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Scholars theorize that black–white disparities in self-employment persist because of racial disparities in human capital (e.g. educational attainment) and financial capital (e.g. assets). Such disp...

Ron Scapp is Professor of Humanities and Teacher Education at the College of Mount Saint Vincent, USA and Reclaiming Education is his third sole authored book after Managing to be Different: Educat...

With social survey data from a random sample of 1252 black and white adults who participated in the Nashville Stress and Health Study, we cross-classified biological markers of dysregulation with self-report health measures. Our aim was to quantify the degree of concordance between them. The study collected blood and urine samples to derive a 10 component estimate of allostatic load. In addition, the computer-assisted interview included an array of self-report measures such as self-perceived health, doctor-diagnosed diseases, bed days, and activity limitations. Allostatic load and the self-report measures were dichotomised. Modest concordance was observed between allostatic load and self-perceived health (OR = 1.742), doctor-diagnosed diseases (OR = 2.309), bed days (OR = 1.103), activity limitations (OR = 1.778), and ill on any self-report health measure (OR = 1.700). The self-report measures were significantly predictive of allostatic load, with the exception of bed days. Further, there was litt...

The diversification of settings in which higher education is delivered has resulted in a growing proportion of lecturers entering teaching from professional backgrounds. This is a challenging transition as lecturers are rarely given the space to consider the implications of this move on their identities and practice styles. Writing is recognised as a powerful methodology through which individuals can make sense of experiences and conceptualise them in light of historical, theoretical and social perspectives. In this paper we consider the experiences of 10 college lecturers who used writing to explore this transition as part of a professional development initiative to promote their writing skills. They were providing higher education in further education colleges across South West England. This project ran over two years, involving a year-long professional development intervention and a subsequent evaluation. Over this time the lecturers produced a number of written pieces. We present the different styles ...

© 2014, © 2014 Taylor and Francis Group, LLC. Within the context of Australian workplace literacy and numeracy programmes, and based on a larger study from an ethnographic perspective, we outline two case studies of manufacturing companies implementing training programmes in ‘lean’ production processes. The role of literacy and numeracy in the training programmes was approached quite differently in the two companies. In one company, a trainer delivered the lean training to a group of workers selected on the basis of their formally assessed literacy and numeracy needs and the training was preceded by some ‘upskilling’ in literacy and numeracy skills. We refer to this training as an orthodox ‘deficit’ model in which literacy and numeracy are seen as pre-requisite skills and potentially ‘problems’ for workers undertaking training programmes. In the other company, literacy and numeracy were not addressed specifically and, in effect, were completely embedded in the lean training and indistinguishable as elements of the training program. We discuss this embedded nature of literacy and numeracy within a conceptualisation of literacy and numeracy as social practices. We use these two case studies to indicate some implications for workplace training programmes of different understandings of the role of literacy and numeracy in workplaces.

Public policy discourses claim that there is a 'crisis' in the literacy and numeracy levels of the Australian workforce. In this paper, we propose a methodology for examining this 'crisis' from a critical perspective. We draw on findings from an ongoing research project by the authors which investigates production workers' literacy and numeracy in lean manufacturing firms. We focus on how language, literacy and numeracy (LLN) practices are embedded in production work and investigate various perspectives, including those of management, trainers and workers, on LLN problems and issues in the workplace. We adopt a critical perspective that analyses the way work, learning in work, and literacy and numeracy in the workplace are shaped and reshaped by social relations and culture, values and the histories of the industry and the local workplaces. This perspective examines the literacy and numeracy as social practices and using the theoretical analysis of cultural-historical activity theory, we indicate some of the complexities surrounding literacy and numeracy issues in workplaces, which have implications for the dominant 'crisis' discourse. © 2013 The Vocational Aspect of Education Ltd.

Growing emphasis on research output has spawned initiatives to enhance writing practices, often targeted at groups less familiar with academic research practices. This paper discusses a collaborative writing group project for higher education lecturers working in further education colleges. Participants had previously undertaken funded pedagogic research projects. The authors analyse participants’ writing during the initiative and data to review the design, operation and impact of the writing group. They discuss challenging preconceptions and normalising the practice of writing, consider how academic developers can support lecturers’ writing practices and identify recommendations to promote the longer term impact of such work.

The recently published Mineral Extraction and Archaeology: A Practice Guide (English Heritage, 2008) identifies the use of geomorphological mapping and specialist remote sensing technologies allied to other techniques as important tools for use in the investigation of deeply buried archaeological sites. Such approaches are particularly valuable within environments like river valleys where prospection is particularly difficult due to the masking effect of alluvium; however, some of these techniques are unproven in several major river catchments where aggregate extraction is significant and they have yet to be widely integrated in commercial practice as part of the planning process. Methodological approaches using these techniques have largely been developed since 2002 through a number of research projects supported by the Aggregates Levy Sustainability Fund (ALSF) and English Heritage. They focus on enhancing understanding of the geoarchaeological and chronological development of river valley floor...

The decision to make the UK student population financially responsible for their own university education has major implications for the future of higher education provision. Chief among these implications will undoubtedly be a much stronger emphasis on the student experience, not least the experience of the teaching and learning environment. Given the increasing influence of consumerism on student identity, the distinct possibility exists that such notions of market-led accountability will be first in line to shape how the academic–student relationship is redefined and understood in future years. It is therefore an appropriate time to explore alternatives to such a narrow understanding of relationships—an understanding that inevitably tends to frame direct accountability in terms of economic exchange. It is argued in this paper that one alternative can be developed by exploring a more relational approach to HE pedagogy, and more specifically one that is based on a synthesis of critical theory and psychoa...

The survival of one of Europe's most important Mesolithic sites, Star Carr, has been threatened owing to recent changes in its hydrology and associated changes in groundwater geochemistry. Before this study it was unclear what was controlling these changes, but possible causes were changes in precipitation regime (notably the frequency of drought), changes in groundwater abstraction, recent agricultural drainage or a combination of these factors. This paper evaluates the hydrology of Star Carr and its environs within the River Hertford sub-catchment of the River Derwent. Available hydrological data (precipitation, evapotranspiration, river flow and groundwater levels) were collated and used to characterise the River Hertford catchment and provide a hydrological and hydrogeological context for the site. The data were augmented by the insertion of 12 dipwells into the site which were used for both site monitoring and model testing. The monitoring included water abstraction for isotopic analyses (δ2H...

Glastonbury Lake Village is one of very few wetland settlements to be almost entirely excavated in the British Isles and Europe. Its stratigraphic context was originally investigated by Godwin who correlated Glastonbury with a “second flood horizon” dated at c. 2060–1900 cal BP. Henceforth both were directly linked to marine incursions through the Axe valley in the late Iron Age. Godwin's investigations of the site lead him to believe that it bordered on open water to the east. Further stratigraphic work in the 1980s by Housley suggested that the village should be conceived of as a swamp village rather than a true lake village constructed in a very shallow lake or swamp. From both the remaining landscape features, its location and stratigraphy it is clear that it was close to a former course of the River Brue. This paper uses recent stratigraphic, pollen and diatom work in the Panborough Gap area and upstream of Glastonbury to re-assess the environment at the end of the third and beginning of the ...

This article reports on a study examining continuing professional development (CPD) for consultant doctors. The aim of the study was to identify what promotes or inhibits the effectiveness of CPD and met the following objectives: comparing and contrasting the experiences of CPD across the range of specialties; identifying and describing the range of different models of CPD employed across the different specialties and clinical contexts; considering the educational potential of reflective practice in CPD and its impact on professional practice and exploring how different professionals judge the effectiveness of current CPD practices. Using a mixture of qualitative (interviews, letters, observation) and quantitative (online questionnaire) methods, the views of CPD providers and users were surveyed. Findings suggested that the effectiveness of CPD, as inferred from the comments made by interviewees and questionnaire respondents, relates to the impact on knowledge, skills, values, attitudes, behaviours and changes in practice in the work place. The quality of CPD was seen as inextricably linked to any improvements in the quality of the professional practices required for service delivery. There was widespread consensus as to the value of learning in professional settings. There was recognition that there needs to be a move away from tick boxes to the in-depth identification of learning needs and how these can be met both within and external to the work place, with learning being adequately enabled and assessed in all locations. In conclusion, it can be said that CPD is valued and is seen as effective when it addresses the needs of individual clinicians, the populations they serve and the organisations within which they work. However, the challenge for CPD may lie in the dynamic interaction between educational opportunities and service delivery requirements, as there may be occasions where they vie with each other for resources.

© 2010, © 2010 Taylor and Francis Group, LLC. Can the current education programme of the Australian trade union movement contribute to reviving union growth and union culture, develop new activists and leaders, and encourage and facilitate the organisational change needed to re-orient unions to develop broader alliances? Twenty-five Australian trade union leaders were asked to describe the educational activities of their unions and to assess the education provided by the Australian Council of Trade Unions' (ACTU) national Education and Campaign Centre (ECC). Analysis of their responses reveals a number of structural, organisational and pedagogical challenges for delivering a national union education programme. It also raises questions of how education can support a union movement trying to convince new layers of workers that unionism can be a dynamic, forward-looking, social movement. The article outlines the existing course framework as a means of understanding the scope of current educational provision. Drawing on interviewee observations and Newman's concept of three contracts in union education, it considers the roles of educator and of organiser, and how an understanding of these roles is currently expressed by union leaders. We conclude with some questions about ways that the union movement might consider the relationship between education and union renewal.

Critical race theory provides a much‐needed framework for improving the study of race and racism's influence on psychological health and illness. Implicating the mundane and extraordinary, critical race theory explains how racism determines lifestyles and life chances. It also clarifies the individual and institutional nature of racism. Such clarification should be meaningful to sociologists of mental health, especially those interested in how race‐related inequality alters the distribution of psychological health and illness. Towards improving research linking race and racism with mental health, the present essay exposes five weaknesses in the sociology of mental health literature: (1) misspecification of perceived discrimination; (2) neglect of the psychological wages of Whiteness; (3) conflation of race and ethnicity; (4) assumption of mental health measurement invariance; and (5) disregard for narratives about how racism hurts mental health. These weaknesses and the strategies for overcoming them are ...

This study examined how pediatrician-parent social status concordance related to communication patterns in medical encounters during which children received treatment for psychosocial problems indicating attention deficit disorder or attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. Using data from 28 pediatric medical encounters occurring in a large southeastern metropolitan city during 2003, we focused on concordance according to race, gender, and education, and its relation to laughter, concern, self-disclosure, question asking, and information-giving utterances, and patient-centeredness. Results indicated that race-concordant pediatricians and parents frequently laughed, whereas parents asked many biomedical questions in gender-concordant encounters. Education-concordant pediatricians and parents expressed concern repeatedly, exchanged biomedical information freely, and shared communication control. Pediatricians also self-disclosed when interacting with college-educated parents.

Comparisons made between art and mathematics so often centre on the beauty of mathematics and how its forms might be seen as aesthetically pleasing. Yet the prominence of beauty as an attribute is less prevalent in contemporary art. Rather, art has a much broader scope of concern, perhaps with a greater emphasis on providing apparatus through which we might better understand who we are. This paper considers some performative aspects of contemporary art and draws parallels with some examples of mathematical activity within educative contexts. It argues that the performative dimension of mathematics is underemphasised in school activity and that the social and linguistic conditioning of mathematics within performance is a crucial aspect of the discipline being addressed in school and vocational courses. In particular, proficiency with concretisations of mathematics and the social dynamics that attend these is integral to the broader proficiency of moving between concrete and abstract domains.

Australian unions have adopted new organizing methods to rebuild and develop their organizations. This represents a change in direction from the commitment to partnership and tripartite planning that characterized the Accord period under the Labor governments of the 1980s and 1990s to a new focus on capacity building. A serious decline in union density along with shifts in the labour process has led unions to focus on recruiting and organizing new members. The vitality involved is tempered by a hostile legal climate that supports workplace flexibility, casualization, fragmentation and low-wage work, while curtailing the rights of unions to recruit and organize. This paper explores the common heritage between the new organizing and theories of popular education, radical history and social movement experience. The paper suggests that contemporary efforts to regenerate unions as assertive organizations that rely on developing and educating new activists and leaders can benefit from drawing on emancipatory tr...

This paper reports on research into a national education program within one of Australia's largest trade unions. The program was designed to assist the union's staff and elected officials respond to the rapidly changing industrial and political conditions in the manufacturing sector. It is ambitious in scope comprising sixteen modules that range from organising skills to union history and political consciousness. Participants are expected to complete formal workrelated assessment in order to satisfy the module requirements, and thereby become eligible for an increase in pay. However, there has been a low number of assessment exercises completed and strong resistance to the idea of linking pay increases to course completion. The paper reports on research conducted with select groups of the union's staff focussing on the program's effectiveness, participant experience, assessment issues, and the challenges involved in meeting different learning needs. Finally it discusses possible improvements to the program arising from the research.

This paper sets out to show how some theoretical concepts derived from Lacanian psychoanalysis might be put to work in the business of reflective practitioner research in education. It seeks to offer a more sophisticated, reflexively produced account of researcher identity built out of the narrative generated within a research enquiry. It illustrates, with reference to examples of writing from a specific research project, carried out within the context of a higher degree, how one teacher-researcher has used the concepts in forging a more productive understanding of her own evolving identity as a researcher through a process predicated on developing her own professional functioning. Shifting perspectives are provided on what the researcher wants from the enquiry as the researcher herself unfolds and analyses the successive phases of her narrative.

This paper addresses the issue of how human beings construct themselves as subjects and the parameters within which this is achieved. We question models in which idealism shapes the trajectory of identity formation and consider how identity might be seen alternatively as a somewhat awkward amalgam of identifications with diverse discursive domains. The particular focus is on teachers conducting 'emancipatory' practitioner research and on how the researcher understands his/her interface with the situation he/she is researching. We survey a range of theoretical models as offered by some leading writers, with particular reference to Jacques Lacan, and consider each in relation to how the teacher researcher might be understood. We provide as an example an account of one teacher researcher examining issues of ethnicity and gender in her secondary school French classes.

This paper presents and describes the background to the Community Landscape Project (CLP), which commenced in Devon in 2001 with funding from sources that include the United Kingdom Heritage Lottery Fund. The project is concerned with increasing public participation in landscape archaeology and, unusually, palaeoenvironmental studies, with the aim of dispelling the myth that archaeology is only about excavation and ‘finds’. The paper describes the project's genesis and its success in increasing public participation in landscape archaeology. The unusual features of the project include its scientific palaeoenvironmental content, both in the field and in the laboratory (environmental stratigraphy and pollen analysis) and its use of GIS. It is argued that this kind of project, with external or charity funding, has become essential because of a high demand coupled with a funding gap between the government, local societies and universities. Lessons have been learnt and some of these are summarised here ...

Studies of floodplain evolution in NW Europe have shown that multiple-channel systems, braided or anastomosing, were far more common in the past than today with riverine islands and islets being a frequent component of lowland landscapes. Archaeological studies on floodplains, such as the Nene and Thames, have revealed prehistoric, particularly Bronze Age sites, which appear to have been located on islands. This raises the question; is the association coincidental and hence without cultural meaning, functional, ritual and/or the manifestation of some social division of space. At first sight riverine islands would seem to be functionally disadvantageous - difficult or at least inconvenient for people to reach, and prone to flooding. It is also difficult to find many resource-based arguments (although there are some) which cannot be satisfied by more accessible riverside or even floodplain edge locations. However, islands have ritual or societal advantages for precisely these reasons; access is rest...

Floodplains and palaeochannels are constructed by a series of events, floods; archaeology can also be seen as a series of events and the large-scale processes of cultural change constituted by many small-scale or individual actions. Floodplains are generally narrow, dry and penetrate the landscape; they are rarely marginal and cannot be decontextualised from society. The ability to generate small-scale, and closely dated, data distinguishes floodplain wetlands from mires and lakes. Technological developments in geoprospection, dating and environmental indicators are pushing this high resolution approach. Examples of fluvial and archaeological events from East Midland floodplains will be used to explore this trend. In future, periods of environmental change or disjuncture should be targeted with questions of intentionality and human agency. Only by this approach can the bigger questions such as the role of fluvial change in cultural transformations be approached in a non-deterministic manner.

We address whether individual variation in internalization of positive or negative racial stereotypes was associated with low levels of self-esteem in a national probability sample of 2,107 self-identified black adults interviewed face-to-face in 1980 (National Survey of Black Americans). Rejection of positive stereotypes and acceptance of negative stereotypes were statistically linked to declining levels of self-esteem, controlling for background variables such as gender, region, education, age, income, marital status, and skin color. Weak evidence was found to suggest that the relationship between negative stereotype acceptance and self-esteem depended upon how close respondents felt to other blacks. We advocate that closer attention be given to conceptualizing internalization and measuring its psychological impact among stigmatized groups exposed to social discrimination.

This article considers issues relating to the marginalisation and inclusion of pupils in a secondary school. It takes the perspective of a teacher researcher examining her everyday teaching in such a school. It has a particular focus on some black boys learning French. The article critically examines the social norms that (a) define the relations between teachers and pupils within classroom situations, (b) guide the researcher's relationship to the researched. It draws on recent psycho-analytical theory in providing an account of how children in school construct their own identity with particular reference to ethnicity and gender

The aim of this article is to encourage a research agenda that attends to methodological considerations regarding measuring self-perceived racial and ethnic discrimination in social surveys. Toward this end, the author compared validity of alternative measures of discrimination. The first measure asks whether something unfair or bad has happened because of race and ethnicity, whereas the second measure asks about generic unfair events independent of attribution to race or ethnicity. In a probability sample of 586 Black respondents living in the Detroit metropolitan area interviewed in 1995, it was found that the prevalence of self-perceived racial and ethnic discrimination depended on question framing. Moreover, different respondents were likely to respond affirmatively to explicit versus generic measures of discrimination; importantly, the mental health consequences of self-perceived racial and ethnic discrimination varied by question framing. The results confirmed that the prevalence, correlates, and ps...

This study examined African Americans' racial label preferences at two time points using data collected in the 1971 and 1992 Detroit Area Studies. Survey respondents chose from the following racial labels: Black, Negro, Colored, Afro-American, African American, or no preference/it makes no difference which label. At both time points, there were significant differences in age and education by preferred labels but gender and income differences by preferred labels were not statistically significant. Racial label preference was associated with protest ideology and perceptions of Whites' discriminatory intent in 1971 and with perceptions of Whites' discriminatory intent in 1992. In multivariate analyses, age, gender, protest ideology, and the perception of Whites' intent were significant predictors of emergent racial labels. Suggestions for future research on the relationship between institutional inequality, self-designation, and identity were discussed.

In recent years the concept of globalization has become widely used in a broad range of disciplines. It is also attracting increasing attention within adult education although the discussion is still only in its infancy. It is not surprising therefore that this discussion has drawn on arguments and positions opened up in other fields but in the process the term has been used indiscriminately and often in a highly uncritical way. Globalization mostly refers to a set of economic and political phenomena. However, it has also become a discourse which serves to treat globalization as an irresistibleand irreversible process beyond the scope of human agency to resist. This paper aims to contribute to the debate about adult education and globalization and raises issues concerning the role of the nation state and the proposition that globalization is a new paradigm. It concludes by posing an alternative way of understanding globalization, seeing it not as the driving force of change, but rather an expression of th...

Derrida's revolutionary work in the study of language has seriously challenged the way in which we see words being attached to meanings. This paper makes tentative steps towards examining how his work might assist us in understanding the way in which our attempts to describe or capture our mathematical experiences modify the experience itself. In doing this we draw on the work of Jacques Derrida and John Mason in locating possible frameworks through which to conceptualise the relationship between language and mathematical cognition. It concludes that mathematical meaning never stabilises since it is caught between the individual's ongoing experience and society's ongoing renewal of its conventions. That is, mathematics, language and the human performing them are always evolving in relation to each other.

This paper addresses the concern that much educational multimedia is currently based upon technology rather than sound educational principles. The Strategic Teaching Frameworks (STFs) is a constructivist instructional strategy informed by two theories: anchored instruction and cognitive flexibility. This was deployed in the development of a CD‐ROM in an Australian University. The paper describes the development of a STF prototype and provides the reasoning behind decisions that had to be made. The authors outline some of the problems involved in their study and suggest implications for the use of STFs for teacher education and in the production of multimedia.

(2014). Humans and the Environment: New Archaeological Perspectives for the Twenty-First Century. Edited by Matthew I. J. Davies and Freda Nkirote M'Mbogori. Archaeological Journal: Vol. 171, No. 1, pp. 425-426.

This book is a monograph based upon a study of the locations and characteristics of sites of deposition of Bronze Age metalwork and other artefacts in an area of central Sweden called Uppland which...