist/parents kept logs or diaries of what happened, and attended a series of joint meetings to discuss developments. At the same time a series of public workshops were organized (sometimes from a large trailer parked in a shopping centre car park) in which other children and parents from Thanet, Kent were encouraged to spend time making art together. The researcher collected evidence of the progress of the project from observations, discussions, telephone and email communications, photographs and the logs of the artists involved. The report discusses the challenges this project has raised regarding: (1) definitions of creativity; (2) adult artist's conceptions of art; (3) the motivations towards creativity; (4) the teach-ability of creativity; (5) parenting; (6) inter-generational learning; and (7) child-led aspects of schooling. (Contains 1 figure.)

This paper documents the impact of a study visit to south India in 2007 on students following courses in initial teacher education at Canterbury Christ Church University, UK. The research was conducted by the two course leaders and employed a varied methodology, involving open-ended questionnaires, self-reporting of emotions, video diaries, informal conversations and follow-up interviews. The main finding was that the study visit was a powerful learning experience which transformed students' thinking by creating dissonance on a cognitive, emotional and existential level. These results are placed alongside current research in psychology and neuroscience to argue that a sense of hope and personal flourishing can be generated through experiences of this kind. This is supported by a model of transformational learning which highlights personal growth and development. We conclude by proposing that the study visit provides an example of how intercultural understanding can reinvigorate teacher education with a sense of meaning and hope. (Contains 4 figures and 1 table.)

This article is a summary of a cross-Arts, action research project in primary teacher education. The Higher Education ARTS and Schools (HEARTS) project aimed at attitude and pedagogical change amongst teacher education students. The researchers chose to explore the effects and effectiveness of the Arts in making meaning and relevance for both children and university students. The project used challenging, outdoor experiences shared equally by students and pupils in an attempt to generate creative thinking. The article describes the project and highlights key research findings from a meta-analysis of student research assignments and logged student reflections. It suggests that there are major challenges for teacher education, in particular to support new teachers in discovering their own areas of creativity, enhancing those of the children they teach and in becoming more confident in making their own curricular contributions. The research also revealed neglected capacity in tutor/tutor, tutor/student and student/pupil collaboration. For the Arts in schools, the project strongly suggested that the meaning-making qualities of the Arts were currently under-used and should be maximized. For schools the researched and researching students recognized the great potential of shifting the locus of control towards children and also the power of the Arts as motivators for learning across all curriculum subjects. (Contains 14 notes and 3 figures.)

In the light of the government's Excellence and Enjoyment primary strategy, the current emphasis on well-being arising from Every Child Matters and recent moves by the QCA, Creative Partnerships and OFSTED to promote creative thinking, and cross-curricular and thematic approaches in Key Stages 1, 2 and 3, teacher education is looking again at childcentred and experience-based learning. The article reports on insights from a recent crosscurricular arts project in Kent which can be applied to any environment near your school. (Contains 3 figures.)

Purpose: Current research in both cognitive neuroscience and what has been called "positive psychology" point to the need for wholesale reappraisal of what happens in schools, especially with regard to the wellbeing of children. Seeks to examine this issue. Design/methodology/approach: Reviews and discussion of research by the World Health Organization and current UK reports on the mental health of children together with US and European research on the optimum conditions for children's learning. Findings: Current research findings in both psychology and cognitive neurology suggest that the condition of "positive emotion" is a prerequisite of deep, transferable learning, and also of a healthy mind and body. The author suggests that involvement in creative activity and creative thinking in any context seems to be a particularly effective way of promoting this sense of wellbeing. Practical implications: A curriculum and school ethos designed to promote a sense of security and happiness would be a powerful means of addressing under-achievement in large sections of UK society. It is hypothesized that the mood of distrust and unhappiness, which negatively affects both the health and learning of many young people, would be effectively addressed by a curriculum which concentrated more on the kind of creative and practical activities which provoke positive emotion. Originality/value: Provides 12 practical recommendations arising from ongoing work of educationists, psychologists and neurologists for consideration by leaders of health education and school policy. (Contains 3 plates and 1 note.)